By Lorna Tychostup

There was a fly pestering me today. Sometime after my shower I was sitting in my kitchen by the window. The light is good there — good enough for me to pluck my facial hairs — a must if I am to go to the wedding at the Al Huda squat camp tomorrow. If I don’t take care of them, the women of the family that has adopted there will take care of them with the “string” method. You really don’t want to know. It IS painful, much more painful than the one-at-a-time tweezer pluck method I use ever since my first visit to the camp last Feb. When the women tried to usher me inside to remove my mustache hairs. The man I had gone there to interview arrived in the nick of time but later in the privacy of my hotel room my female translator, Amal, removed them with the special string method.

Anyway, as this fly was dive bombing me, I remembered the words I read in a book once, “Look to nature for the signs…” and wondered what this fly was trying to tell me. “What is coming?” I thought, always associating flies with death. “Will it be me?”

Later, I took a nap. It had been a long ha’ara (hot) day taking photos at the courthouse in the Green Zone. Dave Enders, a fellow journalist, Amal our translator and Super Fixer had gone there to interview the judge overseeing Saddam’s trial. He was unavailable so I photographer for Dave as interviewed Judge Zuhair Al Maliky, and then attorney Shalal Abed Hamis Al Rubaie.

When we returned back to the hotel — soaked through once again from the heat, I was feeling extremely taba’an (tired) and went to take what has become my “arrival” shower. No easy task here as it involves another Baghdad mystery - a turn of the left faucet produces hot water and a turn of the right faucet produces hotter water. Each time I shower after coming home it is yet another assault on the body. But I imagine to myself that this sort of heating of the extremities is a purging of all ills. After the shower I uploaded my photographs and promptly feel asleep.

Though deeply asleep and dreaming of being held in the arms of my habibi, I heard the first blast. It echoed in my head multiplying into four or five blasts in my dreamstate. I remember semi-consciously thinking it was one of the trucks outside perhaps unloading particularly heavy cartons. There are trucks arriving every day, unloading shiny white refrigerators and freezers, stacking them up on the sidewalk until a pedestrian has to walk through this white avalanche reflecting the furnaced heat of the Baghdad sun.

My phone rang a few minutes later. “Lorna, did you hear the bomb?” asked Mohammed, the everything man here at my hotel. “Over on Karrada. Come up to the roof. You can see from here.”

Four out of the five car bombings that struck Iraq today all within a short time of each other, occurred at Christian churches in Baghdad. The fifth occurred in Mosul. Two of the four in Baghdad were a short distance from my hotel. The first just a block away from the Agadeer Hotel where I stayed last Feb. And the second a short walk from the first. This is the first time Iraqi Christian churches have been targeted in this way.

Dave, a fellow journalist, and Amal had left earlier to meet Paola, a member of Occupation Watch, at the Kesh Mesha fruit juice bar on Karrada St. I threw on my clothes, packed my camera bag and ran up to the roof while calling Dave’s cell phone. Alaa answered and we made a plan for her to come by and pick me up so we could so over to the site. I took some photos from the roof and went down to the lobby to meet her. She and Paola arrived in a taxi and we drove down Sadoun St. as far as the taxi was allowed to go. As we were driving toward the first bomb site we heard a second blast and could see gray smoke rising in the sky ahead. Police sirens were blaring and when we all exited the taxi Amal recommended we walk in the center of the street. “If these cars have a bomb we will be safer in the middle,” she said pointing to the cars parked at the curb. As we walked along the island, cars flew past us, some with windows totally blown out from the blast, others with windshields imploded and/or shattered. Many of the windows of restaurants and shops we passed had had their windows blown out. Not all, just one here and another there. Many were left untouched by the formidable blasts.

We turned down a side street following the fading smoke trail and learned that the target had been a church. It was Sunday and around 6:30 PM, and it struck us that the church would be filled with people. I called Sheila Provencher of the Christian Peacemaking Team to check on them. She said two members were out attending mass at a church and were missing. She wanted to know what churches had been bombed. None of us were sure so I told her I would call her back.

We arrived at the first bombing site - an Armenian church just one block off of Sadoun - and as I began to take photos of the three shredded blackened cars, their strewn parts including a charred engine and blackened buildings, a young Iraqi policeman came up to me waving his kalasnikov and screaming, “Why you want to take pictures? You see this? You want to take pictures of this? Why you want to take pictures of this?” Anger and sweat poured from his face. I couldn’t blame him yet at the same time was afraid he might do something out of his rage. I turned to Amal, tears coming to my eyes and said, “Tell him I am here so that I can help people to see the truth.” Almost immediately some of the older police officers came over shaking their heads in his direction and escorted me past him with apologetic looks all around.

Without a shared language we all understood this moment. Horror, grief, anger and shame — the latter being mine as I know all too well that these sort of attacks are ultimately due to the actions of my government. A botched war plan based on deceit, which produced one very good result for the Iraqi people — they all say they are glad to be rid of Saddam. And yet, it was so poorly planned and executed that it left the Iraqis without any security force in place. This is an inescapable topic here. And even now, when the situation is what it is and needs to be attended to - as a very highly placed Kurdish gentleman said last night at dinner, “I have been telling Bremer and the CPA this from the beginning. From before the war even began. If you want security in Iraq, the answer is jobs, jobs, jobs. Instead they just talk about creating more violence and the result has been that I have become a persona non grata.”

As I went about my photographing I turned to see the young officer, his face now was filled with a gentle softened sad kindness so typical of Iraqi people. He apologized with words I didn’t understand but did feel. We touched hands and hearts standing there with shattered glass and building debris under our feet and in that moment there was an understanding of peace between us. I was glad it was me he had unleashed his anger upon and not another one like him — angry with a gun in hand. The only weapons I use to shoot with here are my cameras.

