An Interview With Bourzou Daragahi
For futher information check out www.topica.com/lists/borzou/read
After spending almost one year in Iran, Freelance journalist Borzou Daragahi entered northern Iraq in Sept 2002. At times embedded, and at others not, he has been covering the war and posting letters home on a Topica webpage:
Lorna Tychostup interviewed him on July 18 via satellite phone from a Baghdad rooftop.
Lorna Tychostup: Are you still with the fourth infantry?
Borzou Daragahi: No, I’m not embedded any longer.
LT: Ok, where are you now?
BD: I’m in Baghdad at Al Hambra, the Al Hambra Hotel.
LT: Ok, the heat is being turned up here in the United States what is becoming obviously the lies of the Bush administration. Last night, a reports came over about some troops of the army’s 3rd infantry who having been airing their concerns on television, yesterday, speaking of poor morale.
BD: And to me too, we were there…I was with the Third ID yesterday. We did a big story kind of with the Associated Press about troop morale, and if you go on the Internet, you’ll find that story too.
LT: So you went there. They seem to be very upset with Rumsfeld in particular.
BD: Well, I don’t know. No one that I spoke with mentioned Rumsfeld in particular. I know that one soldier apparently mentioned Rumsfeld. I’m sure they are upset with their commander. They just want to go home. Their lives are on hold while they’re stuck here. I think they were a little disappointed by the reception they got, in terms of the Iraqi people. You know they were expecting lots of cheers and flowers and so on. What they get is an occasional thumbs up from the little kids, vacant [smiles] from the adults. And at night you know these intermittent but persistence small arms, RPG, and mortar attacks on the vehicle convoys and bases. I think they’re burnt out. I think they’re tired. They’ll tell you that.
LT: They’re in Falluja aren’t they?
BD: The 3rd ID’s near Falluja, yeah. Yeah, I think they’re definitely burnt out with being here. They’re tired of it. I talked to one soldier today and I asked him, “Who do you think is behind the attacks on you?’ And he was saying, “I don’t know. Sometimes I think its Saddam loyalists, sometimes I think its Islamic fundamentalists, but it ends up just me thinking that it’s just the Iraqi people. And it’s the just the same people who are giving me the thumbs up in the day are shooting RPG’s at me at night. And I just end up kind of despising the people here.”
LT: And what do you think? Do the attacks against the troops appear to be simply Baathists, some people who are Saddam loyalists, or is this just more of a general uprising?
BD: Definitely not a general uprising. Definitely not, in my opinion. It’s definitely linked to either…there’s absolutely no evidence to show that the vast majority of the people are opposed to the US presence here. You’ve got 20 percent of the people who are Kurds who are happy the US is here and are happy that Saddam is gone. You’ve got 60 percent of people who are Shiites who are happy that Saddam is gone and kind of ambivalent about the Americans being here, but kind of understanding of the need for them not to pull out immediately because of the security problems that would cause. And then you’ve got the Sunni Arab tribesmen that were supportive of Saddam and they were his base. And that’s about 20 percent of the population. I would say half of them view the situation with the same way that the…they’re happy that Saddam is gone and ambivalent about the American presence. But I would say that there’s a 10 percent, maybe less, core of people, who are actually Saddam loyalists, and I think that the sort of resistant to the US rule is from those ranks. I think that there’s definitely evidence that those folks have been paying - I wouldn’t call them mercenaries, I would call them thugs - to carry out attacks on Americans. There have been interviews, not press interviews, because unfortunately, for me, the US abides by the Geneva Courts. They won’t let us interview prisoners, which when I was in Northern Iraq, they would let us interview the prisoners. But apparently there’s credible evidence that these guys are paid about 200,000 Iraqi dinars, or about $166 dollars, these criminals, thugs, to buy the Baathist loyalists to launch attacks on Americans, and if they kill an American they get a $5000 dollar reward.
LT: In American dollars?
BD: American dollars, yes. And they’ve found cachets of money all over the country. Just the fourth infantry division alone has seized half a billion dollars in cash, mostly in large US denominations, stored in farms and cachets and mansions around the country. The US is trying to counter that money thing by giving $250 rewards for useful intelligence. So if someone offers you $166 dollars to kill an American, or fire against an American, and you instead go to the Americans and tell them who’s been offering you the money, they’ll give you more. They’re playing the economic game as well, in terms of getting the people to give information.
