Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Iraq War – Baghdad & 20 Years of Violence – Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
151 Plays1 year ago
Ep 020 - Nonfiction. 20 years later, the Iraq War still lingers. "All the civil wars in Iraq & Syria had the spark from that chaos." Ghaith Abdul-Ahad joins me to discuss his fantastic new book, 'A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War.'
Support local bookstores & buy Ghaith’s book here:
https://bookshop.org/a/92235/9780593536889
Subscribe to the War Books podcast here:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@warbookspodcast
Apple: https://apple.co/3FP4ULb
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3kP9scZ
Follow the show here:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/warbookspodcast
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/warbookspodcast
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/warbookspodcast/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to War Books Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Hello, everyone. This is AJ Woodham's host of the War Books podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war related topics.
Guest Introduction: Gaeth Abdul-Ahad
00:00:13
Speaker
Today, I am really excited to have
00:00:15
Speaker
Gaeth Abdul-Ahad is an Iraqi journalist born in Baghdad in 1975. He trained as an architect before he was conscripted into Saddam Hussein's army, which he deserted
00:00:38
Speaker
Soon after U.S.-led coalition forces took control of Baghdad in April, 2003, he began writing for The Guardian. He has won numerous awards, including the British Press Awards Forum Reporter of the Year and two News and Documentary Emmy Awards. I think you might be the first person on the show with an Emmy gate. So very cool to talk to you. How are you doing today? Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and I'm good. Very happy to talk to you. Wonderful. Well, like I mentioned,
The Impact of Abdul-Ahad's Narration
00:01:06
Speaker
really enjoyed your book. And frankly, I feel like I've actually already spent a lot of time with you listening to you because I flip back and forth between your book and your audio book, which you narrate yourself. So really well done on that. And I love audio books that are narrated.
00:01:28
Speaker
I love audio books myself. Yeah. Well, there's something very special when the person narrating it is a person who wrote the book. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who's a writer, and he wrote a nonfiction book, a history book, and he wanted to narrate his own history book. But his publisher is like, no, you can't do that. We only let people doing memoirs, apparently, and this is news to me, we only let people doing memoirs
Why Write About War and Sectarianism?
00:01:57
Speaker
do that.
00:01:57
Speaker
um but you have a very nice voice too so uh good job there um well yeah so you know let's just kind of dive into your your book here a stranger in your own city um travels in the middle east long war what made you want to write this book that's a good question um well my publisher i blame him
00:02:21
Speaker
But, you know, I mean, kind of at one point when you start seeing a pattern of what's happening in the Middle East, it's not only a fighting in a certain town or certain place. As you travel around and as you see the same components of a certain war, and here I mean sectarianism, traveling from Iraq to Syria to Yemen back into Iraq, back into Syria, back and forth, you realize these are not
00:02:51
Speaker
I mean, there are isolated wars in a way because every war is very local, but the people fighting these wars will try to claim that these are like one set of global wars stretching, say, from Beirut to Tehran, from northern Iraq to Yemen.
00:03:09
Speaker
I mean, of course, it's a collection of local conflicts, and the reasons are different. But the art, how the combatants try to portray these wars. So that's when the idea came. First, I wanted to write about Arab Yemen and Syria, but that was a huge book. Then it was reduced to Iraq and Syria, and then Syria was reduced. And then I think it's good. We ended up focusing on Arab and on the 20 years since the invasion.
Childhood in War-Torn Baghdad
00:03:39
Speaker
So your book starts off actually with your childhood during the Iraq-Iran war. And I think people really either don't know, people in the West don't know that war even happened, or it's something that's very forgotten about. But that was just, it was a terribly violent conflict, one of the worst conflicts after World War II.
00:03:59
Speaker
that happened and chemical weapons were used and just really terrible, awful fighting. And so I'm glad that you went kind of back to your childhood to start this. Would you consider it a memoir actually? Would you consider this a memoir?
00:04:17
Speaker
Stay, I mean, I don't see it as a memoir, but I thought it's very important to tell people, myself included, that what happened in 2003 did not start in 2003. The American involvement in Iraq that went on for like a decade, two decades earlier, Iraq's mentality, the militarization of the society, how quickly the society fragmented after 2003 into combating, into war and factions.
00:04:47
Speaker
So I felt like it's very important to go back and see, I mean, there is no start to where violence begins, you know, we can go back 20, 30, 50 years, but I felt Iran and Iraq war is very important for a personal reason, because this was my first war when I was five years old, but also I think
00:05:04
Speaker
Iran-Iraq War, as you say, it was a huge war, it's a huge conflict. We in the cities, we were sheltered from that war, but nearly a million Arabis and Iranians died, injured, kind of the trauma in the Iraqi society.
00:05:20
Speaker
One can argue that the invasion of Kuwait and the first Iraqi American war of 1991 was a direct result of the Iran-Iraq war. And then of course, 1991 led to 2003.
Life Under Saddam's Regime
00:05:30
Speaker
So I thought this is a very good start, my first memory of the war and the war that actually led to all the later conflicts. Yeah. Well, talk a little bit about your childhood and kind of growing up under the Saddam Hussein regime.
00:05:46
Speaker
You know, I have to confess, I had one of the most boring childhoods. My mother was a teacher, my father had a small business, we were kind of a middle class or middle class family, lived in a nice part of Baghdad.
00:06:01
Speaker
And I repeat this in my book that none of my family joined the Ba'ath Party, none of my family was close to the regime, and none of my family suffered from the regime. So we didn't go to prison. We were not chased by the intelligence service. So it was a very boring and very sheltered childhood. And that is, you know, I mean, many people in Iraq suffered in one way or another, but also a lot of us
00:06:29
Speaker
You know, we just had a life. It was an oppressive regime, but it was a functioning regime. It was a dictatorship, but it had schools and water sanitation plants and whatnot. So that was my childhood. I mean, of course, my childhood and all of the Iraqis who grew up in that time was so dominated by the figure of Saddam. I mean, I repeat this line again and again. He was really a godlike figure in our lives.
00:06:59
Speaker
He played the role of the revolutionary leader with a cuck uniform, a cigar, a pistol in his waistband, but also, you know, he couldn't whisper his name. You always talked about him.
00:07:17
Speaker
telling a joke was punishable by death or long time in prison.
