Terror from the sky, horror on the ground: The view from Ramadi
| Wednesday, April 25, 2007 | Printer friendly version |
| by | Summary in Japanese |
Located about 100 kilometres west of Baghdad, the city of Ramadi in central Iraq, with a population of over 400,000 inhabitants, is one of the more populous urban centres in the country. Once a vibrant hub of cultural activity ― of markets, schools, homes, hotels, banks ― the city is now better known as a "focal point of resistance" against the U.S. occupation. While a search on the web brings up page after page of statistics on death tolls, information on military strategy and tactics, and dire warnings about the growing "terrorist insurgency", very little comes up about the city's pre-war history, its customs, its traditions, or its people. The Wikipedia page, the reference of choice for a growing number of netizens, reads like a military fact-sheet, devoting roughly 90% of its content to "Wartime Military Control" from March, 2003 until the present day; the word "infantry" appears 25 times, the words "culture" and "history" not even once [1].
Through the narrow lens of the modern-day "war on terror", Iraqi cities such as Ramadi are first and foremost seen as battlegrounds engulfed in "sectarian violence", waiting to be "secured" by their Western occupiers. As one conservative-oriented investigative journalist described it: "Ramadi is both a litmus test for the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq and a laboratory. If we can defeat the terrorist forces here, there is no place we cannot defeat them" [2]. Inhabitants of this "laboratory", and the reality they endure on a daily basis, factor into this picture only as casualty figures to be minimized or ― often, more conveniently ― as lab rats to be caged and controlled.
Ramadi, however, is an exception in one important sense. Thanks to the work of the Iraq Hope Network, a Japan-based network of NGOs, aid workers, journalists, lawyers, university professors, and volunteers, Iraqi voices from Ramadi have, over the past few years, been granted a new and greatly-needed outlet for free expression on the web. Iraq-Mail: The Voice From Ramadi is a blog page devoted to transmitting first-hand reports received by members of the Iraq Hope Network to an international audience, with the intention "to make known the true situation of what is occurring in their country."
When compared to official, "embedded" reporting on Iraq, the contrast of these first-hand accounts is drastic indeed. In a letter entitled "Horror, Terror in the sky", posted on Oct. 11, 2005, an Iraqi citizen recounts the experience of an air assault:
When I waked up at 9:30 morning, this day started with sound of Helicopters everywhere, the glass of the house was shaking and the walls were vibrating. When I opened the window I found 2 US military helicopters (Apatchi) flying on very low and dangerous height.
I changed my clothes and went to the garden. Most of my family were watching the helicopters. In the openings of each helicopter there was 2 soldiers with big machine guns. They were not snipers.
The helicopters moving with high speed and very loudly sounds, they are scaring us. Their guns point to the people on the street and to my family in the garden also... The US tanks moving on street randomly with high speed in the narrow roads. The killing machines was very clear. But the real scare started when ( F-16 ) air force jets flying in the sky... Oh! they are showing their force for civilians..... for me, they are showing civilians all the guns that used to kill Fallujah and Qaim families.
While horrific events such as this one unfolding every day in far-away Ramadi may seem remote indeed to people living in Japan's largest city, on April 2nd, one voice brought them first-hand across the globe to an audience of eager listeners in Tokyo. Recently revealed to have been the author of the Iraq-Mail letters, Kasim Turki, a former soldier in the Iraqi Republican Guard later employed by the U.S. television network CNN, has been called by his townspeople "the luckiest person in Ramadi" ― certainly one of the few to make it out of the country, let alone all the way to Japan. Educated as a mechanical engineer, Turki began his career as a journalist when he reported on an assault by U.S. forces against peaceful demonstrators in Fallujah on April 28, 2003. Since that time, as well as working with CNN, Turki has teamed up with freelance Japanese journalists and aid workers in Iraq, notably photojournalist Shiva Rei and humanitarian worker Takato Nahoko.
Thanks to support from the NPO Peace On, the Iraq Hope Network, and the Fallujah Reconstruction Project, Kasim was granted the opportunity to come to Japan to talk about his experiences in Iraq. The presentation that Kasim gave in Tokyo on April 2nd, entitled "View from the Iraqi Sky", was particularly heart-wrenching given that, only days earlier, his own 16-year-old cousin had been arrested by the Iraqi army, then abused, tortured, and killed. The boy's family, Kasim explained, found his body four days later, "in the garbage". The event, sadly, was not unfamiliar to Kasim. In June 2006, less than a year earlier, his brother was driving with his 3-year-old son when he was suddenly caught amidst gunfire from U.S. marines. His brother was severely injured and later died from loss of blood while being stopped at a military checkpoint. Kasim recounted his great frustration at being denied access to see his brother in his last moments, only finally allowed into the hospital to identify the body.
These stories typify events occurring on a daily basis in occupied Ramadi. Kasim explained that every day for the past four years, starting only days after the war ended in April 2003, ordinary civilians ― men and women, children and the elderly ― have been injured and killed in the conflict. While vastly outnumbered by the innocent deaths of Iraqi civilians, to the great frustration of local Iraqi people, mainstream reporting has focused, and continues to focus, almost exclusively on the deaths of American soldiers.