LT: Like a bidding game?
BD: Yeah, basically. I don’t think there’s a large-scale resistance to the US. You know what? The people here are just tired, they don’t want to fight.
LT: They were tired before the war; they were exhausted.
BD: Exactly, they’re even more exhausted now. Yeah. And there’s no real resistance. They’re just kind of jaded. So what else is knew? On the other hand, you know there is positive…I think Paul Bremer came here all full of bluster and, “We’re going to do this, we’re going to do that, we’re going to take over, we’re going to mold Iraq into our own image.” And then he just started dealing with the day-to-day. The same thing happened to Jay Garner. After a few weeks of being here he just kind of was humbled and took a much lighter approach and said, “Ok you guys, you know what, I think I don’t mind the Iraqi population complaining to me about electricity and problems.”
LT: [Static in the line] I’m sorry…what did…Bremer said that?
BD: Yeah. I think that basically that’s the attitude at this point. I think that this governing council includes a number of people who have been vocally anti-American in the past and that it’s not as much of a puppet formation of the United States as some people might believe. I think it’s going to get some credibility as the biographies of these people start trickling out. It’s going to gain a foothold in the population here. Maybe not everyone will support it but they’ll be like, “Wow, this is a pretty decent cross-section of our country.” I think it’s partially a victory for the Iraqi opposition figures that were in London in December and in Salah ad Din in Northern Iraq in February, and have been vocally anti-Saddam for 20-30 years. I think it’s definitely a victory. There are many, many of those figures there that are respectable, respected Iraqi opposition figures in the international community.
LT: The attacks are occurring with such frequency. You feel strongly, you feel comfortable then saying that there are that many people who are willing to accept $166 in American to launch an attack against troops when they might be killed? There are just so many attacks; I’ve spoken to other people who are in Iraq…
BD: There are 12 a day. There’s about on average 12 attacks a day against US forces. That’s the official number that AP uses. I wouldn’t say that—I would never say that all the attacks are financed by the Baathists and are mercenary attacks. There is some credible evidence that definitely some of the attacks are just basically wayward 17 and 18-year-old kids, who were paid a couple hundred bucks to launch an RPG against US forces. However, I will say this too, there’s obviously an escalating organized resistance developing against the US presence here. Definitely. Even the new Central Command General John Abizaid conceded that last night. The sophistication of the attacks is growing. It’s gone from Kalashnikovs to RPGs to mortars, and then yesterday anti-aircraft guns launched against airplanes. Each one of those escalations, those levels up, shows an increasing level of organization and technological and training sophistication.
LT: I interviewed New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges on Friday. He wrote the book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Based on his experience in Central American and watching insurgencies grow there, he said that this is almost a perfect ground for this. This is what he predicts—that this type of guerilla movement is unified and as the atrocities continue and as the people’s needs aren’t met, [the occupation] will turn into a full-blown guerilla warfare situation, unified.
BD: You know, I don’t know. I think Chris Hedges has shown his political views and they might be a little different from mine. But I think that just generally what I see is that the US is not…and I’ve talked to soldiers about it, I’m like, “you know what they want.” And they’re like, “Yeah, we know what they want. They want us to go in there…they launch an attack, they launch an RPG attack from a village. They want us to go there and blow the hell out of this village and create more recruits for them. Well, we’re not going to do that at this point.” And if you look at the casualty figures, there have been less and less reports of atrocities against Iraqi people since the war has abated. I think that was a definite strategic decision, having spoken to a lot of the brass here, there is definitely an adjustment in the rules of engagement, to the frustration of a lot of the more trigger-happy soldiers.
LT: So they’re not shooting at will anymore?
