Editor's note: Photojournalist Kael Alford spent 10 months covering the invasion of Iraq and its immediate aftermath in 2003-2004. She returned this summer to see what has and hasn’t changed as the U.S. prepared to withdraw its troops. 

By Kael Alford

For many Sunnis in Iraq, including a man I’ll call “the Sheik” to protect his identity, the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq is no cause for celebration. Rather it is fueling apprehension about basic security and the minority sect’s economic future.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

The Sheik has breakfast while his eldest son and heir Zaindon, 9, sleeps on the couch in their temporary Baghdad apartment. One day Zaindon will take responsibility for mediating conflicts and providing community leadership back in Anbar province.

I met the Sheik in 2003 not long after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when I broke curfew and slipped past the scary Iraqi security forces at the Palestine hotel and, with a driver assigned to me by the Foreign Ministry, ventured out for a glimpse at village life outside Baghdad. A writer I was working with had previously met the Sheik, who invited me to join them. Outside his village, near Ramadi in Anbar province, we encountered another ring of security – this time a checkpoint manned by Baath party regulars in their drab green uniforms. But here, even Saddam Hussein’s power had limits, outranked by an older code of tribal affiliations and family networks, and they let us through.

In my early visits to the village I got glimpses of an idyllic life that residents enjoyed, so far not marred by the invasion -- feasts of fresh foods, wading in the Euphrates River with the Sheik’s family – but that soon changed.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

A photo of Zaindon in the clothing worn traditionally by a Shiek or tribal elder is shown on a cell phone. One day Zaidun will be a community leader following in his father's footsteps.

Village elders had initially given U.S. troops safe passage through their area. That attitude changed within months as civilian deaths and raids on local homes by U.S. troops fueled resentment. By the end of 2003, neutrality had changed to open hostility, and roadside bombs and ambushes on the main road through Anbar earned it the name the “Highway of Death” because it was the scene of so many attacks against U.S. troops.

I visited the area repeatedly to report on the uprising and checked in regularly with the Sheik. While his neighbors and members of his tribe were debating – and in some cases battling -- the U.S. occupation, he was focused elsewhere. The Sheik is a practical man and had many mouths to feed, so he decided to work with the Americans, figuring his construction business could benefit from some of the projects they were planning – building schools and roads or repairing basic infrastructure.

The Sheik made trips to the “Green Zone” to seek reconstruction jobs, but didn’t have any success. He said the contracts were going to American companies, stoking further frustration in Anbar.  When I left Iraq at the end of 2004, the Sheik was still without work.

When I returned in June, I found the Sheik and his family in a rented Baghdad apartment, very comfortable by Iraqi standards but nothing like the vaulted ceilings and marble floors of the family home in Anbar, with its vast garden and palm trees.

Within a half hour of my arrival, the food started coming – roasted chicken, salads, bread -- only this time it arrived in plastic bags from a nearby restaurant rather than on platters from the kitchen, because the army of women in the family who used to prepare the meals were back in the village.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Zaindon, 9, climbs through a window between the laundry room and his bedroom in the family's temporary Baghdad apartment while his younger sisters and a cousin watch. The children typically play indoors for safety reasons while their father has business in the busy capital. At home in Anbar, they had plenty of room to play safely outdoors.

The Sheik told me had finally landed some reconstruction contracts related to a water treatment plant outside of Ramadi, but he moved his family to Baghdad because most of his business was in the capital and it wasn’t safe for them in Anbar.

But he said he was concerned that his business contracts would be terminated after the American withdrawal, when the fractured and corrupt Iraqi government will take complete control of infrastructure projects and contract procurement.

“I was given a chance to apply for an American visa, but I can’t leave Iraq” he said. “Too many people depend on me here.”

Among them is the Sheik’s heir, 9-year-old Zaindon. It will be his responsibility to carry on the family name and traditions – not just a patriarchal euphemism in this culture. One day Zaindon will be a community leader responsible for helping to settle disputes in the village. The Sheik would like his son to learn English so he can study abroad.

“My dream is to open a university in Iraq,” he said, explaining that providing better educational opportunities for young engineers is critical so that the next generation of talented people can stay and help the country to rebuild.

But he was concerned with the deterioration of the security situation in his village and elsewhere in Anbar.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

The Shiek's wife cuts melon while her two oldest daughters Yehmameh, 7 left, and Tiba, 9, watch.

When what was initially a mostly home-grown Iraqi insurgency became dominated by groups affiliated with militant Islam, many of them made up of foreigners, local leaders in Anbar eventually took security into their own hands. With the backing of U.S. forces, they formed “Awakening” councils – essentially Sunni militias capable of taking on the al-Qaida-inspired groups that had grown powerful in Western Iraq.

The Sheik said most of the radicals arrested early on were released without prosecution, because there was rarely enough evidence for trials and people were too frightened to testify. That's led to a resurgence of the radicals and put pressure on the Awakening councils from two sides – from the radical groups and also from the central government, which is increasing arrests of Sunnis in the region under expanded de-Baathification purges.

“Al-Qaida is distributing fliers again,” said the Sheik, “and although there is no way for them to reorganize like before, they are still active, only using quieter techniques, like sticky bombs that target specific vehicles and silencers on their weapons.” 

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

The Shiek walks the grounds surrounding his estate along the banks of the Euphrates River in Anbar Province, May 2003.

At the time of my visit, the situation was growing worse. We cancelled a trip to see the water treatment plant his company was working on when we got news that at least seven policemen had been killed in a drive-by shooting at a checkpoint west of Ramadi. Three were relatives from the Shiek’s village and he was occupied paying his respects to the families.

And that incident was hardly isolated. A cursory Internet search for attacks targeting Iraqi police in Anbar province leads to websites of radical Islamist groups like Ansar Al-Mujahadeen, which posts videos, photos and detailed descriptions of operations carried out against Iraqi security forces in English.

