Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
March 31, 2008 By Qais Mizher
BASRA, Iraq — I walked, ran and crawled into central Basra on Thursday, constantly dropping to the ground because of gun battles between Mahdi Army militiamen and the Iraqi Army and the police.
The rest of my stay in the city went like this: On Friday evening, the hotel I had somehow found open was showered with bullets, smashing glass on several floors and knocking pieces out of the stone facade. The next morning, Iraqi Interior Ministry forces in a part of the city they supposedly controlled were ambushed with heavy weapons at a hotel 50 yards from mine. On Sunday morning, after I had hired someone to drive me out of the city, an Iraqi soldier fired at our tires but missed. We did not stop.
Iraqi forces started their assault on the Shiite militias in Basra on Tuesday. Whatever the initial goal of the operation, by the time I arrived in Basra it was a patchwork of neighborhoods that were either deserted or overrun by Mahdi fighters. There were scattered Iraqi Army and police checkpoints, but no place seemed to be truly under government control.
Early last week, when the assault started, I happened to be in Diwaniya, another southern city, as part of my work as a reporter and translator for The New York Times.
Calling on my experience as a captain in the Iraqi Army before the 2003 invasion and essentially a war correspondent since then, I headed to Basra to see if I could make my way into the city and see what was happening there.
Traveling anywhere was difficult because of the violence that the Basra fighting had caused all over the Shiite south and the curfews that the government had imposed. Somehow I made it to Nasiriya, about 100 miles northwest of Basra, and persuaded a taxi driver with a GMC truck to take me to Basra.
The driver knew the road well. He took the old highway south; he knew that a checkpoint at a small town along the way would not let anyone through. So he turned off the road and drove several miles through the open desert to another road, and continued south.
That is when we started to see terrible signs of the conflict in Basra. I counted about 20 civilian cars coming north with coffins strapped to their roofs, heading to bury their dead in the Shiite cemetery in the holy city of Najaf. My driver and I were unsure about the road ahead, so we flagged down a family driving in the opposite direction. As we did so, a woman in the passenger seat began frantically waving a piece of white cloth — a white flag — out her window.
It turned out that she was terrified that we might be members of the Mahdi Army, who she said had put bombs and snipers all along the road where the family had just passed. Once we calmed her down, she suggested another way.
Before we drove off, my driver had an important thought, asking the woman: “Could you give us your flag? You left the city, and you don’t need it anymore.”
She kept her flag but gave us another piece of white sheet. We used it often. At one point, we passed a huge plume of smoke at a place where a major oil pipeline had been bombed. We drove slowly into what looked like a deserted city, and at a certain point my driver refused to go any farther. I said fine and got out, but before I left he had one request: could he have the white flag?
I tore it down the middle and gave him half.
Somehow I found another driver to take me within a couple miles of the city center, which I had been told government forces controlled. When that driver would go no farther, I had to walk, but by then I saw trucks filled with Mahdi Army members speeding through the streets wearing black masks and carrying AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades.
Gun battles broke out unpredictably, so I ran or walked when it was quiet, then dropped down and sought cover when I could hear shooting. After 45 minutes or so, I came upon the Rumaila Hotel in a central neighborhood called Ashar. Amazingly, it was open, with six or seven guests inside and a couple of employees. I was so exhausted I didn’t think twice, just checked in.
The next day I moved around as much as I could. The common observation was this: There was nowhere the Mahdi either did not control or could not strike at will.
I am not sure what gunfight poured bullets onto the hotel on Friday. I just heard the gunfire and the windows shattering; as far as I know, no one in the hotel was hurt.
On Saturday I was talking with a colleague on my cellphone when a gun battle started right outside the hotel. It was so loud I couldn’t hear the voice on the other end of the line anymore. I dived into a corner of my room and waited for it to end.
A while after the shooting stopped, some other residents of the hotel and I went outside. The street was littered with the shells of heavy machine guns where the Mahdi Army had fired toward another hotel, the Meerbad, where Ministry of Interior officials were staying, perhaps 50 yards away. We could see their pickup trucks, now full of bullet holes, in the parking lot of the hotel.
I decided to leave Basra. I took the white flag with me.
This article was reported by Qais Mizher in Basra and written by James Glanz in Baghdad.