Realizing Saddam's Brutality
00:07:21
Speaker
So, you know, you open the school book, you see Sandam's picture, you look at the wall, you see Sandam's picture, you go in the street, you see Sandam's, you open the TV, you see Sandam. So he shaped life.
00:07:32
Speaker
I mean he said it once like I'm Iraq and Iraq is me which is true I mean so that is that was these are the main components of my childhood the war with Iran a very sheltered childhood but also everything dominated by this figure of Saddam you know just like he was also very boring he's just like his speech has made no sense uh his cronies controlled life
00:07:58
Speaker
So all these kind of contradictions creates life in Iraq until 1991.
00:08:04
Speaker
Yeah, and something that I thought was interesting. So I've read other memoirs in in history books from Iraqi journalists and writers. And what something I thought that was very interesting was that you hadn't you never left Iraq until later in life. And you actually you open up your book, kind of these with conversation with reporters who, you know, they've only been there for a few years, and they'll leave and
00:08:31
Speaker
I've read other, other books where, um, the writer spends a lot of time outside of Iraq and then kind of writes about Iraq. And I'm always a little bit like, well, you know, that's, I mean, it's, it's great that it's a topic that deserves attention, but you know, those perceptions then get skewed a little bit by, by having lived outside of the country. I'm curious then at what point did you.
00:08:55
Speaker
growing up or even later in life, at what point were you like, something's not right with this regime, with living under Saddam Hussein? Or maybe you never had that realization until much later, but at what point were you like, this is kind of a brutal, uniquely oppressive regime?
Deserting Saddam's Army
00:09:15
Speaker
I mean, I think from day one, from, I don't know, five or six, at the age of five or six, you realize there is something very, very terribly wrong with this regime. I mean, again, to talk about your, even in your sheltered childhood, you realize the way people whisper about Saddam, the people talk about him, the people disappearing. You know, it was a really brutal oppressive regime.
00:09:42
Speaker
when in the way that you see the regime bath party controlling our lives and of course after 1991 our sheltered life basically shut us because under the sanctions so first the bombing of the 1991 war
00:09:59
Speaker
the massive destruction, we lose electricity, we lose the services, we lose whatever makes a society functioning. But also the sanctions broke the society. It really crushed it. We turn from a nation of basically middle class people into a nation of hustlers and beggars and there's no employment and everyone's trying to survive in one way or another. And that's when people start leaving Iraq.
00:10:27
Speaker
and I as a, you know, after I graduated as an architect, my dream was to develop and I tried and I tried many times and I failed and I lost my money and I smugglers and whatnot. So it is, your whole life is A shaped by the regime, but shaped in your reaction to that regime and how to flee the country, how to survive, resist, or, you know, collude and cooperate and become a,
The 2003 American Invasion of Iraq
00:10:56
Speaker
you know a part of the regime because the sanctions which is a very strange thing the sanctions actually strengthened the regime in the 90s so while in the 80s we could see Iraq as a country as a whole you go to your work you can just close your eyes and forget Saddam after 1991 you couldn't he dominated his your life uh whatever resources that Iraq owned
00:11:23
Speaker
came only through the regime and his cronies, the black market flourished and they dominated the black market. So I would say I divide, you know, my childhood in Iraq or mine growing up in Iraq into two periods, one until 91 and the 91 until 2003.
00:11:39
Speaker
That's very interesting. I mean, for me, Saddam Hussein has always been the bad guy. So I was born in 1992. So a year after Desert Storm, in my whole life, I kind of grew up with either as much as somebody in the West talks about Middle Eastern dictators. But he's always been the bad guy for me. And one of the things I wondered is,
00:12:06
Speaker
is if privately most people opposed him. Of course, it was very dangerous to publicly oppose him, but privately, were most people, especially around 1991, opposed to him? You know, again, I don't remember ever in my life, before 1991 or after 1991, ever in my life, meeting a single person
00:12:26
Speaker
who spoke about Saddam as this amazing, great, glorious figure. I mean, you see these people talking about Saddam in this way, but you know that they are part of the Ba'ath Party, they are doing their job, you know, members of the regime, maybe. But I, you know, I've never met a single Iraqi who spoke about Saddam as if this great thing happening to Iraq, every single one. And, you know,
00:12:51
Speaker
was so fed up with this guy. I mean, you say kind of after 1992, he was the bad guy, but you have to remember, pre-1991, he was the good guy. He was the guy who was opposing the Iranians. He was the guy who, you know, Rumsfeld came to see him in the 80s. He was- America supported.
00:13:12
Speaker
At one point, he was the darling of the West. And of course, it is a very short side to society. You know, history tells you that once you support a dictator, you will have to pay
Post-Invasion Chaos and Violence
00:13:23
Speaker
the price of that. And I've seen it again and again and again. And we're still seeing it today. So again, to go back to the Iraqi society, we whispered about him. We were scared to talk about him in public. But never, no one said, oh, look, did you hear the amazing speech of the leader yesterday on TV? Oh, what do you think about this philosophy of the leader?
00:13:42
Speaker
And again, even his characters start changing after 1991. So he shed the green uniform, the rhetoric of the socialist revolutionary leader, and became this pious tribal elder.
00:14:01
Speaker
boring us to death with his speeches and his poems and and he would go dress in different kind of costumes and visit the people and the long boring speeches and he became an architect certainly interested in building these humongous huge mosques and palaces and and so so that is the that's the dam that we lived under
00:14:27
Speaker
Well, talk about some of your memories from the, the first Gulf war. What was it like, you were living in Baghdad at the time. What, what are some of your memories from that? I mean, the bombing, the bombing, it was, it shook, it shook your spine. I can't describe how heavy the bombing was. And of course you have the anti-aircraft machine guns, you have the rockets and you have these repeated air strikes, cruise missiles falling on.
00:14:58
Speaker
the city on civilian houses on infrastructure our house was somewhere in kind of to the west of this to the south of the city actually and there was a beautiful old bridge next to our house built in the 50s that was destroyed here there was a
00:15:15
Speaker
a post office, bright in front of our building that was hit also. And of course the presidential compound, which was on the other side of the river. I mean, imagine your city being carpet bombing. I mean, they call it smart bombing. For us, sitting underneath these bombs, it wasn't smart at all. It was just kind of like this screeching sound of cruise missiles falling on the F-16s or whatever, the jet fighters flying over the city.