In light of the increasing insecurity and purges of Sunnis from government posts, Sunni dominated provinces are reconsidering their relationship to Iraq’s central government. The Awakening councils that reined in al-Qaida in western Iraq that were once on the American payroll are now paid by the central government, but members have been complaining of irregularities and bad treatment under the Shiite-dominated government. They have no official position in Iraq’s formal security structures and weak political representation, leaving them in limbo and even vulnerable to recruitment by Al-Qaida. Governing councils in the Sunni provinces of Salahuddin, where Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit is located, and Diyala have voted for increased autonomy from the central government, sparking demonstrations by Shiites in the latter province and feeding concerns that the tenuous Iraqi state could splinter along political and sectarian lines.

But perhaps the most unsettling development in Anbar province is the resurrection and persistence of local radical Islamist groups that now target Iraqi security forces and Iraqi civilians as readily as they did American forces while they were in the country. These groups were unheard of in Iraq before the war.

Like many Iraqis in western Iraq, the Sheik is convinced that Iran is supporting the radical Islamist groups in Anbar, citing the weapons they use and their choice of targets, including local Sunni shrines.

As the Sheik sees it, that may be a long-term impact of the U.S.-led war and subsequent withdrawal that Washington never anticipated.

“The Iraqi advisers misinformed the Americans when they first came” bringing Iraq closer to the interests of Iran and empowering Al-Qaida, he said. Now, “It’s only the politicians with loyalty to Iran who don’t want the Americans to stay.”

More from the series:

Introduction: As U.S. withdraws, the people speak
Corruption in high places costs widow everything
Patchwork electrical grid a symbol of country's disconnects
A new day for culture and consumer goods
For women, freedoms under fire
Suspicious minds in a squatters' camp
Colonel helped with the ‘Surge,’ then his past came calling

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Editor's note: Photojournalist Kael Alford spent 10 months covering the invasion of Iraq and its immediate aftermath in 2003-2004. She returned this summer to see what has and hasn’t changed as the U.S. prepared to withdraw its troops. 

By Kael Alford

When I start feeling really dark about all the troubles around me in Baghdad, I’ll take a detour from my designated route and stroll through the market in Karrada with my translator Sarah. Karrada is one of the busiest and safest districts, a place where a foreign face can get lost in the crowd. Sometimes we’ll wander into the pool halls or family style clubs on Abu Nuwas Street, mostly tranquil islands in a sea of uncertainty.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

A loosely organized bike club takes over Abu Nuwas street, along the Tigris riverfront in the Karrada neighborhood of Baghdad, June 2011. Members compare rides, display tricks and dart in and out of traffic on dirt bikes, mopeds and motorcycles. The club which is entirely comprised of boys is one of a handful of clubs that gather around the city in various locations along the river.

In such places, I’m guaranteed to bump into one of Iraq’s beautiful juxtapositions and my spirits will be lifted. It may be a hand painted mural on a blast wall, or a shop with trendy women’s fashion called “Hannah Montana” next to a store selling traditional men’s dishdashas. On my most recent trip, I saw evidence that Iraq is more open than ever before to cultural and economic influences outside its own borders.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Early morning at the booksellers market near Mutanaba Street in Baghdad, July 2011, a historic district seen as the heart of the intellectual community in the capital. The area is named after the 10th century Iraqi poet Al-Mutanabbi and has been the target of terrorist attacks.

Young Iraqis in particular, like young people the world over, are often attracted to the habits of the affluent western countries. So nearly nine years of contact with Americans have left its stamp on Iraqi street style as well.

This results in some surprising scenes:  a young man at the book market on Mutanaba Street wears a purple T-Shirt that reads in snarky, oversized English type “How lucky am I to work here? (I keep forgetting).” I ask him if he knows what his shirt says. He says no and when Sarah translates and I try to explain why it’s funny. He looks puzzled. It seems sarcasm doesn’t translate easily.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Sako, a Iraqi private security contractor turned tattoo studio owner, shows off his shop's work. "People say I'm acting like a foreigner," he said. But tattoo shops like Sako's are growing in popularity among young people. Sako says they make up to 10 tattoos a day and even do work on women. The shop's tattoo art is influenced by designs found on the internet, particularly work from Mexico - what their tattoo artist, a.k.a. "Dante", calls Mexican "prison inventions". The shop blares American tunes and sports Marilyn Manson and Ozzy Osborne posters on the walls.

In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq before 2003, information -- from school textbooks to media -- was strictly controlled by the state, with little available beyond official sources. Influence from western cultures came in small doses and reached only the wealthiest and most educated classes. Few Iraqis met Europeans or Americans, or traveled abroad. This is still the case, but some things have changed.

Gone are the days when families listened to radio transmissions of Voice of America or BBC World News for word from the West. Now Iraqis have much wider access to information, advertising and culture through the Internet and cell phones. Iraq’s markets are flooded with goods; foreign shipments of electronics and other goods arrive daily, mostly from China, South Korea and Iran.

The new access to outside influences and information would be difficult to undo. The influx of culture is not only coming from the west of course. Long black “juba” overcoats popular among more conservative Shia women in Iraq are arriving studded with sequins and other bling from Dubai. Iranian tourists arrive in droves to visit holy Shia shrines in Iraq and international flights to Iran outnumber the new direct flights to Europe and the UAE. Now that the borders are more open, Iraqis can choose where they find their influence and inspiration. Future generations of Iraqis will decide what to pick and choose from global culture themselves.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

A popular Kebab restaurant in the affluent district of Karrada is busy on a Wednesday night in June. The neighborhood is currently one of Baghdad's safest - although it still sees its share of violence. It is one of the few that remains somewhat mixed including Sunni, Shia and Christian residents although it is majority Shia. As a result housing prices have climbed further out of the reach of many Iraqis and the commercial districts is bustling.

More from the series:

Introduction: As U.S. withdraws, the people speak
For 'the Sheik,' U.S. pullout is cause for alarm
Patchwork electrical grid a symbol of country's disconnects
A new day for culture and consumer goods
For women, freedoms under fire
Suspicious minds in a squatters' camp
Colonel helped with the ‘Surge,’ then his past came calling

Editor's note: Photojournalist Kael Alford spent 10 months covering the invasion of Iraq and its immediate aftermath in 2003-2004. She returned this summer to see what has and hasn’t changed as the U.S. prepared to withdraw its troops. 

