They bombed my toilet
Excerpt from Night of a Thousand Stars and Other Portraits of Iraq (Nazraeli Press: 2006)
This and nothing else must have been the power of the magic mirrors that are so often mentioned in the treatises of the occult sciences and in anathemas of the Inquisitors: to force the God of Darkness to display himself and to join his image with the one the mirror reflects.
— Italo Calvino, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler
Two hundred furious men chant in the street outside the home of Imam Rabia Mohammed Habib Al Imir. Accounts vary, but at least five Iraqis died and eight more were wounded during a raid on the imam’s residence two days ago, July 28. An unnamed informant had fingered the house, in the “upscale” Mansur District of the city, as Sadaam Hussein’s current hideout. The 72-year-old imam, head of the Rabia tribe and the Iraqi Social Party, was known to be a past associate of the dictator, but hadn’t seen Hussein in more than a year, he later told reporters.
U.S. Special Forces descended on the house in the early afternoon, set up a perimeter along dirt-and-gravel roads bisecting the immediate neighborhood, fired a grenade through the imam’s bathroom window, sprayed a few dozen machine-gun rounds into a ground-floor bedroom, blasted open the locks to two exterior doors, and entered the house from two sides simultaneously.
Inside, they found only a confused and frightened guard, who’d been sleeping on a chaise lounge under a brass chandelier.
I’m the only western journalist that’s shown up—thus far—for the growing anti-U.S. demonstration. The imam’s son, Prince Mohammed Rabia Al Emir, introduces me to the guard, Hammoud, who walks me through the house with a bloodstained cloak draped over his right arm, describing the raid. Hammoud, 45, says he ran toward the front door when he heard an explosion outside the house, and found two U.S. soldiers standing in the kitchen with rifles leveled at his waist.
In Hammoud’s left hand were the keys to the house (he jangles them to dramatize the story), which he’d drawn from the pocket of his dish-dash, thinking he’d unlock the front door and see what the commotion was outside. He says the soldiers backed him against the kitchen wall, searched him, then ordered him to open a side door of the house. He told the soldiers he didn’t have a key.
Hammoud leads me outside and points to the lock. Like every other lock in the house (save for two interior doors in a downstairs corridor and one in the kitchen), it bears char marks and a now-crumpled carriage left by small-charge explosives. By the time Hammoud discovered soldiers in the house, Task Force 20—the military unit charged with tracking down Hussein—had already ‘neutralized’ a second, exterior guard. Hammoud and the second guard were then handcuffed while soldiers stormed upstairs, blew locks and ransacked the empty rooms.
Hammoud says when the U.S. soldiers returned, they beat him—while he still wore his handcuffs—threw him in a vehicle and drove him to a nearby location where he was loaded in a helicopter, kicked and beaten, thrown out of the helicopter face first after it set down at a U.S. military outpost, beaten, interrogated, beaten again and then dumped outside the gates to wander the streets of Baghdad in his bloody dish-dash. He holds the garment at arms’ length and draws circles with a finger around several rust-colored patches. He says he’s washed it several times, but the stains won’t come out.
At some point during the raid, sentries guarding the perimeter of the house opened fire on a sedan that approached a nearby checkpoint. Soldiers—according to a Coalition spokesperson—shouted warnings at the driver and occupants of the car, which slowed but did not stop. Within a few moments, a Toyota, carrying a mother, her child and a disabled man, approached from the same direction and was also fired on. In the melee, at least five unarmed Iraqis (including the child and her mother) were killed—all neighbors of the imam. Eight more Iraqis were wounded. Nearby homes, a market and at least one restaurant were struck by stray bullets.
The imam’s dead and wounded neighbors were Rabia, the largest Arab tribe in the world, numbering about 13 million members, according to Prince Rabia. He notes with great pride that the king of Bahrain, the Saudi crown prince and the Kuwati sheik are Rabia. There are Rabia in China, in Denmark, in Spain, in Great Britain. And of course there are Rabia in the United States. Like all Arab tribes, they are bound by blood and loyalty; members are required to treat one another with greater respect than they would “outsiders,” and to avenge wrongs done to the tribe.
They are also obligated, by a code perhaps as old as the dictates of revenge, to show hospitality to defenseless guests. Even when those guests may be considered an enemy.
It’s crushing to be the object of his patience, in the wake of what I know must be outrage and justifiable fury. The prince refuses to enter any room before I do, as he walks dejectedly through the carnage, grimly pointing to blown locks, cairns of broken glass, toppled furniture, an off-kilter giclée painting in a first-floor hallway—gondolas moored in placid Venice. No one’s bothered to straighten it since the raid. It feels as if all Venice will spill off the frame and flood the prince’s ransacked house.