00:15:43
Speaker
So that went on for 40 days. And of course, the actual war.
00:15:50
Speaker
on the ground lasted for three days or four days. And it was the folly of all qualities. If the Iran-Iraq War was a meaningless war in which 1 million people died for no obvious reason, the 1991, from military perspective, that was the biggest disaster in the history of disasters. I mean, yes, Saddam had, I don't know, 7,000 old Soviet tanks. It was nothing compared to the United. And that show of force basically
00:16:19
Speaker
What's the purpose of the war, I think?
00:16:22
Speaker
Yeah, and I got the feeling with reading your book. So the first Gulf War was Iraq was not invaded, more or less, like it was in 2003. And I got the feeling reading your book that maybe Saddam, after that, because he kind of held off all of the outside forces, or held off,
00:16:49
Speaker
Maybe he felt a little emboldened, I don't know if is the right way to put it.
Sectarian Violence and Civil Wars
00:16:54
Speaker
But here's kind of this moment where he's like, oh, you know, I took on the rest of the world and stuff like that. But how did normal people feel about how the first Gulf War, how that concluded in Iraq? So two points here. The first point is, is, you know, these kind of movements and regimes, they kind of twist the narrative and the ultimate defeat becomes a victory because we're still standing.
00:17:19
Speaker
You know, look, we've been bombed, our country has been reduced into rubble, but I'm still here. So that means I'm victorious. I am victorious in my resistance of Americans. So that's how we shifted the narrative and it was all about standing up to the West and how he defeated the Americans by standing up.
00:17:38
Speaker
The second thing, it was a general sense of defeat, not amongst only the Iraqi people, especially, but amongst the military, the generals, the army officers. They were so demoralized after 1991, because again, the military is one of the main components of the Iraqi state, I would say, from
00:18:00
Speaker
from its inception in the 20s. And the 50s, and since the 50s, of course, it was only the military content ruling it out, one military general until the other. So Kamsad Dam, Saddam, as the civilian who had never served in the military, he became the leader of the war against Iran. And of course, that led to major military disasters. After 1991, there was so much anger within the military, because the military saw its hardware totally wiped out.
00:18:30
Speaker
So the officers themselves reduced them to taxi drivers and hustlers like the rest of us. And this is when you see so much anger against him. And there were like multiple coattends from within the military, from if we use the sectarian terminology that was later in Bolsonaro, from within the Sunni officer cadre that even people within his own home town tried to talk about.
00:18:57
Speaker
So there was so much anger than the military against Sudan after 1991. The rest of the population were just crushed by, you know, by the UN sanctions.
00:19:06
Speaker
Yeah. And I was about to say, well, this is, of course, like the, the sanctions come shortly after the, the first Gulf war. So Iraq as a whole is really suffering. Talk about a little bit about what you were doing kind of during the nineties and then leading up to when you were conscripted into Saddam's army.
00:19:27
Speaker
So as you said in the introduction, I studied architecture. I loved architecture. I loved doodling. So I thought architecture is the best field for that. Can I ask you real quick, sorry to interrupt you, did you do the drawings in the book? I did. Oh, let's see. I was so, because I was in the audio book, I was like, oh, I'm missing, you know, I'm missing these illustrations.
00:19:47
Speaker
So everybody out there, a bonus you get with the paper copy is his illustrations are very well done. But anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Continue, please. So I studied architecture and graduated in the late 90s as an architect. And I was, you know, as every male, you had to do your military service, compulsory military service.
The Rise of ISIS in Iraq
00:20:13
Speaker
And I went there and I saw the conditions of the soldiers and I saw how they are treated basically like, you know, like slaves kind of being pushed around by these kind of NZOs and the humiliation. And I just turned around and went back home. I think I wore a military uniform half a day or something, but I never served.
00:20:36
Speaker
And it's not only me. I mean, in the 90s, desertion was really high. Because of the conditions, because of the poverty, because the regime was weaker. I have to say something important that had I deserted in the 80s, I wouldn't have lasted more than a week or a month. But because after the 90s, the regime was weak, the security forces were weakened, corrupt. And that's how I could fake ID cards,
00:21:04
Speaker
do different kind of ways to dodge these kind of checkpoints in the streets were designated for capturing. So what year is this that you that you deserve? So kind of from 1998 until 2003. And it's that easy you just you you went you put on a uniform you're like oh this isn't this I don't want to be here and you just left? I just left again
00:21:31
Speaker
I could do it because it's because an architect, I had like a engineering, a member of an ID card that says I'm an engineer. So that allowed me to pass through checkpoints. I mean, of course I was trapped in the country. I couldn't leave, couldn't get a passport because you can't get any of the papers without. I moved to my residence. I would change my residence a couple of weeks, couple of months, moved from one place to another. And I survived again because
00:22:02
Speaker
the weakness within the security forces not because I was right it was risky now I'm thinking of it I think it's just like it was very risky. So what did people uh what do people think when you I was it pretty common for people to desert uh what did your family say when you come back when you came back home after just being in the army were they scared for you or or was it so common one of the things I have
00:22:26
Speaker
I had to leave the house because that's the first place where they come look for you back into your house with your family. So I had to move out of the house, live different places. And you know, at that time, the punishment for desertion was cutting off one ear and being branded a coward on your forehead. So yes.
00:22:52
Speaker
Well, so let's talk about the American invasion, 2003. So you've managed to stay out of the army up until the invasion.
Maliki's Corrupt Regime
00:23:05
Speaker
But then talk about the military situation kind of leading right up to it in Baghdad. And then what happens to you during the invasion? So by 2002,
00:23:20
Speaker
kind of like the war drums were so loud you can hear them even in Baghdad, even in the isolation of Baghdad. And no one wanted a war. And this is another conversation with Hadwell friends. I don't remember anyone saying, yes, it's great. Let's have another war. Let's be bombed again by the Americans. But no one wanted to see Saddam.