By Kael Alford

When I first met Yanar Mohammed in 2003, she was holding a megaphone and leading a women’s rally in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, standing in the shadow of a pedestal where a statue of Saddam Hussein had stood until U.S. tanks dragged it to the ground a few weeks earlier.  With a head of uncovered dark curls and a raised fist, she led chants demanding improved security and equal civil rights for women.

Eight years later, Mohammed is perhaps the most widely quoted activist on women’s rights in Iraq. A resident of both Iraq and Canada, she travels internationally, speaks at universities and conferences and has received prestigious awards for her service. And yet her message remains little known outside Iraq.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Yanar Mohammed rallies protestors in Tahrir Square in Baghdad, July 2011, calling for governmental reforms. She has been an activist since 2003 after the U.S. led invasion.

One of her main talking points is this: Iraq is a more dangerous place for women than it was before the U.S. invasion and it is getting worse. Reports by international human rights groups support her observations. According to the 2011 Iraq summary report by Human Rights Watch: “The deterioration of security has promoted a rise in tribal customs and religiously-inflected political extremism, which have had a deleterious effect on women's rights, both inside and outside the home.”

Today, in a country where women have served in Parliament since the 1960s – longer than in any other Middle Eastern country – they are increasingly targeted by militant Islamic elements for participating in government, holding jobs or violating conservative Islamic traditions, such as appearing in public without head coverings. Even secular women now wear scarves in hopes of avoiding dangerous attention.

Iraq also has seen a rise in the tribal tradition of honor killings, where women who have a love affair outside of accepted cultural or religious boundaries are slain by members of their own family. Often these women, fleeing for their lives, seek out the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), which Mohammed founded in the wake of the U.S. invasion.
 
When I tracked down Yanar this summer, she said the situation remains dire. She is the chief editor of the newspaper “Al Mousawat,” or ”Equality,” that devotes a full page to reporting violent crimes against women, along with phone numbers for OWFI offering safety in underground shelters for women looking for an escape from violence. She also helps operate a radio station that uses  female university students as deejays. 

Mohammed is still leading protests over the lot of women in Iraq, but is now surrounded by a new group of mainly young women.

When I visited the OWFI compound, not far from Firdos Square, on a Friday in July, about two dozen people -- mostly women but a few young men -- were buzzing about preparing signs, making jokes and chatting about strategy for the morning’s protest.

There was nervous energy in the air before the group ventured out to Iraq’s version of the “Arab Spring,” a weekly demonstration in Baghdad’s own Tahrir (“Freedom”) Square. Two weeks earlier state security officers who had been lurking on the fringes of the protests had moved in to teach the women a lesson.

“We heard them among themselves saying, ‘These are the whores, let’s go and get them,’” recalled Mohammed. “…We were beaten, our bodies were groped, we were humiliated … sexually harassed, and their message was to tell us that we are females who do not have the right to come in the arena of political struggle. We should feel ashamed and go back to our homes.”

Mohammed’s young protégés fled the square for various safe houses around the city, many of them bloody, bruised and shaken. Human Rights Watch interviewed the women afterwards and issued a report about the incident.

Despite the obvious risks, the protesters were ready to return to the streets.

“They tried to make us escape in humiliation, but the women are quiet fierce,” Mohammed said. “They gave them a good fight and today they’re back again.”

One of the younger women was 20-year-old Aya al Lamie, a thin, energetic woman in a long sleeved black T-shirt, jeans and oversized faux-diamond studded sunglasses. Head thrown back and long, dark, uncovered hair streaming down her back, she seemed to float on nervous energy as she led the women gathered in the antechamber of Mohammed’s office in anti-government chants. Mohammed stood back beneath large glossy color photographs of earlier protests, looking like a proud mother.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Women's-rights activist Aya Al Lami leads chants from the front of a bus headed to Tahrir square for a weekly Friday demonstration against Iraqi government policies, July 2011. The protestors, mostly women, were sexually harassed and groped by plain clothes security forces the previous week. Undaunted, most of the women are returning for another protest.

After a few minutes of singing and anxious strategizing, the 30 or so protestors piled out of the offices behind Lami and boarded the bus that would take them to the square. I climbed aboard too.

As we approached the square, the protestors grew quiet and began peering out the windows to assess the situation. The protest seemed smaller this week. Perhaps the rash of criticism from international observers would keep the security personnel at bay.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Protestors arrive in Tahrir Square in Baghdad on a minibus, July 2011. Protests in Iraq have been dealt with harshly by the Maliki government since February but protests have continued every Friday, with varying turnout.

The protestors entered the square, passing several Iraqi soldiers in uniform who checked their bags for weapons. The square was alive with several hundred people of all ages and types. An older women in a long black abaya posed solemnly for photographs, pictures of her missing relatives in hand.  Boisterous young men in western clothes would who fit seamlessly into the protests in Egypt, Tunisia or Libya, climbed onto a wall overlooking the square. People chanted and shouted, protesting corruption, judicial impunity, state torture and limitations on free speech.
Aside from a Human Rights Watch observer, I appeared to be the only American in the crowd.

Mohammed and her followers pulled out the megaphone and began stirring things up.  I was struck by how little has changed. Eight years ago, I made a photograph of her just like this, standing next to a red and white banner, megaphone in hand, fist in the air. It was like a flashback to an OWFI organization in 2003.

I recalled Janar’s words during our interview earlier that morning. “(After the invasion) we had a lot of worries,” she said. “There were abductions of women and we were protesting against them. … Now we have a dictatorship again and this dictatorship is exercising to take us back to Saddam’s times.”

Lamie, her young protégé, the took the megaphone,  a wide smile on her face and pumping her hand rhythmically in the air. 