BD: They’re not...? Well, you know, they’re under attack. If they’re under attack they’re permitted…you know that’s a really good question and that’s a really important issue. And you know what, I can’t even discuss this because I’m sort of privy to information that goes to their rules of engagement. But let’s just say that there was a decisive decision to take a more…a kinder gentler, attitude towards using firepower. And that was because, precisely because, and I had spoke to a colonel—this was completely just private chit chat, I can’t give any names and stuff like that—who said basically, “We look at what the Israelis are doing in the occupied territories. We can see that potentially happening here.” So in that sense, Chris Hedges is definitely right. We can see that happening here. We’re going to avoid that by not… by making the response appropriate. We’re not going to go in there and try to inflict collective punishment. We’re going to go…you know, they’re not even kicking down doors anymore…when they’re doing house to house searches. They politely knock on the door and say, “We’re the US. We have suspicion that there are weapons here. May we come inside and search your house?”
LT: So even though that it seems—from what I gather from here—the tensions are increasing daily, the American troops are becoming more polite in their approach to Iraqis?
BD: I think that they’ve been ordered to become less violent (laughter), I don’t know about more polite in their approach towards Iraqis. And listen, I know what politics you come from, you know, and my dad is an old lefty, I was a red-diaper baby and stuff like that, but let me just say that…
LT: You sound like Shawn Hannity when I walked on the set after I got back from Iraq and he called me a lefty liberal. I really don’t have…I consider myself to be a journalist and I’m trying to be as open as I possibly can about my thoughts…
BD: Let me say two things… I don’t mean to be disparaging or anything, I just want to…
LT: No, no, but you’ve revealed to me, obviously, a bias now. I’m not coming from anywhere…
BD: I just based this on the email that you sent here that you’re sort of a progressive publication and I just assumed it was like Nation politics.
[Note: The initial email read: “My name is Lorna Tychostup. A writer and photographer, I am Senior Editor of the News and Politics section of Chronogram magazine, a monthly progressive publication with a distribution of approx. 20,000 in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York.”]
LT: Right. Well, we’re not screaming liberals. What I’m trying to do within my section is something legitimate.
BD: You’re going to appreciate what I have to say.
LT: Ok.
BD: There’s a lot of fucked up stuff happening in Iraq with regard to US imperialist, chauvinistic attitudes, a lot of arrogance on the part of administrators and stuff like that. There’s a lot of ugly things that make you squirm, you know, in terms of the soldiers’ attitude toward the Iraqis, the patronizing attitude of the Westerners coming here, and you know importing, cramming down their version of democracy down people’s throats. There are just two points. One is that for every dozen really bad interactions between US regular forces and Iraqis, there’s two or three hundred, four hundred, five hundred, a thousand positive interactions that takes place every day between the American forces here, the American officials here, who are helping in reconstructing a country that has been really messed up from 30 years of war and dictatorship and the ordinary Iraqi people. There’s a lot of good stuff happening here that we in the media don’t record—just because of the way the media is - they focus on heartbreaking, violent bloody news.
LT: Well, there’s no money in the good stuff.
BD: Exactly. And the second point I’d like to make is, regardless of how fucked up what Bush did was—how totally screwed up and kind of racist and unjustified and deceptive and manipulative it was in terms of the rationale for bringing the US to war - a consequence, maybe an unintended consequence of this whole thing, and a really exhilarating one for someone who’s here now, is just this explosion of renaissance in Iraqi cultural life, Iraqi business life. We’re talking [about] people who’ve always dreamed of newspapers finally starting a newspaper. We’re talking [about] people who’ve had this great idea for a business, for a commercial enterprise finally having the chance to do that. We’re talking [about] people who are really talented academics, but because they were Shiites and members of the Baath party, would never go anywhere in their career. Now all of the sudden, they’re head of the department and they’re doing really interesting, creative things that they’ve always dreamed of doing but couldn’t be [doing] during this ugly brutal dictatorship. There’s a lot of shades of grey in what the US did. Did the US occupy and brutally and violently and maybe unjustifiably attack Iraq and overthrow its government? Yes. Did the US, in the most literal sense of the word, not ideological, did it liberate Iraq? Yes. To me, it’s a very, very…it’s just a complicated question and I’m so conflicted about whether it was right, whether it was wrong, whether it was justifiable, whether the ends justify the means, whether the means justify the ends, et cetera.
