The Vanishing

1

IRAQ

2002–2019

IN THE DYING MONTHS OF SADDAM HUSSEIN’S REGIME IN IRAQ, THE MINISTRY of Information, which controlled the movements of the press, granted my request to travel the country by car.

That long and melancholy voyage, shadowed by the coming American invasion, began in 2002. I usually had two companions on this trip: a driver, the kindly Munzer, a transplanted Palestinian Sunni whose family had emigrated to Iraq in 1948; and a translator, Reem, a woman from Babil Province, home of the capital of ancient Babylonia.¹ On some parts of the journey, there was also a bad-tempered minder accompanying us, graciously provided by the ministry. He was tasked with spying on us and taking detailed notes about where we went and whom we saw. But I only found that out later. He filed a daily report on our activities. Occasionally there was another translator as well. Ali moonlighted as a Martin Scorsese–worshipping film scholar. He and Munzer had a tumultuous relationship and sometimes came close to blows, so we tried to keep them separated.

Munzer had a 1987 Oldsmobile, nearly the same model that Hillary Clinton said she drove from Little Rock to Washington when her husband became president. I would load the car with fruit and water, a medical kit, and emergency supplies, and we would begin driving up and down, north and south, east and west across the country.

For me, these trips were accompanied by a sense of mournfulness because I knew even then, as we were traversing the endless highways constructed during Saddam Hussein’s regime—Basra to Baghdad, Baghdad to Mosul—that I would never take those routes so effortlessly again. Although the invasion had not yet happened, the trip took place at a time when it was predictable, and everyone knew it. The highways, the villages, the way of life in the cities and in the countryside—all of this was sure to change.

But the war to come turned out to be worse than many expected. With the invasion of 2003 and the insurgent war that followed, Iraq itself would virtually disappear. The land of date trees, oases, and deserts would end up being marked by checkpoints and graves. But although I could not know then the extent of the anguish that would fall on this beguiling place, I was sure as we drove through those biblical ruins in the ancient land of the prophets, through languid farming villages and dusty cities, that they would be forever altered once the bombs started falling.

Part of what I had set out to do was to search for the descendants of ancient Christians. The biblical stories I had grown up with all seemed to begin in Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers, in what would become modern Iraq: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Abraham’s flourishing birthplace of Ur, the stories of Daniel in the lions’ den and Ezekiel in Babylon.

My childhood Bible had drawings of the Garden of Eden, full of immense trees with a man and a woman nearly naked, shaded by foliage. In the pastel children’s Bible I was given for my First Communion, there were drawings of the couple fleeing the garden after tasting the forbidden fruit. The beautiful garden, sensual in its lushness, disappeared from their grasp forever. Then came yet another punishment, the flood.

The Garden of Eden was believed to have been in what was ancient Mesopotamia because of the description of four ancient rivers that kept it green and fertile. In the Book of Genesis, these rivers are clearly named: “A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon.… The name of the second river is the Gihon.… And the name of the third river is the Tigris.… And the fourth river is the Euphrates.” Tracking biblical geography is complex, and I am not a biblical scholar. Modern locations remain uncertain. For instance, two rivers I know well, the Tigris and the Euphrates, which today run from Turkey through Iraq into the Persian Gulf, may not be in the same geographic location as the biblical rivers. The locations of the Gihon and the Pishon are unknown. After Genesis, they are never mentioned again in the Bible. And rivers are famous for changing their course over time.²

The biblical Eden might have been in any number of places other than Iraq—including Turkey, which also has portions of the ancient rivers running through it. And there are a legion of Eden-seekers, people who spend their entire lives searching for answers about where the garden may have been and what might actually have happened in it. They include scientists, archaeologists, biblical scholars, and crackpots.

Gihon might be the Nile, although some scientists have mentioned the Indus or the Ganges as possibilities. The Bible actually does not refer to the “Tigris”; it refers to “Hiddekel.” Most Bible translations connect this to the Tigris and translate it as such. But some who have studied the issue maintain that they are quite different rivers. Some have even suggested that the biblical rivers were actually canals. The truth is, we know very little of the geographical features of the earth before the alleged devastating flood.