I didn’t want any run-in with state security, and Sami, my driver, had been circling the square in his battered Mercedes, begging me to get in.  It was my last day in Iraq and I had more appointments, so I left the women mid-protest, hoping all would go smoothly.  I later learned that their bus was stopped as they left -- not in the square where the lone Human Rights observer was watching,  but on a side street a few blocks away. The bus driver was questioned and some of the men were taken to an abandoned building for interrogation. One of the women on the bus called the Human Rights Watch observer, who soon arrived on the scene to ask why the women are being detained. Shortly after that, the bus and protesters were allowed to leave.

But that was not the end of it. In November, four months after my trip and one month before President Barack Obama’s promise to complete the withdrawal of U.S. troops before the Christmas holidays, I found this story about Lamie, Yanar's young protege, on the OWFI website:

20 Year old OWFI activist Aya Al Lamie Kidnapped from Tahrir Square and tortured
Although the numbers of demonstrators became much less in the Iraqi Tahrir square, Aya Al Lamie insisted to join [sic] the demonstrators every Friday of the last months. She insisted to put a woman's face on the Tahrir demonstrations and cooperated with all the organized groups in the square.

On Friday 30-9-2011 afternoon, towards the end of the demonstration, a group of security men dressed in civilian clothing surrounded her, carried and threw her into the trunk of a car which they parked next to the square, in what looked like sectarian mob kidnappings, under the eyes of the police and the army - which had become common practice in the last months in Tahrir.
20 year old Aya was taken to a security facility in Jadiriyah-Baghdad where she was beaten by a mob of torturers using sticks and whipping her back and arms by cables.

She was released at 5:00 pm after being told:" This was a first warning!"

A pattern is emerging in Iraq related to the treatment of demonstrators, journalists and social critics. This September, Hadi Al-Mahdi, a journalist well-known for his public criticism of the government on a popular radio show, was shot in the head in his apartment. Al-Mahdi had been helping to organize a large protest on the first Friday after Ramadan. He’d been abducted from a demonstration earlier this year, beaten and threatened with torture. It makes me fear for Aya and Yanar's bnd of brave, outspoken women.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Anti-American banners decorate Tahrir square in Baghdad during anti-government protests, July 2011. The abuses of the Iraqi government are often considered partly as a consequence of American intervention in Iraq.

More from the series:

Introduction: As U.S. withdraws last troops, the people speak
Suspicious minds in a squatters' camp
Colonel helped with the ‘Surge,’ then his past came calling
Patchwork electrical grid a symbol of country's disconnects
A new day for culture and consumer goods

Photojournalist Kael Alford spent 10 months covering the invasion of Iraq and its immediate aftermath in 2003-2004. She returned this summer to see what has and hasn’t changed as the U.S. prepared to withdraw its troops.

By Kael Alford

If there is one issue that symbolizes the difficulties and political turmoil that have beset Iraq over the last decade, it is the country’s electrical system.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

A generator in Sadr City, Baghdad, July 2011.

While the nation of 29 million people is rich in oil, which generates revenue of nearly $2 billion a week, the government has not been able to translate that river of cash into a steady flow of electrical current from its power plants to homes and businesses. According to the Iraqi government’s figures, the grid currently meets 50 percent of demand or less, depending on the region. 

USAID and other international organizations have invested billions of dollars to try to improve the battered system, and progress has been made. But as an October 2009 USAID report noted, such efforts are hampered by the continuing “looting of cables, destruction of high-tension towers and sabotage of fuel lines. … Decades of operation without regular maintenance have resulted in increased breakdown and a need for significant rehabilitation.”

The dire state of the official grid has given rise to a perilous patchwork by the private sector to keep the lights and other appliances on.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Cables reach to a generator on the outskirts of Baghdad, July 2011.

On a typically sweaty July afternoon in Baghdad, as temperatures hovered around 113 degrees, I met a 40-year-old freelance electrician named Majid, who was making the rounds at private residences in the Karrada district.  He was installing a second-hand air conditioner for a woman whose “swamp cooler,”  which functions by blowing air across a reservoir of water, wasn’t working because the city water had been cut for two days.  Majid had been an electrician in Saddam’s elite Republican Guard, and was wearing U.S. military issue boots with thick rubber soles to guard against getting electrocuted while he worked. His only other protection was a pair of pliers with plastic handles. Regardless of these precautions, he said he’s been shocked many times. He said these days Iraqis were all doing their own maintenance work on the city wiring in their neighborhoods and he was one of the best-employed men around.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Majid, a 40-year-old freelance electrician, works on the makeshift neighborhood wiring while a young local resident holds his ladder this summer.

He waxed nostalgic about the electricity supply under Saddam, which was already inadequate. “Then there were only 2 hours in the day and 2 hours at night without power, and we were complaining! We even had one day when there was electricity all day.”  With a half-joking expression he says that people used to complain about Saddam Hussein, “but these days we say, ‘God be Merciful. Let those days come back again!’”

He works from 9 in the morning until 9 or 10 at night and doesn’t ask anyone for a fixed price. He says he’ll accept whatever his neighbors can pay.  “The whole neighborhood depends on me and I’m getting tired,” he said.

In addition to freelance electricians, each neighborhood in Iraq hosts a private generator to augment the official electrical supply. Cables erupt from crude concrete or aluminum buildings containing the thrumming generators and converge and tangle in chaotic knots before finally plunging into homes and businesses. It’s the same in big cities, small towns and even some squatters' camps, all over the country.

The uninsulated cables often stretch and sag, particularly in the summer, triggering fires when they touch one another.

Experts say it’s no secret what the problems are: The Iraqi electrical grid is unstable, hampered by war-torn infrastructure that forces implementation of blackouts to prevent it from crashing entirely; demand that has steadily increased since the 2003 U.S. invasion; and incompetence and massive corruption at the highest levels of the government.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Electric cables to private generators hang above a street in the Karrada neighborhood of Baghdad, July 2011.

In August, Iraqis learned that Minister of Electricity Ra’as Shalal al-Ani had tendered $1.7 billion in contracts to a shell Canadian company and a German company that had gone bankrupt, prompting Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to request his resignation and leading to a corruption investigation.

