If those in the protected zone had to live in the real Iraq, they might stop spouting optimistic tripe about the 'march of democracy', writes Lara Marlowe in Baghdad
Everyone in Iraq is afraid of being kidnapped: civilians, journalists, military, Iraqis, foreigners. The hostage-taking epidemic strikes men, women, children, young and old, rich and poor. It's hard to find an Iraqi who doesn't know someone who's been kidnapped, usually for ransom.
Like the Irish journalist Rory Carroll, 18-year-old Faed Khrasraji was freed very quickly. The motives for Carroll's brief abduction now appear to have been political. Khasraji spent three days in the hands of a whisky-drinking, pill-popping criminal gang that drugged its victims and used prostitutes to lure victims to their hideout.
When he woke up in a large tiled room with six other hostages on the afternoon of June 15th, Faed remembered the fond look his mother gave him as he left for school that morning. He was going to sit his final secondary school examinations, after which he hoped to enrol in university in Germany. "I was so proud of him," says Faed's mother Faiza (45), sitting on the sofa next to her son. "I realised my little boy was a man." As he begins his story, she weeps softly.
While the students entered the examination building, Faed hung back to do some last-minute cramming. A van pulled up beside him, and a middle-aged man asked for directions to An-Nahda neighbourhood. "That's the last thing I remember," Faed says. "When I woke up, I was on a dirty floor, and my arms and legs were tingling. I thought I was dreaming. A man asked for my father's phone number. I couldn't remember it, so I gave him my brother Ahmad's. He called Ahmad and said, 'Faed is our guest. We will contact you in a few days.'"
In his fury at having been kidnapped, Faed lunged at the guard, who called in several men who beat him unconscious. Thereafter, his hands and feet were bound. The other hostages were only handcuffed. They were forbidden to talk to each other.
The following day two more hostages were brought to the room. The gang's leader burst in, addressing a man lying on the ground a metre from Faed as Othman Azawi. "The leader was tall, with a goatee and a long, dirty moustache that hung over his mouth. He was very ugly," Faed recalls. "He shouted at Azawi: 'I have come to this dirty place because of you. We were working together, and you took our money. Where is it? Is the building in Karrada [ neighbour-
hood] from our money? Is the factory imported from Syria from our money?"
The gang leader aimed a Kalashnikov at Azawi and fired at his knees. Azawi lost consciousness, but the leader continued insulting him. "I will make you feel the pain the way we feel the pain of losing our money," the gang leader said. "You son of a bitch, you deserve to die." When he fired into Azawi's forehead, "I saw smoke come out of the hole before the blood spurted," Faed recounts with horror.
"They were all drinking whisky and popping pills. I saw two women who worked with them; one of them wore hijab , but the other walked by the steel gate in her underwear. I heard the guards say: 'She was very good; she brought a man with a BMW.' One of the guards said: 'I'll sleep with her tonight,' and the other said: 'No, I will'.
"They got very angry, and one of them broke a whisky bottle and plunged it into the other's stomach. He twisted the broken glass, as if he was digging. I fainted."
On the last day of Faed's captivity, a relative of the man who was gored with the broken bottle entered the tiled room and opened fire on the guards, killing two. A third played dead on the floor. After the gunman walked out, he pursued him into the corridor, and Faed heard more shooting and screaming.
"Later, I heard them talking about us," Faed continues. "They said: 'We should release them."
The hostages were blindfolded and piled into a van. Faed was dropped about five minutes from his home in north Baghdad.
The teenager was given a second opportunity to sit his examinations, but was too frightened to leave the house. "I hate all human beings now," he says. He has lost a year's study, and the motivation to go to Germany.
Faed's mother Faiza says there are many days when she feels she cannot bear life any longer. "I feel completely depleted," she says. "My sons give me the strength to carry on."
Her husband Jabar's travel agency was destroyed when a suicide bomber attacked the Baghdad Hotel, CIA headquarters in the capital, in 2003. On April 29th of this year, Faiza's favourite nephew Nashat, a newly married 26-year-old policeman, was killed by a suicide bomber in Aadamiya. Her husband Jabar identified the body.
"He was a big fellow," Jabar says. I couldn't believe how a person looks when they have been burned; like shrunken charcoal. I recognised only a part of his shoe."
Compared to many Iraqi families, the Khasrajis' losses are small. But their daily life is hard. "We try to adapt," says Faiza. "We bought a generator because there is no electricity. At the beginning of this month the cesspool in our neighbourhood overflowed. We were lucky, because our house is on higher ground; the neighbours had sewage flowing into their houses.
"But we couldn't use the bathroom. I had to carry the dishes to the side of the road to wash them and throw the water in the street. I'm afraid the cesspool will overflow again, as soon as the rain starts.