00:23:41
Speaker
And again, this whole question, the very simplistic question, Saddam or America was a very, you know, I think it's a very kind of linear, simplistic paradigm in which we have to choose between a mad dictator or a foreign invasion. And now no one asked us in our opinion, but then as the war is approaching where Iraq is known very well how to survive a war, so we started, you know,
00:24:06
Speaker
stockpiling, I should have stopped buying tuna, rice, cooking oil, gasoline for the lamps. Because you know what will happen when the war starts. The first thing you lose is the electricity, the water. And then the war started, and the bombing on the city started. And buildings started being destroyed. The command of the Air Force was very close to the place where I was living was bombed. Different targets around the city was bombed.
00:24:36
Speaker
Stupidly, I would circle throughout the streets of Baghdad with a small camera and a monitor that a friend had lent me and take pictures of destroyed buildings, thinking that I want to document the architecture, the destruction of the city. Very stupid. I was arrested once, went back home, waited, and then one day a neighbor knocks at my door and says, the Americans are here. And I'm kind of trying to
00:25:04
Speaker
trace their movements on a map or listening to the radio. And I say, is that 100 kilometers south of Baghdad? I don't know, they're here downstairs. And you go downstairs and you see this, it's like a movie. That day, it plays in my head like a movie. You see these American Marines, amphibious armored vehicles, soldiers pointing their guns. It's things you see in the movie. And then it's happening right in front of your door. And then I followed that kind of ring
00:25:34
Speaker
convoy they reached the square where all the Germans were staying and of course the famous statue that was toppled and the rest is history. Yeah and that's it's so interesting to read your perspectives of the the invasion so like I said I was born in 1992 I was 10 years old when when we when America invaded Iraq
00:25:56
Speaker
And my memory is just like watching, I think my parents had CNN on and the shock and awe campaign where bombs were dropping on Baghdad and these big explosions. And I think that's about it. We were at war, but we had been at war.
00:26:15
Speaker
with, you know, we had been in Afghanistan. And so it almost seemed like a, it was, of course, you know, I was 10. So looking back, perhaps other people were maybe not more worried about it, but more invested in what was going on in Iraq. But I don't, I remember it just like being kind of almost like a non-event.
00:26:35
Speaker
um um you know at the time everybody was we're just two years past 9 11 and so everyone's like oh yeah this probably over in like a day or two and you know the iraqis will will realize the americans were are liberators who have come to to take away their their dictator um you know so it's it's it's very interesting to read your perspective on the ground and to hear this kind of cinematic
00:27:04
Speaker
events, these cinematic events taking place right in front of your own eyes. Of course, you know, it's not over in a couple days. And you write a little bit about how Iraqis, you may be at the very beginning or thinking, okay, the Americans could change things for the better, correct?
00:27:25
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, again, no one asked that that is their opinion. But once Saddam was toppled, there was a kind of collective sigh of relief that lasted probably
00:27:35
Speaker
couple of hours because everyone was happy to see the end of Saddam and I say even in Saddam's hometown, even within the military, everyone was very happy to see the end of Saddam and of course there was this kind of perception, oh this is the greatest nation of the world, look at their machines, look at their guns, look at their tanks, of course everything will be fixed within weeks and Iraq will turn into
00:28:00
Speaker
maybe Dubai, with that point. And of course, none of that happened. And none of that happened for multiple reasons. You know, people blamed Americans who had no planning for the day after.
Hope for Iraq's Future
00:28:12
Speaker
The kind of the criminal negligence, I would say, of the people who planned the war, who executed the war. And of course, they managed to alienate those Iraqis within, I would say, days, weeks. And the third element, which is, I now totally believe in,
00:28:30
Speaker
There was no scenario in which a foreign invasion comes to invade the country after bombing it, you know, multiple times. There is such a big gap. Not only there's a gap in language and perspective and whatever you want to call it, but there's also so much grief in Iraq and so much grief in the States. And I mean, most of the soldiers I talked to after 2003, you know, 9-11 is there.
00:29:00
Speaker
And you try to kind of say, but hold on, we are not 9-11, we're Iraq, we had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, with the Jihad, it's not the same. But that was part of, you know, it was the motive. Personally, there in the background, consciously and consciously, 9-11 was very present in anything that happened in Iraq, 2003 and after. But that was a very, very wrong misconception. And of course, again, I say criminal negligence with those,
00:29:29
Speaker
An American soldier standing in the middle of the street, in the middle of the heat, they don't know what to do. They don't speak the language. No one told them what to do. Sometimes they try to clear gridlocks. Sometimes they just drive the tanks in the middle of the street. It was utter chaos. It was utter chaos. And in that chaos, in that moment of chaos, and the lack of security, everything that happened after all the civil wars in Iraq and Syria
00:29:58
Speaker
I have the spot from that chaos, because suddenly the borders are open. When everyone was in grievance against the Americans, jihadis, Iranians, you named them, flooded into Iraq, because that's the place where you can fight the Americans. Before you had to go bomb a USS Cole in the middle of the ocean to, from their perspective, to fight American soldiers, to kill American soldiers. Now we can just do it in the streets of Baghdad. And the lack of security led to
00:30:26
Speaker
the looting of all the military depots and military camps, you push all the Iraqi army officers who wanted to play a role in the post Saddam, whatever regime, they are all alienated, pushed into a corner and condemned collectively as collaborators of the regime. So all these conditions,
00:30:52
Speaker
created the mess that happened later. And of course, from an Iranian perspective, why do we wait for the Americans to topple Saddam and then come after us? No, we will make sure that the Americans are defeated in Iraq. So so you have all these different elements fighting the Americans on Iraq as well. So after the invasion happens, how long until people realize, oh, this isn't this isn't working? It's it's not going to work. I would say
00:31:22
Speaker
within days, within weeks, within months, it's just kind of this kind of realization. I mean, I write in the book about this guy who was sitting in this very poor neighborhood and says, look, my son, look at this, this is America, America is so big, they will fix electricity, the water, and then kind of very soon people realize not only the Americans had no plans over there, but they were messing things up, they were kind of
00:31:51
Speaker
you know, very soon kind of incidents start take place, civilians getting killed, civilians getting detained. And of course, like every army, every invading army, their kind of sense of their own security is so huge, it's bigger than anything else. And for the security of that invading army, you will see them kind of
00:32:15
Speaker
doing parameters, a soldier gets shot out, a whole village would be rounded up and detained. So I mean, I would say by the summer, even before the summer, kind of a sense of not only this is a huge mess, the absence of other family and friendly words,
00:32:38
Speaker
But, but this is, you know, the kind of this whole, again, remember there is a legacy of American Iraq. There is all the regime talk and propaganda about the next. Suddenly, the Iraq is saying, oh, this can't be. America cannot not make a plan. So this must have been a grand scheme to destroy Iraq forever.