For certain, Abraham, the patriarch of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, came from Ur of the Chaldees, a Sumerian city-state in Mesopotamia. Nowadays, Ur is called Tell el-Muqayyar, and it is near Nasiriyah, a town in Iraq about 225 miles southeast of Baghdad. It is here where, thousands of years after Abraham’s death, in the last weeks of March 2003, US forces would fight Iraqis in a bloody effort to occupy their land. As we drove south of Baghdad several months before that war began, I was lost between both worlds. I would imagine life along the Euphrates in the time of Abraham, the swaying date trees, the merchants, the scribes and the temples, and then I would be brought to reality with thoughts about the upcoming war: how I was going to survive, what the landscape would look like once American troops arrived. This was part of the lure of Iraq for me: the certainties of its ancient past were wreathed by the imminent uncertainties of a chaotic present.

I was a war reporter who was supposed to be immune to fear, but that was not the truth. I was anxious, frightened, unnerved. I tried to hide it from my small team of travelers by taking notes, poring over maps—ancient and modern—and speaking to as many people as I could, most of whom were too terrified to speak, sensing the looming war. Like Adam and Eve’s days in Eden, it was a time before a fall, and people were all too aware that the Iraq they knew, like Eden, could soon be out of their grasp—perhaps lost forever.

Still, the grandeur of the ancient places stunned me. Ur, Abraham’s birthplace, was once the center of an affluent empire. Considered by many to be the world’s first great cosmopolitan city, it dominated southern Mesopotamia after the fall of the Akkadian Empire. Civilization reached a height in Ur around 2000 BCE, in the days when Abraham is thought to have lived.

The city had great wealth and nearly sixty thousand inhabitants. There were merchant ships, weaving establishments, and factories that produced wool clothing and carpets, which were exported. The Great Ziggurat, a massive four-thousand-year-old pyramid whose remains were rediscovered in the nineteenth century, rose above the city.

There were foreign quarters in Ur for traders, who came to the city from as far away as the Mediterranean, 750 miles to the West, and from the Indus civilization, called Meluhha by ancient Iraqis, 1,500 miles to the east. The marketplace was full of curiosities and the sounds of exotic languages. There was plenty of innovation. The creators of one of the earliest forms of writing, cuneiform, came from Ur. I slept in houses that were not so different from the ones that existed in ancient times—flat, square buildings with ladders to the roof, where we would sleep in summer to avoid the stifling, airless heat. In Abraham’s day, men would gather in the courtyards to chat, bargain, and gossip, drinking from large urns with straws. In 2002, I saw men very much like their ancestors. They sat in the rooms drinking tea and smoking hookahs, while the women stayed in the kitchen or outside with the children. Technology, electricity, and medical science had come to Iraq, but traditions and society had a way of holding on.

Other prophets were said to have roamed across the region as well—or stayed there for a time unwillingly. Daniel, a heroic Jewish youth, most likely came from Jerusalem, but he was brought to Iraq in the time of the Babylonian captivity in the early sixth century BCE along with many of his fellow Jews. The Book of Daniel depicts the city under the Babylonian king, and later in the time of the Persian conqueror Cyrus, but also shows Daniel’s righteousness and wisdom in the face of oppression, and depicts how God continues to work his plans when all seems to be lost. Some modern scholars argue that Daniel never existed; others claim he is buried in what is now modern Iran or Iraq.

Ezekiel, another Hebrew prophet in exile in Babylon, also lived during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, around the time the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were built. He called himself a “sentinel for the house of Israel,” sending messages of hope to the exiled Jews while warning them against idolatry. In his visions, he saw the rebirth of Jerusalem, but he also stressed the need to preserve Hebrew traditions in preparation for the day when God would lead them back to Israel, reporting how God spoke of the day that he would “[bring] them back from the peoples and [gather] them from their enemies’ lands, and through them [vindicate] my holiness in the sight of many nations.”³ Ultimately, the prophecies of Ezekiel were about redemption. As I drove through Iraq in those final prewar days, what people seemed to seek most was solace. “Tell me a war is not coming,” they would say to me. There was very little comfort I could give them without telling bald-faced lies.

The American invasion was planned for the early spring of 2003, but there was little solid information about it. We knew it was coming, though we were not sure when or how, what day, what hour. Rumors circulated through Baghdad before we left about how Saddam would light the city on fire, or how foreigners would be rounded up and put in Abu Ghraib prison.

It was with a kind of resigned relief that I heaved my bags and a few blankets and pillows into the trunk of the car as we set out. We were cut off from the world on those road trips. The Internet in Baghdad was carefully controlled, and there was no cellphone service. I did have a smuggled satellite phone, but it was illegal to use it, and the level of paranoia I felt from months of living under the Mukhabarat, Saddam’s secret police, was fierce. I dressed in the dark, knowing that I was being filmed. Maids searched my room and went through my notebooks. If I had guests in my hotel room, I turned up the volume of the television to make it more difficult for anyone to hear us when we spoke. Most of all, I never really knew who I was talking to and what they might report back to save their own skin. I had to assume that every word was being monitored. Every night when I left the Ministry of Information, an official sealed my satellite phone with sealing wax, and every morning he removed the wax. This was so he could tell if I opened it or not and used it illegally overnight. The penalty for that was certainly deportation, but it could have been worse—jail. That was the way we lived in Saddam’s Iraq—there was uncertainty, fear, and paranoia at an uncomfortably high level.