"The Americans and the [ Iraqi] government have done nothing for us," Faiza continues. "Do you think the Americans cannot fix sewers? Do you think they cannot prevent bombings? It is painful to say, but I want to leave Iraq, for the safety of my husband and sons."
While Mrs Khasraji was talking, I remembered the engineer from Halliburton whom I'd met at the baggage carousel at Baghdad airport. He told me he was working on electricity and sewers. "For Iraqis?" I asked hopefully. "No, for American bases," he replied, complaining that his German sewage technician refused to travel to Iraq because it was too dangerous.
If the denizens of the "Green Zone" - US military, embassy personnel and the entire Iraqi government and parliament - had to live in the real Iraq of the Khasrajis, they might stop spouting optimistic tripe about the "march of democracy" in Iraq.
Post-invasion Iraq is an apartheid system in which foreigners and America's Iraqi allies enjoy water, food, electricity and above all security, behind the 10-metre walls of the Green Zone, a vast enclave that used to hold Saddam Hussein's palaces, swimming pools, parks, a convention centre, office buildings and the al-Rasheed Hotel.
Although a few bombs, rockets and mortars find their way into the Zone, it is infinitely safer than the dirty, impoverished and extremely violent Iraq outside. The US publications Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal rent houses inside the Zone.
Some journalists stay at the al-Rasheed Hotel. Many foreign visitors to Iraq are helicoptered into the Zone and never see beyond its sprinkler-watered lawns and endless checkpoints. These are manned (in order of nationality as you enter) by the Iraqi army, Georgians (from the former Soviet Union - not the American south), Zimbabweans with Alsatian dogs and Nepalese.
To enter, one is frisked repeatedly and passes through a half-dozen metal-detectors. Iraqi employees pass explosives swipes over all cell phones, equipment and cameras.
It takes a mind-boggling assortment of badges and security clearances to move within the Green Zone. Mere journalists are entitled only to the CPIC (Combined Press Information Centre) card, which grants admission to the convention centre-cum-
parliament. The Iraqi journalists who do most of the ground work for the western media hang around the convention centre all day, waiting for Iraqi politicians, diplomats or the US military to give briefings which are not announced in advance for security reasons. It's rarefied and claustrophobic;a test-tube experiment in democracy under siege.
The Green Zone has spawned a series of imitations across Baghdad, with far less spectacular means. The Palestine and Sheraton hotels form one security area. A few streets away a miniature Green Zone houses the French embassy, Reuters, BBC and New York Times. Most of the English-language press stay several miles from the Green Zone, in a small cluster of hotels and houses whose approaches are blocked by concrete barriers, steel gates and guards with Kalashnikovs.
Because the traffic is so bad, it takes an hour to reach the Green Zone from the hotel complex. Likewise, many neighbourhoods have taken security into their own hands. Residents of a street or building chip in to set up barriers and hire security guards.
Most of the violence occurs outside these "secure" islands. People are kidnapped every day, like Saadoun Jennabi, the lawyer for one of Saddam Hussein's co-defendants who was taken from his office by gunmen about an hour before Rory Carroll was released on Thursday night.
Jennabi's body was found yesterday, shot in the head and chest. On Wednesday Mohamed Haroon, the head of the journalists' union, was gunned down in his car on the motorway.
Moving from Green Zone to the real Iraq is especially dangerous for Iraqis who work for occupation forces. Marwa (24) is a Sunni Muslim medical secretary who has several friends working inside the Zone. There are almost no jobs in Iraq's paralysed economy, but she has repeatedly turned down offers of work inside the Zone.
"I consider this money is not clean," Marwa says. "I could not eat from it. These Americans kill my Iraqi brothers. Second, I am sure the resistance would kill me." One of Marwa's friends, named Raghad, was shot because she worked in the Green Zone.
"Three of her colleagues were killed," Marwa recounts. "The Americans sent them home in a minibus after work every day, wearing flak jackets. She said she felt the heat entering her body; she was hit by three or four bullets. She survived, but she stopped working for the Americans."
Whole professional categories are being wiped out. After medical doctors were targeted for assassination, hundreds, possibly thousands, of doctors fled abroad with their families. Then the killers went after pilots who bombed Iran in the 1980-1988 war.
"My uncle was a pilot and he will not leave his house," says Marwa. "He couldn't attend my sister's engagement party. He has a gun at home - we all do - but bodyguards are too expensive. No one can lead a normal life."
There was a telling moment when I went into the US military press office in the Green Zone to request to go on patrol with US troops. I asked for Aadamiya or Amariya, areas where the insurgency is active.
But the sergeant who deals with the media couldn't help me. "We don't know their names for these places, ma'am," he said. So how do Americans identify Baghdad neighbourhoods?
"By the names of our headquarters," he explained. For the US military, Baghdad is divided into Operating Bases Courage, Liberty, Honour, Prosperity and Justice.