As we walked to the site of the second blast, a Syrian church, we ran into Dave who diverted us down a specific side street to avoid being turned away by the police and soldiers. American soldiers had arrived and were working with Iraqi police and soldiers to keep people away. One specifically explained to us another car had been found that they suspected to have explosives in it and they were in the process of examining it. “For your safety, please ma’am, get back.” There were 3 fire trucks in the intersection small intersection and seven or eight demolished vehicles, some more blackened than others. The area around the church was filled with private homes and people were running to and fro, some bleeding, others very frightened and others were weeping.

A CPT dispatch I received tonight said this:

“One family pulled them inside their home and shared their recent experiences.

The young woman of the family wept and said, ‘My father was killed recently because he sold alcohol. Because of that, I was too afraid to go to my church today. Now it has been bombed. I don’t know if my
friends there are alive or dead. Saddam was a killer. Now there are many Saddams.’

Her distraught mother added, ‘All Christians want to leave Iraq now. There is no safety for them here now.’

The blast at the Armenian church destroyed three cars on the street, an adjacent brick wall, and shattered windows in a 500-yard radius, including stained glass windows in the church. The ensuing fire blackened the face of apartments within the church compound. The engine block from car containing the bomb landed over 50 yards away. The blast at the Syrian church destroyed at least six cars, blew out walls on both sides of the street, and most of the windows in a two-block radius. Iraqi police and US soldiers cordoned off the areas around the churches and US helicopters flew low over the area for the next hour.”

Amal and I instinctively walked closer, all the while gauging where we were vs. where the American soldiers were. There was so much confusion they didn’t notice us slip past and go further down one of the side streets of the intersection. We weren’t going towards where the suspect car was located more like away and to the side. Amal crossed the street to interview a family and I stood angling position for the best shots. At one point the same soldier approached me and said, “You must leave this area ma’am. I will not tell you again. I told him I would go but couldn’t leave until I found my translator. I walked off feigning looking for Amal. He went off in another direction and then came back and I finally left. He then spotted Amal and had her back off as well. She and I stood in the intersection next to one of the firetrucks. I looked up and saw an older Iraqi man with the kindest eyes looking down at me from inside the firetruck. He sort of twinkled his eyes at me. I noticed the seat next to him was empty and pretty high up — high enough to get some really good shots. I asked Amal to ask him if I could sit up front with him and he gestured to the back of the track and made climbing signals. I didn’t understand at first so he got out and we walked to the rear of the truck where a ladder led up to its roof. I climbed up and was unnoticed for quite a while until another photographer - Carolyn from the LA Times - joined me. At that point the same soldier looked up at us and I thought he would pop a cork for sure. I obediently got down and walked down the street. Amal was no where to be seen and they were literally forcing all bystanders down the street with a long swath of rolled barbed wire.

Once back on Sadoun Amal appeared. She was trying to interview some of the victims but to no avail. We walked back down Sadoun and after several blocks we hailed a taxi.

Amal was very quiet the whole time, her face dark. I asked her what was up. “I am feeling confused. I have this thing in my throat. It is all so confusing, what is happening.”

After all this time working with her I can feel her…”You are hating Americans, aren’t you?”

“No, it is not right to hate.”

“Well, it is OK to hate,” I say. “There is much to hate. And it is better to talk about and acknowledge it is there than hold it inside.”

“They are the cause of all these problems. We are happy to be free of Saddam, but at what price?”

Later the reports say that 11 have died in these blasts alone, although other violence across the country have killed others. The latest figure is that 53 people were wounded. I have to wonder at this figure as there were 200 people present at services in just the Armenian church alone. At the site of the Syrian church we were told that 34 people had been wounded and more were still appearing.

And this is just another day in Baghdad. Dave and I stay in an unassuming hotel on a bustling street by day, which is deserted by night. But there are no gunfights in the street outside as there were when we each stayed at the Agadeer Hotel on our last visits here which occurred at different times - I left just days before he arrived this past March. This trip has been much calmer than last time - I have felt more secure. Indeed, there are Iraqi police everywhere.

Dave’s room and mine are next door to each other and thanks to his ingenuity, we have Internet in our rooms, with an extra line for Alaa’s computer. She practically lives with us spending her entire day working with either me or Dave, moving back and forth between our rooms. Sometimes we all work together like we did today — this day of bombing. We have fun, we laugh, we party, we eat meals together, and we work our asses off. Dave and I plop into our beds at night exhausted and work some more on our computers. Amal goes home to her househusband Ahmed, and two young children ages 4 and 6. She wrestles with the kids, cooks a meal, makes phone calls preparing for the next day’s work, and appeases her husband who gets really super pissed from time to time. Especially when she comes home late at night — after 10pm — as she did the other night when she accompanied me to a sheik’s house for an evening interview. The sheik speaks no English and I needed her to translate. When we finished it was way past 10 and I went home with her to provide protection from her irate husband. He was out in the street waiting for her. As we both fell out of the taxi, hungry and tired, he greeted me with kindness and told her, in Arabic, that he would be leaving in — for good — in the morning. How dare she come home so late! He then went off to bed. I stayed for a while, we cooked a meal together, she and I, my Iraqi sister, and Dave came from his visit with friends at the Al Hamra to give me a lift home.

And then we wake up the next morning - Amal never fails to arrive at the hotel early enough to wake us up, order breakfast for all of us, and then with a “let’s rock!” push us out the door — and do it all over again.

lornatychostup.blogspot.com