COVERING
THE WAR
Baghdad: Minding your Minder
By
Anthony Shadid
Before
the war, in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, one of the many things
that made reporting there so difficult were the escorts —
minders, in the language of journalists; guides, in the language
of the government. They were dispatched by the information ministry
to accompany any foreign reporter working in Iraq.
Their job description left little room for subtlety:
rigorous surveillance. For reporters who didn’t speak Arabic,
they made sure a lot was lost in translation. By virtue of reports
they filed to their superiors at the ministry, some journalists
found themselves on blacklists. In virtually every case, the minders
delivered a healthy dose of menace. One of them assigned to a
major U.S. network — a brooding heavy right out of central
casting — used to show up at his job with a pistol strapped
to his hip.
I inherited my minder from a colleague, and within
a few hours of meeting him, with the prospect of a U.S.-led invasion
of the country just a week away, I knew I was remarkably lucky.
Tall and handsome, with the obligatory Baghdad moustache,
Nasir was a former manager of Iraq’s tourism board. Twelve
years into U.N. sanctions that banned air travel, the government
could spare him for other duties. He seemed to enjoy the switch.
Surrounded by hard-drinking journalists, he could socialize into
the early morning. With a certain relentlessness, he brushed up
on his vulgarities, insults picked up from American films that
he used to introduce his every sentence. He was cavalier, as much
as was permitted in Baathist Iraq. It was a trait that proved
refreshing amid the ministry’s ever-tightening control.
During the three weeks of war, in the stifling paranoia
that settled like a fog over the city, there were few people you
could trust. But by chance and circumstance, I ended up putting
a remarkable degree of faith in Nasir. In the end, he had a job,
and I had a job, and we found a way to make sure those jobs at
least overlapped.
In reporting the war in Baghdad, I hoped to chronicle,
to the degree that was possible, the war’s impact on the
city and its people. This required a measure of unvarnished opinions.
In peacetime Baghdad, that was difficult enough. In war, it was
the biggest challenge of my time there. In large measure, I relied
on contacts that I had made in two previous trips, in 1998 and
2002. I had canvassed Iraqi friends in the United States for friends
or relatives who might be willing to meet with me. And I pressed
expatriates and Iraqis working with nongovernmental organizations
in Baghdad for help in setting up private interviews inside residents’
homes.
In his own way, Nasir made those interviews work.
On several occasions, he looked the other way as I visited the
contacts — a clear breach of the ministry’s orders that
minders stay with reporters at all times. There was always a plausible
denial — that I was lunching, that I was going to check up
on a friend, or that I had errands to run. None were all that
convincing, but with a shrug, Nasir accepted them. Time and again,
he never asked questions. I had the sense that he felt the less
he knew, the better.
Yet on occasion, he was complicit, waiting in the
car as I did interviews. And toward the war’s end, he was
downright cooperative, bringing me to people who trusted him and
who, in turn, trusted me. In one of those interviews, about the
suffocating presence of Baath party militia in besieged cities
of southern Iraq, I was told one of my favorite lines of the war.
“If you take your shoe off and throw it outside, it will
land on one of the Baath party guys,” his friend said. Hitting
someone with a shoe is a great insult in the Arab world, and Nasir
smiled. It was the grin that comes with a hint of subversion.
We both understood that we were taking risks. “I’ll
be in prison,” Nasir would say virtually every morning. “I’ll
be in prison tomorrow.” And at times, we perhaps took too
many risks. Just before U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad, we toured
the outskirts of the city to gauge its defenses. We passed checkpoints,
beyond the city’s limits. The information ministry never
knew of our trip, or so we thought. But the next day, I found
my name on a list of fifty-two people to be expelled from Baghdad,
and there were rumors — bluntly told to Nasir by his colleagues
— that I was suspected of spying. With U.S. forces already
on the outskirts, the order was too late and was never enforced,
beyond a handwritten posting on the hotel wall.
I still wonder why Nasir did what he did. My risks,
after all, were his risks, too.
No doubt, there was a current of opportunism in
his cooperation — the kind of opportunism that filled the
ranks of the Baath party for its thirty-five years of wretched
rule. Like many others in the city, he could read the writing
on the wall, even before the war started. Once, while we walked
together in Baghdad, along a Shiite Muslim shrine with ornate
tiles of blue, green, and black, he was bold in predicting the
government’s collapse. “Nobody here likes this guy,”
he told me, the reference obvious.
But opportunism only went so far. It was a war,
and in all the turmoil that bred fear and distrust, grief and
anger, people long for camaraderie.
In the war’s last few days, Nasir stayed with
his family at his home, in a neighborhood caught in often fierce
fighting along the city’s southern outskirts. I was far away
in the Palestine Hotel, with the rest of the foreign journalists
covering the conflict. After the American troops arrived, our
relationship ended. I no longer had to keep up the pretense of
working with a minder. The information ministry he worked for
no longer existed, its senior staff having fled with money they
bilked from reporters.
He had no car, no way to leave. And for a moment,
I hesitated about rekindling contact. For a moment. A day after
the war ended, I drove to Nasir’s home to make sure his family
was safe. He met me at the door.
“I thought you might come,” he said, smiling
the same subversive grin.
— Anthony Shadid is The Washington Post’s
Middle East correspondent
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