March 31, 2008 By Qais Mizher
BASRA, Iraq — I walked, ran and crawled into central Basra on Thursday, constantly dropping to the ground because of gun battles between Mahdi Army militiamen and the Iraqi Army and the police.
The rest of my stay in the city went like this: On Friday evening, the hotel I had somehow found open was showered with bullets, smashing glass on several floors and knocking pieces out of the stone facade. The next morning, Iraqi Interior Ministry forces in a part of the city they supposedly controlled were ambushed with heavy weapons at a hotel 50 yards from mine. On Sunday morning, after I had hired someone to drive me out of the city, an Iraqi soldier fired at our tires but missed. We did not stop.
Iraqi forces started their assault on the Shiite militias in Basra on Tuesday. Whatever the initial goal of the operation, by the time I arrived in Basra it was a patchwork of neighborhoods that were either deserted or overrun by Mahdi fighters. There were scattered Iraqi Army and police checkpoints, but no place seemed to be truly under government control.
Early last week, when the assault started, I happened to be in Diwaniya, another southern city, as part of my work as a reporter and translator for The New York Times.
Calling on my experience as a captain in the Iraqi Army before the 2003 invasion and essentially a war correspondent since then, I headed to Basra to see if I could make my way into the city and see what was happening there.
Traveling anywhere was difficult because of the violence that the Basra fighting had caused all over the Shiite south and the curfews that the government had imposed. Somehow I made it to Nasiriya, about 100 miles northwest of Basra, and persuaded a taxi driver with a GMC truck to take me to Basra.
The driver knew the road well. He took the old highway south; he knew that a checkpoint at a small town along the way would not let anyone through. So he turned off the road and drove several miles through the open desert to another road, and continued south.
That is when we started to see terrible signs of the conflict in Basra. I counted about 20 civilian cars coming north with coffins strapped to their roofs, heading to bury their dead in the Shiite cemetery in the holy city of Najaf. My driver and I were unsure about the road ahead, so we flagged down a family driving in the opposite direction. As we did so, a woman in the passenger seat began frantically waving a piece of white cloth — a white flag — out her window.
It turned out that she was terrified that we might be members of the Mahdi Army, who she said had put bombs and snipers all along the road where the family had just passed. Once we calmed her down, she suggested another way.
Before we drove off, my driver had an important thought, asking the woman: “Could you give us your flag? You left the city, and you don’t need it anymore.”
She kept her flag but gave us another piece of white sheet. We used it often. At one point, we passed a huge plume of smoke at a place where a major oil pipeline had been bombed. We drove slowly into what looked like a deserted city, and at a certain point my driver refused to go any farther. I said fine and got out, but before I left he had one request: could he have the white flag?
I tore it down the middle and gave him half.
Somehow I found another driver to take me within a couple miles of the city center, which I had been told government forces controlled. When that driver would go no farther, I had to walk, but by then I saw trucks filled with Mahdi Army members speeding through the streets wearing black masks and carrying AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades.
Gun battles broke out unpredictably, so I ran or walked when it was quiet, then dropped down and sought cover when I could hear shooting. After 45 minutes or so, I came upon the Rumaila Hotel in a central neighborhood called Ashar. Amazingly, it was open, with six or seven guests inside and a couple of employees. I was so exhausted I didn’t think twice, just checked in.
The next day I moved around as much as I could. The common observation was this: There was nowhere the Mahdi either did not control or could not strike at will.
I am not sure what gunfight poured bullets onto the hotel on Friday. I just heard the gunfire and the windows shattering; as far as I know, no one in the hotel was hurt.
On Saturday I was talking with a colleague on my cellphone when a gun battle started right outside the hotel. It was so loud I couldn’t hear the voice on the other end of the line anymore. I dived into a corner of my room and waited for it to end.
A while after the shooting stopped, some other residents of the hotel and I went outside. The street was littered with the shells of heavy machine guns where the Mahdi Army had fired toward another hotel, the Meerbad, where Ministry of Interior officials were staying, perhaps 50 yards away. We could see their pickup trucks, now full of bullet holes, in the parking lot of the hotel.
I decided to leave Basra. I took the white flag with me.
This article was reported by Qais Mizher in Basra and written by James Glanz in Baghdad.