00:32:58
Speaker
It is all a conspiracy theory. And from that day on, it's all downhill. To the extent that 20 years later, even the people who actually benefited from the American invasion, the people who actually came on the back of American tanks to rule Iraq are now criticizing American kind of denouncing this whole war. So it was a disaster on any strategic, you know,
00:33:27
Speaker
level. It was a great, great, great disaster.
Conclusion and Reflections
00:33:31
Speaker
Yeah. And so then by very shortly after, by the summer, not only are the Americans, you know, bungling this, but they're actually the enemy because of, you mentioned a little bit about the, you know, there's no security
00:33:49
Speaker
Um, you know, the Iranians are coming in, the jihadis are coming in all of these terrible, you know, forces that have been somewhat suppressed under Saddam are coming in. And then it becomes pretty clear that the Americans aren't, they're just not prepared to handle it. Um, is there, is there a point where maybe this is, maybe you had just answered this, but is there a point where most people were like, not only are the Americans not helping, but they're actually
00:34:18
Speaker
they're the reason for all this destruction? Well, absolutely. I mean, once, once, you know, so you have a resistance of the Americans emerges, but then that resistance quickly turns into sectarian jihadi religious rhetoric. And that sectarian rhetoric quickly crosses the line. So from
00:34:40
Speaker
attacking the Americans, to killing the soldiers, the Iraqi soldiers working with the Americans, to killing any Iraqi soldiers because of the Shia, to killing all the Shia. And that line went step by step very quickly. And then suddenly, it's not only about, oh, the Americans are doing a mess in Iraq. The Americans are causing a civil war, causing a sectarian civil war. And that sense of
00:35:06
Speaker
you know, who the Americans were dealing with in terms of Iraqis. A group of Iraqi exiles were living in Dharan, London, different places, empowering them who all came with their sectarian agendas and then the civil war. And then suddenly Iraqis stopped looking at the Americans as kind of this poisons or kind of like something, you know, annoying in the street. They become like this cause of so much
00:35:35
Speaker
chaos and Iraq. And once the civilians start seeing the brunt of the sectarian civil war, everyone forgets the American soldiers. Their presence is meaningless there in the streets. It is the sectarian war. It is the jihadists blowing car bombs. It's the militias kidnapping civilians. And that is where
00:35:57
Speaker
So it's almost, it becomes a surreal, a parallel cities. In one city there is a civil war, in another city there is an American occupation. And that is happening underneath that, overlapping sometimes, but often two different universes.
00:36:14
Speaker
Yeah, well, let's talk about the sectarian wars, the first civil war and the, you actually, you write about two civil wars, but the first civil war, the sectarian war. Talk a little bit about you, what you're seeing during this time period,
00:36:32
Speaker
First, what are some of the main events, so to speak, with the sectarian war? What's the first sign that a civil war is breaking out for you? And then what are you seeing and feeling on the ground? So the first sign of a civil war is not when people start shooting at each other from across barricades. The first sign of a civil war, when the society is so polarized
00:36:58
Speaker
and so split when the rhetoric of, I wouldn't even dignify them by calling them politicians, but all the party bosses that came after the American invasion, the opposition like such, they had a very clear sectarian way of looking into Iraq. I don't want to say that Iraq is not,
00:37:20
Speaker
You know, sects exist in Iraq, Kurds, Arabs, Sumis, Shia, they all existed in Iraq. And of course, there are differences and conflicts throughout histories. But the Iraqi society on the eve of the 2003 invasion was mostly political sectarian identities existed as cultural identities. Yes, people did suffer from the regime's policies, but
00:37:46
Speaker
It may sound very strange, but the regime was not sectarian in a way. The regime was built to preserve the power of Saddam and his clan and his village, be it whatever they are. So he did not oppress the Shia because they're Shia and tolerated this. He would oppress anyone who happened to oppose the regime. To go back to the main point, suddenly a sectarian rhetoric
00:38:11
Speaker
is implemented in Iraq and suddenly the Americans who had no clue and their only Turkey to those Iraqi exile start implementing a new political system in Iraq based on something we call the muhassas, which is the allocation of state resources to different groups, to different parties, to different sects, ostensibly to stop one sect or group of people dominating. But what that creates
00:38:36
Speaker
it splits the Iraqi state institution into little fiefdoms. And these fiefdoms are milked by these political parties, by these militias, by these groups, up until today, creating a massive sense of corruption. That's one. But the other thing that was created by this Mahaso system is it enables a sectarian rhetoric in the society. And as I said, you start, you know, the jihadis first start killing
00:39:01
Speaker
collaborators, quote unquote, then they start killing Shia because they are collaborators and then they start killing any Shia because they are presumed to be quote unquote collaborators. And vice versa, the Shia militia start kidnapping and killing Sunni men accused of terrorism.
00:39:18
Speaker
And again, this is happening under the noses of the Americans. I mean, one of the main death squads created to hunt, quote unquote, Sunni terrorists was these commanders units. And these commanders units were working sometimes in tandem with the Americans, but they had their own agenda because many of them grew up in exile, were trained in Iran. So these things all happened in the same time.
00:39:49
Speaker
There is a surge and everyone talks about the surge as kind of how the war, the insurgency was defeated. I would say the insurgency was defeated because the Iraqi insurgents, the Sunni insurgents realized that they cannot fight two enemies at the same time, the Americans and the Shia militias on two sides. So they decide to go into a fasting deal and hand the foreign jihadis to the Americans.
00:40:16
Speaker
For the promise that the Americans would reintegrate them into the security forces, you know, protect them from the from the wrath of the Shia militias. The first civil wars ended rather than having a peace process integrate all those men into the new Iraqi security forces. You know, we get no reality. The prime minister, who was the strong man, was preferred by both the Americans and the Iranians.