Throughout the trip, my goal was to meet people and write about all that I encountered. Although occasionally, Reem and I would watch Iraqi TV, mostly we talked to people and immersed ourselves in local gossip. There are rumors that inevitably come with the end of a regime. It was an overbearingly tense and claustrophobic time.

“What will happen when the Americans come?” I would ask Reem and Ali. In Baghdad, children were digging trenches, and sandbags were being piled on street corners. But no one wanted to look too far ahead. Reem usually stayed silent. Once, Munzer answered, “We will fight!”

We drove south to the sacred Shia cities of Najaf and Karbala. We drove north to Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, where we watched immense, pompous military parades. We spent Eid al-Fitr, the festival marking the end of Ramadan, with a farmer, who proudly slaughtered a goat in front of us in an alleyway—a gruesome killing—and then served it to us for lunch. Once, Reem and I went to the Imam Hussein Shrine in Karbala. Reem went inside and came back with a green ribbon for me. “It means,” she said solemnly, “you get a wish.”

Reem knew what I wanted. I was getting married in August. I bowed my head, closed my eyes, and wished for a happy marriage, for safety, and for a healthy child someday.

Along the way on our long days of traveling, we met Iraqis from many different sects and tribes. Iraq is an extraordinarily diverse country. We stayed with Yazidis and with blue-eyed Assyrians, and we met Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Turkmen, Chaldeans, Circassians, Armenians, Jews, and Kurds.

All of these groups had reason to fear the coming American invasion, but the fear among the Christians was particularly acute. The Christian community has been present in Iraq since the time of Thomas the Apostle, whose finger bones were said to be discovered in Mosul in 1964 during the restoration of a church. Thomas reportedly brought the religion there in the first century CE. The Assyrians of the time quickly adopted Christianity, making the Eastern Aramaic speakers still living there one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. It coexisted with the local religion for a few hundred years until the latter began to die out. The Christians themselves, however, began to be persecuted in the seventh century with the arrival of Islam.

The community persisted despite massacres by the Mongols and Mamluks in the thirteenth century and the widespread destruction ordered by the Turco-Mongol conqueror Tamerlane approximately one hundred years later. In recent years, persecution has triggered an exodus. Before the war, when I was living in Baghdad, there were nearly 1.4 million Christians in Iraq, mainly Catholic Chaldeans. Today, there are between 250,000 and 300,000 left, according to a report published by Samuel Tadros, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington, DC. But no one really knows the correct figure, because there hasn’t been a census for thirty years.

On most Sundays in the Saddam era, I would worship at the white-stoned St. Mary’s Chaldean Church in Shorja district. Sitting with people meditating and singing quietly in an ancient language was a respite for me from the madness of prewar Iraq and from my dank hotel room in the Al Rasheed, where everything was watched and recorded. Everywhere I went, there were the Mukhabarat in their leather jackets and furry mustaches. They always looked the same, shamelessly conspicuous. Journalists and diplomats all feared the compromising films, often of a sexual nature, that were said to be taken of visitors. After the war, a British security official found an entire building of such films—the Mukhabarat had kept them in storage in the event they needed to blackmail someone. On nights when Saddam’s crazed sons, Qusay and Uday, visited my hotel, everyone spoke in a whisper. I would stay locked in my room.

After Mass, my Palestinian driver and I would have lunch at a Christian restaurant, Saj Al Reef. They served delicious chicken sandwiches on toasted saj, dough placed on a hot griddle and baked over a wood fire, something like an Iraqi pizza. I frequented a Christian grocery store that sold alcohol and other rare and pricey provisions. When I could get permission from Iraqi officials, I would drive north to Mosul and Nineveh to meet with Christian communities. Staying in people’s homes, I would get to celebrate holidays and talk to the priests and bishops.

“In five years, we will be no more,” one priest told me in 2003. Seventeen years later, I think back on what he said. He was not entirely correct—Christians still exist in Iraq. But their numbers dwindle with each passing year, and their position is precarious. At the time, his prediction seemed alarmist. But he was not far off.