Rabia speaks excellent English, tempered with a British accent he says he picked up while serving on an Arab political council in Amman, Jordan. He wants to know if I’d like to see the upstairs rooms, then he hands me a spent shotgun shell and two grenade clips. It feels as if he’s just casually said, “Here. I think you and your friends might have dropped these.”
He asks if I’d like some cold water.
The shotgun shell is printed in block letters that read: Hatton pattern solid use shotguns only 70mm. The grenade clips were culled from what the U.S. forces would call “the area of engagement,” which would include the imam’s house and a car bearing a mother and dead child, and other various victims scattered around the neighborhood. Each clip is stamped, white on forest-green, ps100j.
I can’t tell if the grenades are smoke, teargas or fragmentation. The house is a disaster, but it’s not what you’d expect from fragmentation grenades. There’s a half-dozen or so silvery pockmarks in a rusted iron grate over a rear window that U.S. soldiers had sprayed with machine-gun fire instead of ringing the doorbell, but no serious structural damage. The window opens into a bedroom where Sadaam Hussein was not sleeping, and thus was not awakened by the racket, and thus was not riddled by bullets, and therefore did not achieve a tawdry and violent end to his tawdry and violent career. But a cheap wooden dresser, punctuated with bullets intended for Hussein, was not so lucky.
The thing that strikes me most, as I wander through the place, photographing the damage, is the number of American knick-knacks and kitschy collectibles in the house. And the dust. As for the trinkets, there’s a fascinating little homage to Charles Schultz propped up on the prince’s bedroom dresser. A smiling plastic Snoopy adorns the border of a mirror not much bigger than my hand. “We Are Friend,” announces the mirror’s frame. Beside Snoopy rests a series of faded family Polaroids: the wife, the kids, the in-laws.
Purely for the sake of irony, I lay one of the grenade clips and the shotgun shell (the casing powder still smells faintly) in front of Snoopy, and photograph the collection. My fingers leave long trails in the dust.
On the near wall is an Anne Geddes knock-off—a poster of two Caucasian infants facing one another in apparent surprise, cabbage leaves cradling their bare bottoms, cabbage crowning their hairless heads. It’s a re-staging of Geddes’ immaculate photographic conception; a pictorial explication of that timeless question: Where do babies (Muslim and Christian alike) come from?
The prince opens an armoire and tugs at the left sleeve of a silk business suit. He pokes a finger through an oblong hole about two inches above the cuff. There are in fact two holes, I discover by kneading the pinstripe between my fingers: an ‘entry wound’ and an ‘exit wound.’ Glass shards lay in a heap at the base of the mirrored armoire.
It’s possible that the soldier who fired into the closet saw an armed man in combat fatigues suddenly leap forward, menacing him with a rifle. In firing at the figure, he assassinated not the elusive Hussein, but his own reflection. Bullets intended for the Butcher of Baghdad brought down only the prince’s dry-cleaning. Prince Rabia claps the palm of his hand to his forehead in disbelief, shuts his eyes.
“They shot my suit!” he groans.
Why so much dust? According to the prince, the bedroom hadn’t been opened, save to recycle old clothes that had periodically come back in fashion, since 1983. There’s a twin bed, but it’s stacked helter-skelter with multiple mattresses and sets of box springs. The only guests inhabiting the room were ghosts and memories.
Hussein could have catnapped on a bare patch of carpet near a bay window, but Task Force 20 did not find him there: just an upended, made-in-Singapore rotary fan and other random urban discards. Whatever wasn’t needed, or wasn’t in vogue, gathered here like a crow’s nest.
Not only was Hussein terra incognita at the time of the raid, but the entire Rabia family was absent. The prince, his wife and the imam were in Wazeria, two hours and roughly 100 miles to the south, at the family’s principal residence. Only the two hapless guards were present—a token effort at deterring potential looters. That the room had been abandoned years ago explains the dust. The entire room is colored with a film of the stuff thick as a postcard.
The prince opens the door to the upstairs bathroom, then immediately closes his eyes in disgust—and not only at the highly questionable color scheme: eggshell and fuchsia. If Task Force 20 had been charged with eradicating crimes in interior design – color schemes based entirely on the underside of the human tongue—the justification for the raid would have been obvious, regardless if they’d found Hussein on his throne or not. The anemic-pink bathtub is stained by a starburst pattern a little bigger than a grapefruit, where a stun grenade—or possibly teargas—ricocheted off, bounded across the room and shattered the lid to the similarly colored crapper.
“They bombed my toilet,” the prince wags his head in disbelief. He cradles his face in his hands, staring disconsolately at the mess on the floor, the scorch marks, and scattered fragments of his discolored crapper. 