LT: What you just said, in terms of university professors… a lot of guys in my hotel [in Iraq] were civil engineers, and they were wiping floors down and what not. You already see—besides the newspapers, because that’s something I think is a little bit more organic and can come from a basement even—but you see reconstruction occurring say, in the universities? Because I spoke to a filmmaker a week ago who said that everything was…he’s been to the hospitals, he’s been to the universities, he’s living now in Baghdad, he’s been there for a couple of months…that everything in the universities were destroyed. There’s no way it can be up and running. They have to take their exams. There are no classrooms. There’s nothing. And you’re…what you just said…it sounds like there’s a system in the university that’s up and running, and I’m just curious…
BD: It’s up and running. I was just up at Baghdad University yesterday morning. I mean, and I was at [Mustans Saria] several weeks ago. And yeah, they’ve been looted, they’ve been gutted, they’ve been partially burned, but the students are coming to class, and their main goal is to finish up finals. There have been intense quick de-Baathification of these institutions. The Baathist party higher-ups were kicked out and the people who were more qualified but maybe shunted off to the side have assumed leadership roles… I wouldn’t say that they’re…it’s not like they’re totally high tech sophisticated universities all of the sudden. But they are up and running. Definitely up and running. It’s fun going to the campuses. The kids are there. They’re happy to be going back to school. The semester is a big rush right now at all the universities—to try to finish up with exams, so that even though it’s late, to finish up and have something of a summer break…part of August and then return back to school at some point in September.
LT: So in terms of reconstruction then, is there any actual reconstruction going on? Another filmmaker, Patrick Dillon, arrived back in New York two weeks ago. He said that he felt that there was no reconstruction. He didn’t feel, from what he had seen, and he had been there from February 1st on, that there was no effort being made to actually reconstruct.
BD: Maybe from a filmmaker’s point of view because you’re [laughter] looking for footage, there’s not a lot of reconstruction going on because you can’t film it. But in terms of institutions rebuilding, in terms of the more cerebral stuff, they’re rebuilding the Iraqi police department…they’re kind of actively, that’s like step one, is to have the Iraqis managing their own security. They’re on a very grassroots level, and it’s kind of interesting. This is what I mean by kind of cool interactions between ground level US forces and ordinary Iraqi people. You have basically companies…I don’t know if you know how the US military is divided. You have the infantry divisions, and below that you have the brigades, and then below that you have the battalions, and below that you have the companies. At the company level, sort of the next to the lowest level, only lower than that is platoons…At the company level, you have guys who are on these…what they call forward operating bases, which is like an old Baathist party headquarters in some do-hick town in the middle nowhere Iraq. And these guys get a little bit of access to you know OCPA money— Office of the Coalition Provisional Authority—they get a little bit of access to that money. And on a community level, on a local level, they’re helping rebuild. For example, I went to this city of Khaliz, where the hospital was totally looted. They had no equipment and so on. One sergeant, a nice, working class guy, took it upon himself to make this hospital his project. He got money for the hospital; they’re helping build an outpatient clinic for this hospital that they never had, and he even instituted [laughter] a no-smoking rule for the hallways of the hospital.
LT: [No smoking] in Iraq? [laughter]…
BD: Yeah [laughter]. And the doctors came back. The nurses came back and the patients started coming back. This was a little success story that no one’s ever going to write about.
LT: Where is this?
BD: It was in the city of Khaliz. [Kilo, Hotel, Alpha, Lima, India, Zera.]
LT: You’ve been hanging out with the soldiers [laughter]…
BD: Yes, I have.
LT: Would you say that you’re being embedded at times has changed your view? Has affected you?
BD: I don’t know. My Midwestern kind of talk seems to get me, got me access to the soldiers even before I was embedded. I just learned a lot being imbedded, just in terms of what military life is like. A new appreciation for not the mission of the soldiers, but just the shit they have to deal with on a ground level. Has it changed me? I wouldn’t say that. It has changed my political views which are pretty kind of just all over the place at various points. But it was definitely an enriching and rewarding journalistic experience. Then I was embedded…I used to be sort of informally embedded with the Kurdish peshmerga and I had a similar learning experience with them. It was just very exciting and I learned a lot.
LT: Do you feel that the troops should be sent home?