And that may be only the beginning. An International Crisis Group report released in September said that in 2011 the Integrity Commission and the Board of Supreme Audit, two oversight bodies in Iraq, identified hundreds of such shell companies abroad linked to senior government officials in the Defense Ministry and Maliki’s office.

More from the series:

Introduction: As U.S. withdraws, the people speak
For 'the Sheik,' U.S. pullout is cause for alarm
Patchwork electrical grid a symbol of country's disconnects
A new day for culture and consumer goods
For women, freedoms under fire
Suspicious minds in a squatters' camp
Colonel helped with the ‘Surge,’ then his past came calling

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Koppel: Is the U.S. really leaving Iraq?
Engel: A look a the US bases, Iraqi troops and other legacies of the US presence

Editor's note: Photojournalist Kael Alford spent 10 months covering the invasion of Iraq and its immediate aftermath in 2003-2004. She returned this summer to see what has and hasn’t changed as the U.S. prepared to withdraw its troops. 

By Kael Alford

Former Iraqi National Police Col. Ihsan Ali Ibrahim has the bearing of a man accustomed to giving orders. Even wearing his long white dishdasha and playing with his children, he’s got the presence of the most popular boy on the playground, the guy everyone wanted to please. Which is why he’s so uncomfortable in his new role as a recluse.  

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Col. Ihsan Ali Ibrahim sits at home with his young son and daughter, June 2011. Since his dismissal from the Iraqi National Police, he fears straying too far from home in case he is recognized by the members of Al-Qaeda or other armed groups that he helped to combat during his time on the force.

“I keep myself here in the house. I can’t do anything outside,” he says.

A career soldier and once one of the most feared law enforcement officials in the toughest neighborhoods of Baghdad, Ibrahim is now a man with nowhere to hide. Even in his own town of Dujail, he’s not really safe. He says his brother and brother-in-law were both killed by al-Qaida-affiliated groups here. His brother’s wife now lives under his roof according to Iraqi custom. 

During his career including the time he worked in tandem with US troops during the surge, he made enemies. Serving as law enforcement in Iraq is one of the most dangerous jobs. Revenge for grievances is status quo, the code of the street that challenges formal institutions. While American troops can leave, Iraqi law enforcement officials stay and expose themselves to continuous threats. “I worked against many kinds of criminals and gangs or other militias … so of course, I have to avoid them, because if I see them anywhere, maybe they’ll kill me,” he says. “Now I’m without guards or guns, protection or anything.” Now that Ibrahim can no longer work in law enforcement, he says he'd consider leaving the country for a life somewhere else. But with the American military apparatus gone, he has no one to ask for help.

Photo courtesy Ihsan Ali Ibrahim

Colonel Ihsan Ali Ibrahim, seen here in a Nov. 2009 photo, is a career soldier who served in the Iraqi National Police in West Rasheed from 2004 - 2011.He was dismissed in March of this year under accusations of ties to the Ba'ath Party.

His life is limited to the new two-story house he built just before he lost his job. He also feels safe nearby on the family farm full of date groves, vineyards and wandering chickens. But he can’t risk going much farther afield.

As the U.S. withdrawal progresses, the intensity of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s far-reaching campaign to purge Iraq’s government and security services of any traces of Ba’ath party affiliation has been increasing. Talented and experienced people are barred from public service, leaving them few other options. The tendency may reflect Maliki’s anxious grip on control in a country with a history of coup attempts from within. But it’s also an indication that Iraq’s sectarian and political rifts in Iraq are far from bridged. Wikileaks documents released in February this year contained U.S. diplomatic cables that indicated a systematic effort by Maliki’s government to stack the security services with Shiites, regardless of their qualifications.

Some observers have noted that Maliki’s purges border on paranoia, with citizens who obviously pose no threat being dismissed from their jobs or arrested.

Ibrahim’s fortunes have mirrored the recent convulsive history of the military and security services in Iraq, including the recent, ham-fisted “de-Ba’athification” efforts.

As a child, he started out on the wrong side of the law in Dujail -- a predominately Shiite city south of Baghdad, famous for its palm groves and an assassination attempt on Saddam Hussein by gunmen who hid in the lush orchards and attacked the former president’s motorcade in 1982.

In one of Saddam’s most violent acts of retribution, he sent his security guards to round up more than 600 men, women and children from Dujail, many of whom were executed. Others were imprisoned and tortured. The Dujail massacre was the primary crime for which Saddam was tried and hanged by an Iraqi court in 2006. After the purges, anyone from Dujail was blacklisted from holding official positions in Iraqi government.

Ibrahim hid that he was from Dujail and enlisted in the Saddam Fedayeen, the elite paramilitary organization of Saddam’s Baath Party, after graduating from military college in 1989. After two years of training with the Fedayeen, his commanders discovered he was from Dujail and had been arrested as a boy. He was immediately dismissed and imprisoned again.

After serving time, he was permitted to join the regular Iraqi Army as a major.

Fast-forward to the U.S. invasion. Ibrahim was fired from his Army post, this time at the behest of Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator to Iraq, who dismissed the entire Iraqi military in the early days of the occupation. When Iraqi forces were reorganized in 2004 as the country appeared to be spiraling into civil war,  Ibrahim was recruited to join a new elite paramilitary unit, the Iraqi National Police, charged with countering terrorism.

In 2007, U.S. military units began partnering with the INP on joint patrols to tackle sectarian violence in Baghdad’s West Rasheed district. The sector alongside the Tigris River was one of the most violent districts in the capital, with both Al-Qaida affiliated fighters and Shiite militias using it as a corridor to reach Baghdad from the south, leaving civilian carnage in their wake.

Photo courtesy Ihsan Ali Ibrahim

Iraqi Col. Ihsan Ali Ibrahim, center, is seen with U.S. Gen. Raymond Odierno when he was U.S. Joint Forces Commander in Iraq.

Taking part in the U.S. strategy known as the surge, Ibrahim finally got a chance to prove himself, helping to clear the sector of insurgents and make the streets livable again.

