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February 2008
A phrase for any occasion
But now that troops in many regions of Iraq are focused on nation-building more than war-fighting, they are picking up the essentials of Iraqi Arabic.
Here, a partial list of the vocabulary set of an American in Iraq:
- wasta — connection (used in the context of government favors)
- mako mooshkila — no problem
- shlonek? — how are you?
- zein — good
- moo zein — not good
- shway zein — sort of good
- al-hamdoolilah — thank God
- qadaha — cigarette lighter
And, written on a dry-erase board in a Marine tactical operations center: boos teezee — kiss my ass.
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Into the dust
“I can’t tell if it’s fog or dust,” I announced on my headset.
“Oh, it’s fog,” the driver blurted back. He had been here for 13 months, so I deferred to his opinion.
But I had seen a Mideast dust storm before.
The sands of the Sinai are swept up by winds from Africa and hurled across the Levant and into Mesopotamia. They pick up dust along the way.
There’s no better place to experience a dust storm than the desert itself.
The particles are so fine they are only perceptible by taste, and through the prism of the sun.
The light turns yellow, then, as day wears long, a deep red. The iron of the sands of the Sinai bleeds out with the setting sun.
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Neighborhood Watch … in a very bad neighborhood.
The Sunni Arab men who first came forward nearly two years ago to reject the insurgency and join the American-led fight to secure Iraq neighborhood by neighborhood call themselves the Awakening.
The Shiite-led government has rejected that name, and so, in an effort to strike a balance, U.S. officials have struggled ever since to find an appropriate moniker for the group that has become a principle ally and reason for the turning tide in Iraq.
First, U.S. officials called them the Neighborhood Watch. Then, Fixed Site Security. Then, Concerned Local Citizens. Two weeks ago, top commanders changed their name yet again. They are now known as Sons of Iraq — Abna Al-Iraq — or, in military shorthand: SOI.
The reason for the latest switch?
Their previous name translated poorly. The Arabic word used for “those who are concerned” — ma’aneen — can take on a meaning of worried, disquieted or discomforted.
Today, I visited members of this group, which now number roughly 80,000 across Iraq, at a checkpoint on a highway known for banditry in a remote region of western Iraq considered a safe haven for insurgents.
Their leader, Mohammed Al-Diab, said they were manning the checkpoint, set up by U.S. forces just yesterday, as a vanguard against terrorists raiding their farms and families to the south.
“This is considered the gate of terrorism,” he told me.
Carrying their own wood-stock rifles and AK-47s, and wearing traditional head dresses and dishdashas, they were hard to distinguish from the archetypal image of the insurgents U.S. forces are hunting.
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Bodies in the desert: A gruesome finding by U.S. troops.
U.S. forces searching for al-Qaida in Iraq fighters today discovered 16 bodies, most killed execution-style within the past three to six months, U.S. Army officials said.
The bodies were found in an abandoned industrial chemical storage site in the western Iraqi desert. A three-day-old operation in pursuit of al-Qaida in Iraq has yielded signs of insurgent activity, but no fighters.
Most of the bodies had been shot in the head, their arms tied behind their backs. Some were thrown into a well.
The sparsely populated badlands north of the Euphrates is still a safe haven for anti-American fighters, pushed out of urban areas by U.S. troops and their Iraqi allies over the past year.
U.S. forces, operating alongside an Iraqi army company, were searching the Muthana chemical complex, a Saddam-era storage facility.
U.S. commanders concede that insurgents, leaving calling cards declaring, “Islamic State of Iraq,” operate freely on the eastern shore of Lake Tharthar and along a critical supply highway that links northern Iraq to the western cities of Ramadi and Fallujah.
Recent discoveries of bomb-making materials and large caches of rocket-propelled grenades, rockets and mortars suggest insurgents are using the tribal area as a staging ground for attacks in cities as far away as Baghdad, U.S. officials said.
“It’s the perfect area that Al-Qaida likes because it’s remote,” said Col. John Charlton, commander of 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, who was visiting this remote Army post on Tuesday. He likened the region of shepherds and solitary farming families to the Wild West.
“And we’re the law West of the Pecos right now, so we’re going after them,” he said.
Al-Qaida fighters continue to set up illegal checkpoints on the adjacent highway — as recently as Tuesday, nearby villagers told U.S. soldiers - in order to extract money or cargo from passing vehicles. Those who resist are often shot, U.S. officials said.
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The Few. The Proud. The Glossary. Please.
Just as I was feeling proud of myself for mastering the vernacular of the Army — or, at least enough to fake it — I met the Marines.
For the last 24 hours, I’ve been living with the Marines in crude outposts around Ramadi, where they train Iraqi police, oversee reconstruction projects, lift weights and smoke cigarettes.
The Marines control Western Iraq, once a hotbed of the insurgency, now remarkably peaceful.
Here, a latrine is a head, a door is a hatch, a medic is a corpsman. (And, for the record, the Marines say their corpsmen are much better trained and qualified than Army medics.)
