Third Country Nationals
Cell Phone Videos Reveal Untold Stories from Ramadi
Amman, JORDAN--Mohammad reached across the bar and handed me his mobile. He told me to press start and play the video on hold.
I opened it with apprehension, knowing full well that one of the major ways news is spread in Iraq is through violent depictions sent via cell phone. This is of course how Saddam Hussein's hanging was captured that created such a thunderstorm of anger over how he was heckled in his last moments.
Surrounded by blood red walls, cigarette smoke and fellow drinkers, I was sitting in my favorite pub with two Jordanian friends, Mohammed and Nabil, who were on leave from Iraq. They’d been telling me about their experiences translating for American troops while we curled up to the bar and listened to Red Hot Chili Peppers playing on the Jukebox.
As I hit play on his phone, Mohammad told me I was looking at the dismembered body of a dying suicide bomber. His entire left leg was missing and he was dragging himself across the bloody pavement.
"Look at him, he's so fucked up he doesn't even know what is going on or that his leg's fucking been blown off," he said.
Nabil jumped in and told me that most suicide bombers are so drugged up that they can't even feel it when they set off their lethal payloads. He also told me how he'd heard some of the terror groups in Iraq actually chain suicide bombers wrists to the steering wheel of the car just in case they change their mind at the last second.
Earlier, Nabil had been trying to convince me how safe his posting in Ramadi, was and how all he did was eat, sleep and go to the gym. It was hard to hide my skepticism. Ramadi after all is one of the three cities in the Anbar province west of Baghdad that's been nicknamed the Triangle of Death or the Sunni Triangle.
We eat steaks and lobster a few times a week, he said smiling and rubbing his gut.
"Yeah, KBR really knows how to do it," laughed Mohammad, one of the translator managers (and Nabil’s boss) at the base. He’s of course referring to Kellogg, Brown and Root, a former subsidiary of Halliburton and one of the largest contractors for the US Army.
Later that night, turning away in disgust from a shot of scary blue liquor some friends next to us were shooting, I pushed Nabil about how he was really faring as a “Third Country National” or TCN working in Iraq.
"Just being there has got to affect you. I mean, the things you see etcetera," I said.
"Yeah, of course it does," Nabil relented. "I didn't sleep for two days after my first trip out with the soldiers." He went on to relay one of his first missions out of the base with US troops. They were trying to determine which of the Iraqis asking for financial compensation for various complaints would actually receive any money. Most of the civilians were asking for cash because of problems created by the US military, such as accidental deaths, houses being demolished, and injuries.
The troops were interviewing an imam (a religious man who also doubles as a muezzin, singing the daily call to prayers) and Nabil said all he was asking for was $100.
"I could barely understand him because he was so fucked up from getting hit by shrapnel and he could no longer really talk, or sing. He told me his wife was threatening to leave him because he couldn't work anymore."
"'Please I just need $100 so I can buy my wife a refrigerator and a television so she won't leave me!'" Nabil relayed. "The soldiers were like, 'So Nabil, what do you think, should we give him money?' And I was like, ‘Yeah! Are you kidding?’ Most people are asking for thousands of dollars and he's just trying to keep his wife from leaving him and moving back with her family."
As he told me this story, I looked into his face and thought, this kid is like 24 years old and he is experiencing the horrors of Iraq for a monthly salary of $1100 – no great windfall, even by Jordanian standards, and almost nothing compared to the $10,000 to $16,000 a month paid to Americans working on bases in Iraq.
The next video Mohammad passed to me a few minutes later, after I took some large gulps of my Stoli and soda, was of an execution.
"This guy's one of those fuckers who saws peoples heads off," he said.
"How do you know this?" I asked.
"One of my military friends told me," Mohammad said completely unconscious of the ghoulish scene he has saved to his phone. He was like a stone looking back at me.
The journalist in me of course was morbidly curious about the scene, the background, and the facts—which unfortunately don’t exist. I watched a large group of men, not in uniform, rough up a man wearing a typical brownish tunic.
They proceeded to drag him to the base of a sand dune, stand him up and shoot him in the chest and the head.
No trial, no jury, just a couple of shots by a mob of men. Lawless justice. Something that is now the norm in Iraq, according to a number of people I’ve spoken with here. I’ve also seen Iraqi blogs (particularly healingiraq.blogspot.com) with similar images posted: Representations of the same method of transmitting violence—and sometimes justice, via cell phone video. In some images you can even catch surreal glimpses of other people in the bloody scene with their mobiles out taking a video.
I stared at my friend in amazement as he took a long drink off his double vodka apple juice and lit a Marlboro.
"Don't you feel this affects you Mohammad? What is this doing to your soul?" I asked a few days later.
"I've given enough of my humanity away at this point that it doesn't faze me a bit," he said. But I’ve seen his humanity. I take care of his big and beautiful, fluffy black Persian cat that requires regular baths finished with a blow dry. I’ve also seen him bend over backwards for me to help me whenever I need anything.
I wondered how true his feelings could possibly be. Both he and Nabil have spent the last five days getting so mind-blowingly wasted it's hard for me to believe that this work doesn't scar them on many levels. Especially when yesterday Nabil asked me if I knew anyone who worked at the UN.
He told me that after all he's seen in Iraq he's realized just how bad off people are in the world and he wants to volunteer in Africa to try to help people.
But instead he’s decided to help himself first. His mom gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse: Leave Iraq and I’ll pay for you to go back to school.
Mohammad, a few days after my viewing of the gory videos, met an amazing woman and fell in love. He’s also chosen to leave his job in Iraq and come back to seek his fortune, and be with his woman.
For my friends, this venture was a quick way to make some cash and get out of debt. But there are plenty of others willing to fill Mohammad and Nabil’s place. It is almost impossible to know how many Jordanians or TCNs are employed as translators in Iraq. It’s dangerous for these people to publicly say they’re working with the Americans, so inevitably it’s difficult to obtain hard numbers. Just last month a buddy of ours shipped out and isn’t due back to visit his new bride for another few months.
Its likely that long after most US troops go home, military contractors staffed by young TCN’s like Mohammed and Nabil will still be employed to police Iraq, since the Iraqi military and police have thus far proven so inept.
Jordan is also feeling the effects of movement across the border in the other direction. A new survey conducted by the Department of Statistics and the Norwegian Research Institute Fafo says that as of May 2007 there were 450,000 to 500,000 Iraqis here. In a country with a population of six million, 70 percent of which are Palestinian, adding roughly half a million Iraqis has created a boiling haven of social, economic and environmental pressures weighing down.
Many people on the street in Amman, especially cab drivers who like to give their two cents, think the US needs to get out of the hives nest we’ve created. Others have started echoing discriminatory terms about the Iraqis here and essentially can’t wait for them to return home. There are rumors that Iraqis are responsible for anything from the rise of prostitution, to rising inflation, and the spike in the housing market.
And now there is the very real water crisis raising its ugly head, something very few people want to discuss. Jordan is in the top 10 of the most water poor countries in the world. With the increased population pressures it’s only a matter of time before the proverbial “shit hits the fan.”
Grainy images of violence on Jordanian cell phone screens are only the tip of the iceberg of ugly realities about the War in Iraq that American’s aren’t allowed to, or don’t want to see. But for the people of neighboring countries like Jordan, it’s not so easy to escape the fallout from our war.
© 2008 The Common Language Project