“We collected illegal weapons from the area, searching houses and bringing displaced people back,” he recalls with obvious pride. “We even closed and blocked the streets so people could enjoy themselves in the amusement park. This made us happy.”

Slowly, as patrols cleared the neighborhoods of insurgents, secured the markets and erected blast walls to protect civilians, residents who had fled the violence began to return.

But when U.S. forces ended combat operations in Iraq in 2009 and withdrew to their bases, Ibrahim’s past found him again.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki began a fresh round of “De-Baathification,” gutting Iraqi institutions of qualified people for any actual or imagined connections to the now defunct Baath Party of Saddam.

On March 29, Ibrahim received a perfunctory letter of dismissal from the Ministry of Interior.

Ibrahim was baffled and crushed. He said he never even made it out of training for the Fedayeen 10 years earlier before being imprisoned for disloyalty to Saddam’s regime. Given his loyal service with the national police, he finds it hard to believe that he would be seen as a threat.

“If they really wanted to fire us, why did they … let us join in the beginning?” he asked. “All this fighting, risk and sacrificing for nothing?“

Ibrahim has sent formal appeals to the prime minister’s office and the national police commander. He says he was told by an official in Maliki’s office that he’d need to pay a $30,000 bribe to have his dismissal reconsidered.

Like a museum to a bygone era, enlarged glossy photos of Col. Ibrahim in his blue fatigues, presiding over neat rows of caches of mortars, RPGs and Kalashnikov rifles, line the pink and yellow walls of a spare bedroom in his home. Framed letters of praise from American commanders serve as testament to his competence.

One letter from Lt. Col. Matthew Elledge of the 1^st Battalion, 22^nd Infantry, 4^th Division names “Col. Ihsan” as part of the team that detained over 900 insurgents and discovered and destroyed over 800 weapons and ammunition caches. The letter reads:

“The aggressiveness of the Brigade is only shadowed by their compassion for the citizens of West Rashid (cq). …  “As the Coalition Force commander of this area, I leave with the greatest confidence that W. Rashid will be the shining light for all Baghdad to follow in their efforts to take back their neighborhoods and provide a peaceful coexistence for all Iraqis.”

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Col. Ihsan Ali Ibrahim spends time with his son in a spare bedroom he uses as an office and museum to his accomplishments, June 2011.

The day before our interview, a bombing had rocked a West Rasheed market, the first major attack in the area in months. Ibrahim heard about it from some former colleagues, who called him to say civilians in the area were asking for his help. 

“It really hurt a lot because they’re all my friends, you know, my people,” he says. “…Terrorists don’t recognize that this is innocent blood of kids or women or anyone else.”

Seated on a plastic chair beneath vines heavy with grapes, Ibrahim says the attack adds a fresh sting to the steady pain of forced inaction.

“I lost all those people precious to me, and now I lost my job,” he says. “What else can I do, be a farmer?”

More from the series:

Introduction: As U.S. withdraws, the people speak
For 'the Sheik,' U.S. pullout is cause for alarm
Patchwork electrical grid a symbol of country's disconnects
A new day for culture and consumer goods
For women, freedoms under fire
Suspicious minds in a squatters' camp
Colonel helped with the ‘Surge,’ then his past came calling

Related stories:
Analysis: Welcome to Shia-stan
Troops come home to families’ delight
Koppel: Is the U.S. really leaving Iraq?
Engel: A look at the US bases, Iraqi troops and other legacies of the US presence

Editor's note: Photojournalist Kael Alford spent 10 months covering the invasion of Iraq and its immediate aftermath in 2003-2004. She returned this summer to see what has and hasn’t changed as the U.S. prepared to withdraw its troops.

By Kael Alford

Entering the settlement of Chikuk (pronounced “Chook), strewn across a former Iraqi military barracks on the outskirts of north Baghdad, the pavement all but disappears and the road turns into a rough dirt track piled with trash on either side. Bare power lines sag overhead, a tangle of black emanating from a privately owned generator nearby.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Mohammed, Hanin, Um-Mohanned and Karrar pose for a portrait inside the walled compound where they live in the squatters camp of Chikuk. Hanin's husband, Mohanned is at work and not pictured here.

As in much of Iraq, citizens pay exorbitant amounts to savvy local entrepreneurs for a few hours of unreliable electrical service. City power, which is spotty at best, doesn’t even reach Chikuk because no one is supposed to be living here. It's not a designated refugee camp; squatters claimed the space and built homes with their own hands. Most of those who are literally living off the grid in this camp are Shia refugees displaced by years of war and violent civil upheaval. Representatives from the U.N. High Commission for Refugees say the Iraqi government is only beginning to understand the magnitude of the squatter problem.

My driver, Sami, and I have visited a family in Chikuk before without any problems, but on this day we are stopped in the road by a cadre of black-clad men in front of what was once a U.N.-funded school. They introduce themselves as members of the “Council of 12” and claim they’ve been elected to represent the community. A bearded man asks me my business and wants to know why I’ve been visiting the family of Um-Mohanned and why we’ve singled them out for help, apparently referring to a bag of rice that Sami gave the family the day before. It does not seem an unreasonable question in a country shattered by political and ethnic divides, where everyone seems to suspect everyone else of ulterior motives.

I explain that we met Um-Mohanned while looking for the story of an ordinary family here.

The men offer us an escort, which we’re clearly not expected to decline. I’m not immune to the suspicions of Iraq, and I wonder if these men have strong-armed their way into this position of authority. I also suspect they may be affiliated with the militia formerly known as the Jaish al-Mehdi, aka the Mahdi Army, the armed wing of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s potent political machine. The militia has been ordered to put down its guns and engage in more socially oriented programs, including distributing aid to widows. The Sadrists know that to hold onto support of nation’s most vulnerable populations, their power base, they will need to help provide social support and keep a wary eye out for any challengers.

Sami keeps out escort busy chatting in the car and we soon reach Um-Mohanned’s house. She greets us warmly as we enter the courtyard of the two-room concrete block house, planting kisses on both cheeks. She tells us that her two oldest sons, who we were hoping to meet, had already gone to work. Then she admits that they didn’t want to talk to us.