BD: I feel it would be too premature to send the US troops home. But there were a couple, I do a lot of different beats here…I do sort of whatever comes up every day. One day I went up to cover the senators, the US senators visiting in Kirkuk, and I was talking with Senator Carl Levin, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee. He had a brilliant idea. I don’t know why we haven’t thought of it before. [He said,] “Why don’t we, in areas where there are people who are hostile to US forces, use other coalition troops?” I mean it just seemed like a beauty, a beautiful sort of idea in a way. Why don’t you take the British soldiers, the Polish soldiers, and the Albanian soldiers, or whatever, and put them in Central Iraq, where they don’t have as much of as political stigma. I don’t know how much you would get paid to kill an Albanian Soldier. And then put the Americans in the North and South where they’re more tolerated. Maybe that’s a good idea. Maybe that would make it more of sort of an intelligent occupation. At this point, I think it would be really, really premature and really, really unwise to have the US soldiers leave here. I think it would create a big security vacuum. I think even the people who are vehemently and vocally anti-American, such as the pro-Iranian Shiite groups, even they say no, no, no, no, not just yet. US has to go but if they leave right now it will cause what someone called—one Ayahtollah called—the Lebanonization of this country, which is something no one wants.
LT: So you feel that the, whatever the anger is, where there is anger again the occupying force, it’s against the American occupying force and not necessarily the fact that the country now, this very nationalistic country, is occupied by [just] anybody?
BD: You know, I don’t know. Maybe there was a…I don’t get the sense that they are so nationalistic. I’m Iranian descent, and I thought I would be hated by Iraqis…and so when I came here I first was really nervous, because Iran and Iraq fought this great huge war against each other. And I thought that these Iraqis, all I heard was they are Iraqis first, they are Shiites second, and you know whatever, blah blah blah blah blah. And I came to Kurdistan and I was loved for being an Iranian. They loved…I didn’t know this, but the Kurds consider Iran their parent culture. And then I went to the South of the country, and the Shiites, which are 60 percent of the country, they were…not ever a word about the war, about being Iranian and the rivalry between the countries. I’ve never had any sense of chauvinism or nationalism from the Iraqis except when I go to Oja and Tikrit and what I call Saddamistan, where…you know, Saddam was a fucking bastard, and he just poured money, you could just see what a bastard he was when you go to these places and you see how much money he poured into these places. The shitloads of money he poured into Tikrit and Oja and Samarra and this whole area here. And then you go down South and you see what he did down there. The lack of infrastructure and the lack of anything. People living in their own feces, basically.
LT: That had nothing to do with the twelve years of sanctions? That was Saddam?
BD: In my opinion, well, it didn’t seem to affect Tikrit. It didn’t seem to affect, in 1998, Saddam building [laughter] a huge palace in Tikrit, dedicating it in defiance of the Anglo-American aggression. Yeah, I think Iraq was impoverished by the twelve years of sanctions, and impoverished partially by the years of war with Iranian Iraq, although back then, at least they had free markets. But I think the conditions of the south of the country, yeah, of course they had something to do with the sanctions. But you compare, just compare, that section of the country, Saddamistan—have you ever been there?
LT: No, I haven’t. I had been in the South.
BD: It looks like Dubai. It’s all new. Like Dubai, like the United Arabic Emirates. It looks like a rich gulf country, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Dubai, or Qatar or any of those countries? Those rich…or Kuwait? It looks like one of those countries. It’s all new construction. It’s all new palaces and mansions and stuff like that. We’re talking about decades of lack of investment and I think this goes back—yeah, the sanctions were really bad and they really hurt the country—but I think the fundamental problems of Iraq go back many, many decades to the fundamental imbalance of power between the Sunni Arab majority and the rest of the country.