00:40:41
Speaker
and Maliki re-implement the same sectarian policies that actually created the first civil war. It goes after the same means. And this is now we're moving to 2010, 2011. Arab Spring is happening. Sectarianism is already planted into the Syrian uprising, Syrian civil war. The jihadists were defeated in Iraq, migrate into Syria, reconstruct their organizations in the desert region, come back into Iraq, and
00:41:11
Speaker
take advantage of the very charged sectarian atmosphere in Baghdad, which leads eventually to the fall of Mosul in 2014.
00:41:20
Speaker
Yeah. And you write about something I found very interesting is life has changed so much for you and for everybody just in moving around the city. So now all of a sudden, instead of you being able to like drive into a neighborhood, you know, if you're a Sunni and somebody else is a Shia going to visit a friend in their Shia neighborhood, all of a sudden becomes like a life and death.
00:41:43
Speaker
Um, um, you, you write about, there's like one, I think it was a Shia militia group that sees a car drive by twice and they, they don't, they've never seen it before. And then they order out this, this militia group orders the occupants out at gunpoint and, um, you know, it takes them away for questioning. And then other people are like, Oh, I think I saw somebody dressed in black in the passenger seat. You know, Oh, I think I saw, you know, some, some banners or some slogans or something.
00:42:13
Speaker
Um, talk a little bit just about how these kind of daily, you know, everyday life, uh, things that you used to be able to do. Talk about how that's changing and how violent things are becoming. So this is where the title stranger in your own city comes because within two years, uh, I, someone who grew up in the city, who lived in the city all my life become actually a stranger. I can't move freely in my own city. You know, as you say, uh, the city that had no
00:42:42
Speaker
sectarian boundaries suddenly acquire actual boundaries and act like you have a map and you say this neighborhood is Sunni, this neighborhood is Shia, oh no, this neighborhood is Shia, expelled from it, and the militia controls this thing. And you don't know which militia controls which road because that becomes a danger. You start carrying two sets of ID cards.
00:43:08
Speaker
or you travel with two people, a Sunni and a Shia, to use them to vouch for you, wherever you go. And it's very quickly, you know, this kind of xenophobic mentality of civil wars, you know, oh, as you say, this guy is dressed in black, he must be a Shia, this guy is, you know, has his beard, he must be a Sunni. The length of your beard, the accent, all these tiny little identifiers become really, really dangerous in the context of a civil war.
00:43:38
Speaker
Yeah, and you mentioned, so Nouriel Maliki becomes, he becomes prime minister and the first civil war, if you want to call it ended, and talk about his regime or his administration and then how things change for Iraq, but for you personally too.
00:44:03
Speaker
And I guess something that I forgot to mention too, you've become a reporter by this time. So you're on the ground seeing all these events and writing about these events. You're not an architect anymore, just to be clear for the audience out there. The Nobel Maliki, as you call it, regime, is a very good description. It was built on... It's a product of this Mahasasas system that we talk about, the sectarian system that was created and had
00:44:32
Speaker
But also, it's a regime built on corruption. So he wanted to build this kind of client-patternish networks. And to build these things, he used state resources that are at his disposal. So not only he built the state of the so-called strongman, and he pursued policies very similar to that of Saddam, but he also allowed
00:44:59
Speaker
creation of one of the most corrupt states in the world. It's not only not in Maliki, of course. I mean, the whole state, everyone was playing the same game. But the kind of the direct result is, for example, the military and the security forces becomes this, you know, a way of like tax farms in the old age. So a military officer buys his position and to become, let's say, commander of such and such brigade.
00:45:29
Speaker
by bribing a member of parliament, a politician, a minister of defense, and then he uses his position to siphon as much as money as possible. So we had this phenomenon, the ghost soldiers, in which a unit on the paper has 1,000 soldiers, but in reality there are only 200, and the rest of the 800, their salaries are siphoned by the commanding officers. And this is why
00:45:58
Speaker
ISIS managed to defeat all these units with tens of thousands of soldiers on paper. In reality, there was scattered smaller outpost here and there. That corruption in the security forces was the direct result of Nouri al-Maliki's politics and the way, his authoritarian way of dealing with the country. And it's still going on.
00:46:27
Speaker
he may be not a prime minister anymore, but he's a very strong man and he's still, if not him, people under him, still dominates parts of their countries. Before we kind of get to ISIS in the Second Civil War, and I've got questions for you about what your predictions kind of for the future of your country are. Before we get to that, I'm just curious for you personally, what's going on for you at this time?
00:46:55
Speaker
So, I mean, very soon you have to leave where, you know, you have to live in a compound in a protected hotel in a, you know, lit behind fences and barbed wire, like the rest of the journal. It doesn't matter if you're a foreigner or a Iraqi, everyone is targeted by kidnapping and killing. And then, you know, I started dividing my time between Beirut and Baghdad, Istanbul and Baghdad, because going to Baghdad becomes so dangerous. And so personally,
00:47:25
Speaker
Again, I mean, everything I described in the book is the thing that I saw as a reporter, which is like a tiny, tiny percentage of what a average election was going through every single day. Because as we talk about these clashes and car bombs and kidnapping, people had to go to school. People had to go out shopping. People had to, I don't know, visit friends. And all these things were happening within the
00:47:50
Speaker
within the real network of a civil sectarian civil war. So it was, you know, crazy. The easy description to it was living in Baghdad in these days.
00:48:02
Speaker
So let's get to the Islamic State then, you know, obviously, you know, they're terrifying. But just talk about, talk about how, how Baghdadis and Iraqis talk, talk about the second civil war that you call, talk about how that started with the Islamic State and how, how normal people kind of felt about the events that were going on in Iraq.