So instead I interview Um-Mohanned again and things gradually become clearer.  She has also been suspicious of us.

First, her oldest son, Mohanned (she is “Um-Mohanned” for the mother of Mohanned) is 15 and is married to his 15-year-old cousin -- the delicate girl in pink padding around the courtyard, fetching us tea and bread. She is four months pregnant. By Iraqi law it is illegal to marry before the age of 18, though still common among traditional families or those in need of extra hands around the house. So she had been worried that we would turn the underage couple in to the authorities.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Um-Mohanned and her daughter-in-law Hanin share a breakfast of bread, cream, eggs and tea with visitors.

Um-Mohanned’s eyesight is very bad, she explains and she can’t afford glasses, so she arranged a marriage between her eldest son and a cousin – also a common practice in Iraq and not illegal -- so the young girl could come help run the household. Um-Mohanned admits it was not ideal for people to marry so young, but she says she needed the help.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Hanin, pictured on her wedding day in a photograph with her husband Mohanned. The two were 15 when they married. The couple did not meet before their wedding day.

Then Um-Mohanned reveals a second sensitive circumstance of the family’s life, which began to unravel in 2005 in the neighborhood of Hasswa, a predominantly Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad.

“We were living in the same area like brothers. We didn’t know that this one is Shia, this one is Sunni. But when the terrorists came, we started to hear these names.”

Shia families such as hers became targets, their homes destroyed by homemade bombs or raided in the middle of the night, entire families murdered. So Um-Mohanned and her husband fled for their lives with their three sons and came to Chikuk.

Then one day her husband, a taxi driver, left for work and didn’t come home. She never heard from him again. 

“I asked everyone, I even published his photo and the plate number of his car, and I’ve heard nothing until now,” she says. She assumes he’s dead but is resigned to the fact that she may never know what happened to him.

After their father disappeared, Mohanned and the couple’s middle son, Karrar, dropped out of school to find jobs and support the family. Mohanned drives a garbage truck and Karrar works in the market as a porter, carrying heavy items to shopper’s cars. Karrar earns the equivalent of about $8 per day and his brother not much more. The two boys support the family of five, while the youngest son, Mohammed, who is 12, attends school.

“I felt so sad when they left school,” says Um-Mohanned.

At this point the conversation turns to the complicated dynamic in traditional Iraqi society surrounding the role of women. Um-Mohanned says she told her sons she would have to go to work.

“My sons told me, ‘No. It will be a shame on us. When one of our friends will see you working somewhere, and they will talk badly about us.’”

So Um-Mohanned relented, and let the boys go to work instead.

“Even if I stayed home, suffering from hunger, I would rather that than have my boys hear any bad things about me,” she says.

There was another consideration as well. Crimes of violence against women are rife in Iraq, in part fueled by traditional views of women’s place in society. An “honor code in which men protect women from the shame of contact with men outside the family remains strong in traditional families. In extreme cases, some women who survived being kidnapped or raped were later the targets of honor killings within their own families for bringing shame on the household.

“It’s so difficult to move safely from area to area alone,” says Um-Mohanned. “I’d have to work as a saleswoman, selling simple things. It’s not like I can work in a ministry surrounded by guards and other people.”

The Iraqi Ministry of Central Planning estimates there are 900,000 war widows in Iraq, including those who lost husbands in the earlier war with Iran and to sectarian violence. An extensive survey of widows in Iraq by an aid group Relief International reported that widows are vulnerable to an array of dangers from high rates of poverty and domestic violence to recruitment by radical militants.

I wonder about the men who greeted us at the village entrance and ask her if she knows who they are. She explained that without a man around the house, she has no one to keep up with what’s going on in the local community. She did vote in the last election, for Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, but is disappointed by the outcome.

“We didn’t get anything from this new government,” she says. “We lost our husbands, our houses, our lives.”

She says she sees no government assistance – not surprising considering the central government is barely aware of the locations of camps like these.

Later after tea, I ask Mohanned’s young wife about her arranged marriage. She says she also dropped out of school when she got married and that she and Mohanned had never spoken before that day. She refuses to tell me more in front of her mother in law, but brings out photographs of her wedding day. She is painted in the dramatic white face paint and heavy eyeshadow common among Iraqi brides. She looks unhappy -- almost angry -- in the photographs.

Um-Mohanned says the young couple gets along great now, they are inseparable and they never stop talking. Mohanned’s wife looks away in embarrassment, her face breaking into a shy smile.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Hanin pictured inside the room she shares with her husband in a squatters camp in Chikuk. It is fairly common for girls to marry young, particularly if they do not plan to attend college. Hanin, who is four months pregnant, dropped out of school when she was married at 15 and does not expect to return.

More from the series:

Introduction: As U.S. withdraws, the people speak
For 'the Sheik,' U.S. pullout is cause for alarm
Patchwork electrical grid a symbol of country's disconnects
A new day for culture and consumer goods
For women, freedoms under fire
Suspicious minds in a squatters' camp
Colonel helped with the ‘Surge,’ then his past came calling

Related stories:

Koppel: Is the U.S. really leaving Iraq?
Engel: A look a the US bases, Iraqi troops and other legacies of the US presence

Editor's note: Photojournalist Kael Alford spent 10 months covering the invasion of Iraq and its immediate aftermath in 2003-2004. She returned this summer to report this Photoblog series. (This post includes a graphic image)

By Kael Alford

The question Americans ask me most often about Iraq is how have the lives of Iraqis changed due to the war? Have we helped them? Are they enjoying more freedom of expression, more security, more prosperity and a brighter future thanks to the U.S. intervention?

Those are tough questions that defy “yes” or “no” answers. But over the next seven days, I will offer some insight into the status of Iraq and its people through a series of vignettes, profiles and photos that I reported in June and July of this year.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Smoke from burning oil drifts over the Euphrates River as seen from the Highway to Falluja. Shortly after the U.S. invasion, oil pipelines and infrastructure became targets of sabotage by Iraqi insurgents.