Against the backdrop of a city map taken from Google Earth, Kasim described, in great detail, the current state of Ramadi's infrastructure after four destructive years of war. He began by pointing out that the busy thoroughfares depicted in the map ― photographed back in 2002 ― were very much a thing of the past; in Ramadi today, there are more craters on the streets than cars. The city's main street and its neighbouring banks, hotels, markets and civilian houses have all been been bulldozed to give a clear shot for U.S. snipers, perched in a former school, to fire on targets one street over. Kasim remarked: "This street, I remember it very well, because before it was destroyed, before the war, it was the best street in Ramadi." Now reduced to a pile of debris, the area is today home only to U.S. tanks, snipers, and army personnel, its former residents joining countless other refugees in Ramadi and elsewhere across Iraq.
Life in Ramadi, Kasim explained, has been growing steadily more unbearable as the months have progressed. The city's layout is such that there are only two ways to get in or out: either through one of two bridges that cross the river Euphrates, or through the farmland in the south-east. Both exits are now occupied by U.S. forces. Within the city, the destruction left by years of occupation is near absolute. The general hospital is closed, the train station has been bombed ten times, the football stadium has been destroyed, electricity stations have been occupied and shut down, and there is no running water. In summary, he noted: "no electricity, no phone services, no medical services," and people are reduced to drink water directly from the river, "just like ancient times".
Kasim himself first became directly entangled in the U.S. occupation in June of 2003. Only a few weeks after the end of the war, he and his friend, freelance journalist Shiva Rei, were both arrested inside the city's university. He noted that "to this moment I don't know the real reason" for the apprehension. His U.S. captors, however, did not fail to come up with inventive accusations ― among others, that he was a spy from North Korea, taking photos of American military bases.
At the military jail, a former glass factory (the only one in Iraq), he reported seeing two hundred other prisoners, including children and handicapped people. He described prison conditions reminiscent of Guantanamo: beaten, hands bound behind his back, a bag over his head, dragged out and left, face down on the concrete in the blazing sun, for hours on end. At the toilet ― a rubber tire ― two soldiers pointed machine guns and counted to five: "1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ― finished". The same treatment, Kasim reported, was doled out to kids, old men, everybody.
Kasim was later captured again, this time not by the U.S. occupiers, but by Al Qaeda, who became suspicious of his involvement with foreigners in Iraq, specifically Japanese aid workers and journalists. He reported that he was held for only four hours on this occasion, until the kidnappers were assured that he had no connection to the American forces, at which time he was released.
Kasim's last and most recent arrest was on Sept. 27, 2006, again by the U.S. forces, this time on the basis of blog entries he had posted reporting on U.S. marine and civilian casualties. In his presentation, he described how marines, borrowing moves from famous Hollywood movies, had smashed down the door to his home and stormed the house, commando-style. Breaking from the narrative of the movie hero, the marines then proceeded to destroy furniture, steal money, gold, jewellery, take his computer, and arrest both him and his brother. During the arrest, eighteen members of his family, guns pointed at them, were sequestered into a single small room with closed windows and doors for four hours in the sweltering heat. With eyes to the ground and hands tied, he was dragged 500 metres to a tank and taken off to prison again, where he stayed until being released in October, 2006 ― only months before his Japan visit.
While Kasim's tales of the daily struggles of Iraqi citizens in Ramadi were grim indeed, he also brought with him a constructive perspective on the future of the war-torn city. In May, 2004, just after the Fallujah massacre, a group of engineers and teachers teamed up to start a rebuilding project, entitled Rebuild Youth Group [3], in an attempt to re-establish basic services for the inhabitants of Ramadi. Kasim explained that: "It was very important for us to keep the young people busy with rebuilding" and keep them "useful for their families". The rebuilding effort, he explained, gives young people an alternative outlet for their energy, energy which would otherwise be used for seeking revenge at the expense of further death and destruction.
The rebuilding process itself is also an opportunity for constructive communication. Kasim explained that "we found that it's difficult to discuss with young people and ask them to be peaceful" when loved ones had just been killed in the conflict: "so we founded this idea, instead of talking about peace, we tell these kind of young people, who are angry, tell them that we are building this school, for instance, and we need your help, please join us". An opportunity is thus afforded: "during working and building, we can talk with [them] as a friend".
The rebuilding process, of course, is slow and difficult. It is not guaranteed to bring results, given the ongoing violence and the overwhelming power of the occupying forces. Concrete steps have, however, been achieved: a medical centre, a communications centre, and the rebuilding of certain schools. Despite the many obstacles along the cratered path to a brighter future for Ramadi, these steps are surely a positive sign.
I walked out of Kasim Turki's talk after a one-hour slide presentation and extended question period with a strange sense of detachment. The images of Ramadi in ruins, tied together through the narrative of one person's life, all of this passed through my eyes and ears and registered in my brain. And yet, while the people of Ramadi, the first-hand witnesses to the horror of occupation, suffer every day under terror from the sky, the view from Tokyo has an odd way of rendering the extremes of this reality somehow surreal. While the horror on the ground continues ― a truck bombing only days after Kasim's presentation reportedly killed at least 35 people in Ramadi [4] ― on that night, I returned home without quite feeling that what I had seen was real, that what I had seen was even possible. Despite the very real concern expressed by the Japanese audiences in attendance at the event, I suspect that I was not alone in this feeling.
REFERENCES
- See "Ramadi", Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, uploaded 2007-04-19. In contrast, note that for example the city of Hartford, Connecticut (USA), with a population of just over one million people, has an entire page devoted to its history.
- Michael Fumento, "Return to Ramadi", The Weekly Standard, Nov. 27, 2006. link
- Eric Prideaux, "Former Iraq soldier turns to rebuilding," Japan Times, April 19, 2007. link
- "Ramadi suicide bombing 'kills 35'," BBC News, April 6, 2007. link