00:48:29
Speaker
There was a sense of disbelief when Mosul fell. I mean, there's a difference between insurgents reappearing, say, in the countryside, in farmland, outside Baghdad. Would you say, sorry to interrupt, would you say that with Mosul falling, was that the first
00:48:46
Speaker
time that most Iraqis were like, holy cow, like there's, there is now like these terrible, these jihadis pouring into the country. Was that kind of the first instance people are like, they've invaded our country or did people know about them before Mosul fell? So before Mosul fell, there's all this Sunni agitation, and these were peaceful demonstrations. And the kind of inspired by the Arab Spring, but of course, Murin Maliki treated them as a conspiracy, you know,
00:49:16
Speaker
conspiracy of the jihadis and the Baathis. They were not. And so he oppressed them. As a reaction, there was more anger in the street. In that anger and that vacuum, the jihadis infiltrated these demonstrations. And first thing, you see cities like Ramadi and Fallujah falling. But no one knew who was actually there. Some people called them tribal, you know,
00:49:45
Speaker
rebels, some people call them, you know, different kind of jihadis. But it was actually the fall of Mosul. That was the moment, the ultimate moment when, because it's not only Mosul fell, within three days, you know, Mosul fell, Tikrit fall, and the jihadis were actually in Turkey, which is kind of the outskirts of Baghdad. And there was suddenly a sense of a catastrophe going to happen, because what if
00:50:14
Speaker
these ISIS jihadis kind of come and take over Baghdad. Can you imagine the massacres? What if they destroy the Shia shrines and shot in the summer again, or reach Karab Al-Anajah? There was an existential threat. And this is when you see tens of thousands of young Shia men and Sunnis in different parts of the country who volunteered to fight ISIS. That's when the Iranians become very involved in the fighting.
00:50:43
Speaker
And that's when the Americans were also very involved in the party. And then within weeks after that, the push starts and the push to start to liberate these towns and villages, which takes, of course, nearly three years, more than three years, until it culminates with the Battle of Mosul and the final defeat of ISIS in Iraq. But that process was a very, very long process. I mean, I would argue that every single meter
00:51:12
Speaker
was fought for multiple times. People die, people can liberate the land, lost the land, liberate it. It was a huge mess. And that war exposed how corrupt the Al-Aqsa security forces were and what Maliki's regime had created and the mess that it had created. But of course, the ultimate defeat of ISIS only came when the Sunnis realized that ISIS was a, you know,
00:51:42
Speaker
Because in the beginning, ISIS portrayed itself as coming to Mosul, for example, to liberate the people of Mosul from the sectarian Shia politics of modern Maliki. And people were, in the beginning, happy to see the end of the presence of Iraqi security forces because of the abuse of the Iraqi people. But within weeks, it was the Sunnis, the people of Mosul themselves, who started seeing the wrath of ISIS, the policies of ISIS. And that's the moment when
00:52:12
Speaker
I would say it was the end of the European sectarian politics of 2003 happened. ISIS, because they're so beautiful and so horrible, they kind of managed to create a kind of a sense of, I don't know, co-existence, patriotism, we name it, you know, a unified purpose between the seniors and the Shia to defeat this kind of organization. In what year does Mosul fall? Mosul fell in June 2004.
00:52:43
Speaker
The battle to liberate it happened in the end of 2016 and went on throughout 2017. I remember I was working at a university, it was the Center for the Study of the Middle East at Indiana University.
00:53:00
Speaker
I remember reading a lot about, and I think this might've been before ISIS, but Baghdad at this time, I remember there was just like a ton, there was a ton of violence going on in Baghdad already. I could be misremembering this, but I'm pretty sure this was the case at the end of 2013, beginning of 2014. I wonder how, is it, first of all, before I go on with my question, is that correct? Am I misremembering the situation in Baghdad in 2013? No, no, there was like a series of problems,
00:53:30
Speaker
I wonder with just kind of how Baghdadis felt at the time. So you've got this horrible streak of violence that's been taking place, corrupt politicians,
00:53:46
Speaker
ISIS knocking on the doors of Baghdad, what's just kind of like your, if you went down to the coffee shop in 2014 and we're talking to Baghdadis about how they felt about their city and their life, what would those conversations be like? So it's funny you talk about
00:54:06
Speaker
coffee shop because I had a small coffee shop that I would frequent since the 90s. It's not even a coffee, it's two metal benches under a tree and a guy making tea, it's not even coffee. And that place was bombed three times. You know, car bombed, suicide bombed. Every time it's bombed and people die, I tell myself it can be bombed again. So I go back there, it's safe now, and then it's bombed again, and it's bombed again.
00:54:32
Speaker
A sense of fear, a sense of, you know, existential fear. Thousands of Iraqis, young men had volunteered to the front. So not only in the security services and these kind of paramilitary units that were fighting against ISIS, Iran aligned.
00:54:53
Speaker
And a lot of them were dying. They were cannon-folders. They were just young kids sent to the front. And there are images of these young children, many of them, wearing these green bandanas sitting in the back of trucks, miniature trucks, and being shipped to the front to end up as cannon-folders. They really replayed the images of the Iran-Iraq War. And of course, the Iraqi media, state media, tried to reclaim
00:55:18
Speaker
imagery from the 1980s war against Iran, but played in a different way, used it in the fight against ISIS to reclaim this image of the victorious army that will liberate the land. It was a very painful war. I mean, again, remember 2014-15 coincided with the massive migration to Europe because as a direct result to ISIS in Iraq and Syria and
00:55:48
Speaker
The whole region was in an upheaval, a military after military after military campaign. And of course, what you hear on TV is one thing is pure propaganda. I don't know, it's like this whole wise of telling the people, oh, we'll liberate Muslim in two weeks. Oh, we'll liberate Muslim.
00:56:08
Speaker
And it's only later when I started talking to the soldiers, kind of collecting their memories, you realize, oh my God, they've been going through like serious, serious stuff. I mean, for example, there is a refinery in Beijing. We were told that ISIS took over the refinery and then Iraqi special forces re-took the refinery. And then there were besieged inside. And they were besieged for like, I don't know, a couple of months. And the lines were so tight around them that
00:56:36
Speaker
you know, airdrops couldn't reach them, food, ammunitions. And then we're told that the refinery was liberated and the soldiers kind of came out victorious. And then only when I talked to the soldiers again, I realized that there was another seed that no one knew about in Baghdad, because these are the memories of soldiers that are not shared, are not told. So what I remember from this fight against ISIS, the level of propaganda.
00:57:01
Speaker
I mean, we talk about ISIS propaganda, videos and sleep videos, but the propaganda on the other side was equally manipulative, filled with disinformation.
00:57:13
Speaker
I wonder if, you know, obviously you grew up during the Saddam Hussein regime. I wonder just kind of like comparing the propaganda to when Saddam Hussein was in power. Like, how do you, how do you compare and, oh, we've got a dog joining us. Was that a cat? I thought it was a dog. Well, welcome to your, what's your cat's name?