LT: I wasn’t trying to get at whether they hate a specific group of people or something, but you raise the question in what the senator…his suggestion— what we’re hearing here in the United States is that [the violence stems from] the fact that Iraq is occupied. So even if it were occupied by monkeys, the people would be pissed off. That they don’t want to be occupied, and that’s why this violence is occurring. And from what you’ve said, that’s not really true. [The violence is occurring] more because it’s an American occupation…
BD: I think there’s an American…I think there’s a stigma to the fact that you’ve got Americans here. If it were the UN it would be a different story. I’ll tell you that. I think it would be a lot less volatile in the South. It would be a lot less…in the South…I didn’t say they were pro-American in the South, I said they’re ambivalent and conflicted. I think if it was the UN, they would be so much happier, so much happier if it was an international force. And in the center of the…in my estimation…I’ve been coming in and out of this country in the past year, I think there’s only about, even among the Sunni Arabs, only about 10 percent supported Saddam. Only about half of them supported Saddam. Even among the Sunni Arabs there was maybe 1 in 10 of the country were pro-Saddam people. I don’t think you can do anything with those people. They had their sort of very, very, very cushy existence here, and they’ve lost it. They’ve lost everything. Imagine you’ve lost everything. You’re mad. You’re angry. You’re going to take up arms. I don’t think that because of the fractious nature of the… and I’ve thought a lot about this…
LT: I don’t mean to interrupt you, but losing possessions and then watching your family be blown up in front of you, or watching certain levels of devastation occur in front of you, it seems would elicit a response, where maybe they have to be paid to attack Americans. But there are people who literally will strap that bomb on to their body and go after what they perceive as having just killed their family…
BD: That hasn’t yet so much at all. You haven’t had the suicide bombings yet. There hasn’t been that. That might happen.
LT: That reportedly happened during the war in Basra. Some of those men strapped bombs to their bodies, rode bicycles into tanks…
BD: It happened a couple of times. But it’s not like West Bank. Listen though, one thing I should note. And I think you’re right here. Just a note, I think that financing attacks and organizing them, that’s just one tool. I don’t think necessarily that it shows [static on the line]. It shows a level of sophistication, that they’re at a level of organization that, in addition to carrying out attacks themselves, they’re also finding people to finance to carry out the attacks. Maybe it just shows they’re pretty good, instead of showing they’re lack of commitment.
LT: Right, no, no, my thought on this is just…I take it to the personal sometimes. I’ve got kids and if someone came here and bombed my kids, I would definitely be fighting back and you wouldn’t have to pay me a dime. And I wouldn’t care who they were, and why they had done what they did…
BD: But maybe if you were smart, instead of fighting back yourself with your own body, you would organize, create an organization, a secret organization, and create a funding mechanism for that organization, and then you be the leader of that organization, and then you pay people to go carry out attacks...
LT: Exactly, but at that point, anyone who had gotten affected, whether their family was killed or they don’t have access to the wealth that they had before, would join. It wouldn’t be just these Baathists, in my mind…a lot of people in the South…
BD: No, no, no…There’s no evidence whatsoever. There was that one incident where the Shiites were pissed off at the Brits because the Brits went into their homes and searched their women’s quarters. And they killed six Brits. But in the South, at this point there’s been no evidence of resistance towards any occupation. An Najaf is quiet. Karbala is quiet. Basra, except for this incident, is quiet. Nasiriyah is quiet. All these towns are quiet. We don’t even have reporters in those towns anymore. We brought them out because there’s just basically nothing happening there. The only places that things are happening are Falluja, Ramadi, Ba qubah, Balad, Tikrit, Samarra, [Aldora].
LT: Mosul?
BD: Ah, Mosul, sure, a little bit. Mosul has been such a success story though after being so fucked up right after the war. Mosul is already in the hands of an Iraqi governing council. And the Iraqis are managing their own affairs, and their police department is this multicultural police department. Mosul’s a model.
LT: Filmmaker James Longley said he was there a week ago, I believe, and there was a firefight outside of his hotel…RPG’s and what-not going on.
BD: Yeah, there are firefights everywhere. But I’m just saying, in general, the big picture overview, Mosul is quiet, generally. There’s occasional stuff happening, definitely. You have the nightly incessant…listen, when the soldiers in Balad go out on patrol, they are basically expecting to get attacked every night when they go out.
LT: Where is this?
BD: In Balad. That’s in the heart of the Sunni triangle. Every night they go out and they are constantly attacked. I’ve gone out on patrol with these guys. I’ve seen the looks on the people’s faces. They do not like the Americans there. They hate the Americans there. It’s a very different vibe from going through the Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, or going through An Najaf [where] you see Americans and how they interact with the locals there, and then in Mosul and Tikrit, where I’m telling you, the soldiers don’t even wear their flaks [flak jackets] sometimes, against regulation. They don’t wear their flaks and helmets when they go out and interact with the people so they feel comfortable. It’s very different, you know, just the vibe.
LT: Well, I’m very happy that you called. I really appreciate this.