Last night, speaking to Capt. Matthew Martin, I wanted to confirm when we would be leaving in the morning (for the opening of a health clinic).
“At oh nine hundred?” I said, meaning 9 a.m., which would have been exactly how an Army soldier would say it.
He laughed. “oh nine hundred,” he said to a staff sergeant nearby. “That sounds like MASH,” referring to the television show about an Army MASH unit. I was corrected. We were leaving at zero-nine.
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The times that try men’s soles
That might seem welcome relief in the harsh, otherwise arid climate of Western Iraq. It’s not.
Soldiers and marines dread the rain and measure a good winter by few rains.
When it rains, the world turns to mud.
“It’s either muck or it’s dust,” a Marine captain told me.
Simple walks across base turn to slogs through ankle-deep sludge. Combat boots turn from desert tan to toilet-bowl brown. Mud curdles on boot soles and sloughs off in clumps in their vehicles and offices and barracks and mess halls.
It rained last night in Ramadi.
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Sergeant-power! Making the Iraqi army a little more like America’s.
Rank structure is similar in the Iraqi Army and police forces, but officers tend to issue all orders, and enlisted soldiers simply obey them. That will change slowly, with the opening of the first Iraqi academy for non-commissioned officers — higher-ranking enlisted soldiers — modeled after the U.S. Army. The goal is to empower sergeants as leaders.
“Only through great training and leadership will your formations be a powerful symbol of the new Iraq,” said Command Sgt. Maj. Marvin Hill at a dedication ceremony Tuesday for the academy, run at Forward Operating Base Kalsu by the Fort Stewart, Ga.-based 3rd Infantry Division. He was speaking to 94 Iraqi soldiers and policemen about to take part in the two-week training. “I salute your courageous dedication to defend Iraq.”
Several American generals attended the ceremony, but none spoke, perhaps to underscore to their Iraqi counterparts present the important role of America’s enlisted soldiers.
The Iraqis stood in straight lines, wearing six different camouflage patterned uniforms and dress blues, some stretched taut across healthy paunches.
Fadhil Hakim Qadhim, a 34-year-old policeman and father of four from Baghdad said after the ceremony that the training “will teach a lot of new things and modern things,” including running checkpoints, searching cars and street fighting. He said he hoped that stronger Iraqi security forces hasten an American exit from Iraq. “This is our country,” he said. “The people that don’t protect their own country will never lead.”
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Saddam’s words live on … in a U.S. Army HQ.
Saddam’s name and face have disappeared from most everywhere in Iraq. His familiar likeness and the iconography of his once-feared Baath Party have long since been destroyed by his fellow countrymen.
Yet, if you want to find it, go no farther than the headquarters of the U.S. Army’s number-two ranking general in Iraq. The Al Faw palace — Saddam’s last completed palace — on the outskirts of Baghdad was built to commemorate a modest military success in Iraq’s 8-year-long war with Iran in the 1980s.
The marble floor is designed with an eight-pointed star, once used as a symbol of Saddam’s Baath Party.
Monday, during a U.S. military ceremony in the palace, I wandered into a large foyer adjacent to the main hall and was surprised to find, in pristine condition, two identical quotations carved on the wall in stone, signed “Saddam Hussein,” in Arabic, and dated 1996.
Spoken by a true paranoid dictator, it seems to address those who might have betrayed him or those he thought might betray him.
I figured either the Americans who work there consider the masonry work an Iraqi cultural treasure not to be disturbed, or they don’t read Arabic.
An, umm, urgent incentive to subdue insurgent attacks in Iraq ….
Tonight, I’m staying on Forward Operating Base Kalsu, south of Baghdad.
Like other American bases that have come under frequent mortar fire in the past, it has had a long-standing policy of night black-outs. No lights, the thinking goes, makes it harder to target.
You might not have seen darkness until you’ve tried to find the latrine on FOB Kalsu on a pitch black Iraqi night, an orange crescent moon yet risen.
“You’re going to Kalsu?” a soldier said yesterday with a smile. “Be sure to bring your flashlight.”
The good news is the mortars have mostly fallen silent of late. (A small one landed harmlessly last week.)
Rumor has it, the lights may come back on sometime soon.
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Fishing in a war zone
On my first two days back in Iraq, I’ve found new signs of progress:
The C-130 military flight from Kuwait to Baghdad, which just a few months ago would have plummeted from the skies in corkscrew fashion to avoid being fired upon, landed much more gently this time.
During the flight, only three soldiers (and this journalist) put on their helmets. Civilian contractors — the majority of the passengers — including one man who has been working in Iraq for more than four years, never donned body armor.
Commercial jets now cruise into Baghdad International Airport for a conventional, gradual landing as if it were Topeka, Kansas.
On sprawling Camp Victory in Baghdad, military police hand out speeding tickets to their fellow soldiers.
This afternoon, I saw a U.S. soldier in uniform fishing with a spin cast rod, reeling in the line slowly while keeping the tip close to the water, on the edge of a lake beside one of Saddam’s former palaces, now home to U.S. Army offices. They say there are fish in there the length of a Ford F-150 dash board.