00:57:38
Speaker
Welcome, Kish Mish. Anyway, so compare and contrast the kind of propaganda that you grew up with to what you're seeing on the TVs now. You know, the propaganda, it's in a way, it's a direct result of sometimes propaganda. So it's kind of like they borrowed the same imagery. They borrowed the same songs, the same pictures. And of course, rather than do actual
00:58:10
Speaker
You know, tell the people what's going on. No, they had to create this religiously infused propaganda. One of the things that I realized about the Iran-Iraq War in the 80s, the Iranians had a better documentation of the war from their side.
00:58:32
Speaker
So, so they have these 10, eight volumes of pictures. They call them Genghi Makata, the Holy War. And they actually have war photography, decent war photography, and they send people to the front, photographers at the front, and they document the suffering, the death, because everything for them was a holy war. And, you know, they were not shy of
00:58:56
Speaker
the monitors and the NJP because all are suffering off the notion. And we had a different model, sorry. And I'm not going to do a different model, which is a kind of almost a Soviet model in which all the pictures you see from the front are very curated. They're all fake, reconstructed. You don't know what was going on the front from the news. You know it from the soldiers who come back to their homes from the front. They tell you, oh, we actually, we lost this, we won this battle. That same psyche
00:59:26
Speaker
It's still prevailing in Iraq up until today. You're not allowed to show injured soldiers. You're not allowed to show dead soldiers. Everything is a lie. The Iraqi army, the most victorious army in the world, although it's been defeated again and again and again. And that is the mentality, the military propaganda mentality that rules Iraq. It's still the same continuous, because one of the things that
00:59:53
Speaker
as the civil wars settled in Iraq and as the Americans left and as Iraq was trying to just kind of come out of the rubble, they looked back into the history and they said that the only model
01:00:06
Speaker
of governance, they know, is the model of Saddam. And they went back to that model. So this is why in Iraq today, we have one of these most mutant states in the world. It is a democracy on paper. It has a kind of a liberal, freedom-loving constitution. And yet, it's governed by this archaic mentality based on bureaucracy, security mentality, and corruption.
01:00:31
Speaker
Well, let's talk a little bit about kind of the, where you see the future of Iraq going. Um, obviously ISIS has more or less been defeated. Um, but there's still a lot of problems, uh, in, in Iraq. Um, talk a little bit about where you see things going. The ultimate program.
01:00:52
Speaker
And that corruption will lead to another upheaval, a kind of a social upheaval. We're talking about a country with, you know, $120 billion worth of oil money per year. And yet, parts of Iraq and Baghdad are on par with some of the poorest nations in the world. And that is happening because of corruption. And that corruption
01:01:16
Speaker
led in 1919, the streets, violence, street demonstrations, the uprising, youth uprising of 1919. And that was crushed and all uprisings failed, but that was a, you know, a benchmark and a history of the last 20 years. It's kind of a post-sectarian politics.
01:01:35
Speaker
But the anger is still there. The frustration is still there. The politicians, again, I don't want to dignify them by calling them politicians. The party bosses, the militia commanders, the religious parties, they are still siphoning the wealth of the nation. While Iraq is growing very fast, 42 million, doubling in population 20 years, it's facing serious climate challenges. The combination between corruption and that
01:02:03
Speaker
will lead to another social upheaval if it's not dealt with. How do you think the next generation of Iraqis, the Iraqi youth, how do they feel about their government and what do you think they want from their government? You know one of the biggest disasters of this war is that words like democracy has been soiled in the eyes of Iraqis.
01:02:24
Speaker
I mean, you say parliament and they think of corruptions and deals and commissions. And the sad thing, you know, remember when you asked me, how did the Iraqis feel growing up under Saddam? What did they think of Saddam? We talked about him as a man dictator. Ask Iraqis now, how do they think of Saddam? As a kind of a portion of the Iraqis, you know,
01:02:46
Speaker
across the sectarian wine would say, oh, he was a dictator, but at least he runs the country properly, or at least he did so-and-so, at least we had running water and electricity. That is the problem with the last 20 years. It was so bad the last 20 years, it managed to exonerate Saddam, or at least allow certain people to say, oh, it wasn't so bad under Saddam. This is what the disaster was.
01:03:14
Speaker
So do you think, go ahead. Because again, I mean, I love history like you do because and I think history is very important too. Because if we forget the history, we don't remember the history, we will tend to repeat the same mistakes or turn someone like Saddam into a glorious leader again.
01:03:34
Speaker
I was just about to ask you something similar. Do you think that the road has been paved to let another dictator take power in Iraq? It's very difficult for another dictator. I mean, everyone in Iraq is obsessed with this whole idea of a military coup. Every single army officer I talk to will kind of sit there, relax, push back the chair and say, if only they give me power for six months, I will change the whole country.
01:04:03
Speaker
And of course that is a delusion at best, but also it's very difficult to have a military dictatorship in Iraq because the security forces, the military power is so diffused, but not a single unit. I mean, look, it is there. I mean, militia commanders, there's so much mistrust between the, you know, the paramilitary units, the special forces units, the Iraqi army units, the security forces unit. There's so much discord.
01:04:33
Speaker
everyone says the political system as it is is going to fail. To have a military dictatorship is very difficult. And is there anything you're optimistic about? I know we've been talking a lot about the things that are wrong, but what are you hopeful for for Iraq's future? I'm hopeful for the new generation. I mean, this is where the only hope
01:04:55
Speaker
exist because it's a post sectarian generation. It's a generation that has realized the sectarian rhetoric of the ruling politicians is not doing anything. So that's where my hope lies.
01:05:11
Speaker
Wonderful. Well, this has been a wonderful interview and, you know, really thank you so much for your time. Where if people want to follow you or, you know, find you, are you on social media? How can people stay in touch with what you're working on? I am on social media. I'm at great.aptune.ahad on Twitter. And of course, in The Guardian, I'm the lender of your books. You can see one of my others.
01:05:40
Speaker
Wonderful. Well, thank you again so much for your time. Thank you. Keith Abdulahid, a stranger in your own city. Go buy a copy. Go check it out from your library. A story worth reading. And I'm so glad that you were able to join me here, Keith. So thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.