The last room we visit, a former bedroom whose door (the prince says) has not been opened for nearly 29 years, turns out to hold the only evidence that Sadaam Hussein might have once slept here—by an extreme stretch of the imagination. Under another heavy patina of dust there’s a coffee table lying on its face, legs sticking up in the air like a dirty, dead mule. There’s a Byblos high-fashion shopping bag stuffed with mildewed button-up dress shirts, apparently waiting for Goodwill to join Halliburton, MCI and Bechtel in Baghdad. There are crumpled cardboard boxes, tattered suitcases, a decades-old day-planner, a discarded feather duster.
And then we find it: the smoking gun, so to speak. I pick up a white plastic bag lying on the filthy carpet. Several magazines spill out. “U.S. Gov’t Report: Carlton Lowest” announces the back cover of one. An ad for low-tar Carlton cigarettes. I remember hearing about them when I was a kid, but I don’t know if they’re even still manufactured. It must be old. I kneel down and flip it over. Playboy. October 1981: Girls of the Southeastern Conference.
I nearly die of embarrassment—not for myself, but for the prince. I look up at him, horrified. He is as composed as a statue, smiling coyly, head bowed, hands cupped together in what looks like a parody of that press-run-print of the old man giving thanks over his stale crust of bread. The very picture of grace, humility and dignity.
“Well,” I say, and flip the magazine back on its face and pretend to be interested in something else. And then think better of it.
“Sir,” I ask, “would you mind if I kept this? Kind of like a souvenir?”
“It’s yours,” he smiles. “Keep it.”
The prince walks over and kneels beside me. There’s another magazine beneath the first. He picks it up: Penthouse: Vol. 16, No. 7, 1981. “Over 30 Pages of Gorgeous Girls,” the front cover promises.
“Keep them both,” he says, dropping the magazine to the floor.
As I leave the house, the prince says something to a servant and the man returns a minute or so later with a red plastic bag in which I can hide the smut. I have to walk half a mile through the teeming streets, to the main road to catch a taxi back to Karhk, the eastern sector of Baghdad. A lone, pasty-skinned, blue-eyed imperialist with five grand in Nikons dangling from his neck is pushing it already, the prince knows. No sense in walking through the Mansur district flagging naked Georgia peaches at the local Muslims. I might as well be packing a shovel and a tombstone.
The prince, it’s humbling to realize, is still looking out for his guest.
I know I should be grateful, but it’s a knife in my heart. Earlier this year, coalition forces dropped four 2,000-pound bombs on this same neighborhood in the mistaken belief that Hussein was hiding out in the “block” next door to the imam. Sixteen Iraqis died. Hussein was not among the Rabia then. Apparently, he’s not among them now.
About the time that the imam’s neighbors were dying in western Baghdad in this most recent raid, another Coalition military unit reported that they had ‘just missed’ catching Hussein in Tikrit. What is present, at least among the raid’s survivors, is a fury and an outrage that is tempered, nonetheless, by a profound desire for civility, and an obligatory kindness toward those they feel are responsible for the deaths.
How such patience prevails, in the midst of so much anger and sorrow, is a mystery to me.
In my office on Karrada Dahkil Avenue, I start reviewing the “evidence.”
I pour over the magazines for two hours, trying to find some random phrase or statement that would crown the day’s irony, or give some kind of meaning to the chaos, the bloodshed, and the humiliation that the prince, the imam, the families of the dead must all share. Looking for wisdom in Playboy seems to me no more absurd than bombing a suburban neighborhood based on hearsay and speculation.
Between ads for Courvoisier (“the Cognac of Napoleon”), Top Hat Visiting Massage and the Penthouse Forum (“sometimes, being tied up is the only way to calm me down”), there’s a short story about the German occupation of the Ukraine in the early 40s.
Heavy Sand, by Anatoli Rybakov, tells the tale of a grandmother who attempts to lead Ukrainian Jews out of a ghetto before they’re slaughtered by Nazis during a surprise night raid. The occupying army murders those whom it can find, but hundreds flee to safety in the forest. A man who had been a child at the time of the Diaspora returns to the village later as an elderly adult. The story concludes with his discovery of a black granite slab in the cemetery, commemorating the deaths of the refugees.
Venkoisi dormon loi nikoisi, an inscription reminds mourners and passersby. Everything is forgiven, but those who have spilled innocent blood shall never be forgiven.
Before leaving the prince’s home, I apologized for my final question. “I’m sorry I’m so ignorant about this culture,” I said, “but I would presume that the members of the Rabia tribe would see an attack on the imam and your family as an attack on the entire tribe.”
The prince didn’t answer, but for a fleeting instant he looked at me with a coldness addressed, I suppose, more to the ignorance of the question than the man who spoke it.
You know the answer to that, his eyes said.
10/13/11 | 0 Comments | They bombed my toilet