There are many ways to quantify the price the U.S. paid for the invasion and occupation of Iraq:
•    Nearly 4,500 Americans killed and scores of thousands of veterans’ lives forever transformed by lost limbs, traumatic brain injuries and life-changing psychological impacts.
•    The financial costs: more than $800 billion and counting for the U.S.  war itself, and a huge burden on the veterans’ health-care system for many years to come.

But those calculations only begin to tell the story, and they don’t take into consideration the flip side of the equation: What about Iraqis?

A conservative estimate is that 100,000 Iraqis have been killed as a result of violence since the invasion and some informed estimates put those numbers much higher. The civil war that followed the invasion has abated though lower levels of sectarian and politically motivated violence continue.

Since the American deposition of Saddam Hussein indicators of Iraqi well-being show some improvements but paint a mixed picture. The future of democracy in Iraq is tenuous and much depends on what happens next.  I reported in Iraq this summer seeking a more nuanced perspective from Iraqis themselves.

Courtesy of Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

Photojournalist Kael Alford in Najaf, Iraq, August 2003, during battles between U.S. forces and the Jaish Al-Mehdi.

When I left Iraq in 2004, foreign journalists and aid workers were being targeted by groups ranging from nationalist militias to home grown groups affiliated with al-Qaida.

The violence later expanded to include Iraqi journalists, politicians, doctors, college professors and professors and everyday citizens, who were subjected to kidnappings, sectarian murders and massive bombings.

When I returned this summer, the violence had diminished but was once again climbing.  On the morning of my arrival in Baghdad, a loud explosion shook me awake. At first I thought it was a nightmare, but a characteristic second explosion a few minutes later confirmed I wasn’t dreaming. The target was a Turkish restaurant across the street from the compound where I was staying. No motive was known, and luckily no one was injured at that early hour.  A week later, even the shattered glass of the nearby windows had been replaced and life returned to normal.

There were other incidents during my stay, including the murder of an American professor who was contracted by USAID to cultivate entrepreneurial education at Baghdad University. He was killed when his convoy was struck by a car bomb. And the violence has increased steadily since I left Iraq in July.

Sami, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war who drove me while I reported, never left his car unattended for fear that an infamous “sticky” bomb might be placed under the carriage. I limited my time in each location and didn’t return to the same place often or follow any discernable routines. Taking photos on the street usually brought the attention of Iraqi police, who -- anxious about any form of surveillance -- detained me and pored over my documents.

I rarely walked outdoors in public except in areas we knew well, and could count the number of western journalists in Baghdad on two hands. Other than journalists and one freelance human rights observer I knew, no foreign diplomats or aid workers ventured outdoors without heavily armed escorts. A young American embassy worker I met in the “Green Zone” -- the heavily fortified village of bureaucrats and politicians where the remaining American officials reside and the Iraqi government does its business -- called all of Iraq outside the fortified compound the “Red Zone.”  I never ran into trouble, but each journey felt like a safari into unknown territory because security in Iraq is always in flux. You’re safe, until you’re not.

But in the midst of this troubled landscape, I also was met with kindness and hospitality.

I can’t count the number of times Iraqis welcomed me into their homes, offices, conferences, shops and restaurants and told me their stories. With only a few exceptions, people were eager to share their experiences with an American journalist and to host a foreign guest. These visits always happened behind closed doors, away from the watchful eyes of the street.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Pilgrims pass through Firdos Square, Baghdad, June 2011, as viewed from the Palestine Hotel. Firdos Square was where U.S. Marines famously toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein with the help of a tank on the day they arrived in central Baghdad on April 9, 2003. The Palestine hotel stands behind blast walls. The hotel housed foreign journalists during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The hotel became a target for terrorist attacks in the years during the U.S. occupation when foreign journalists and contractors stayed at the hotel which was struck by a massive bombing in 2007. The hotel has recently been renovated in the summer of 2011 and is now open for business.

One family I most wanted to find again, I had never spoken to. All I had was a photograph I’d made in March 2003, in the neighborhood of Shoala on the outskirts of Baghdad, during the initial American air campaign. In the picture, three men cried over the body of an 8-year-old girl lying on a slab of marble in the back room of a mosque. She had been killed when an explosion ripped through a market where she was shopping with her family –apparently caused by an American missile gone awry.

I returned to the Shoala market on the last day of my trip and showed the photograph to the first person we saw, who happened to be the doctor who pronounced the girl dead. Hours later I was sitting in the living room of those men in my picture. We looked at each other as if we all might be ghosts. They begged me for copies all the images I had of that day. They wanted to know, did I have any photographs of their mother? She was also killed in the attack, along with a sister-in-law.

Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Ahmer, Ali and Mohammed Al-Mousewi with the body of their 8-year-old sister Zahra who was killed in a missile strike on an outdoor market in Shoala, Iraq, March 28, 2003. The brothers' mother and sister-in-law were also killed. The attack left more than 50 people dead, according to Iraqi officials. Journalists for the Independent Newspaper in the U.K. have uncovered strong evidence that suggests the bombing was a U.S. missile gone astray during the U.S. air campaign that preceded the American invasion of Iraq.

They brought a 9-year-old into the room, their niece who had survived the blast as an infant, sheltered by the body of her dead mother. The girl’s ice blue eyes tore the fabric of time, her young body counting the years that had passed since that day.
One brother asked if I could help find a doctor who might treat his daughter with a speech defect caused by a palate malformation that no doctors in Iraq could repair. “She is a girl, and in Iraq girls with defects do not find husbands,” he said.  Before I left their house, the men asked Sami if he’d make a photograph of me and the family together, in a gesture that said our lives, however distant, are connected. 

In the week ahead I will share other scenes like this, drawn from a tenuous, hospitable and resilient country. As the last American troops leave Iraqi soil, the future of our relationship with Iraq begins a new chapter.

Editor's note: This project was supported by a Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion.

More from the series:

Introduction: As U.S. withdraws, the people speak
For 'the Sheik,' U.S. pullout is cause for alarm
Patchwork electrical grid a symbol of country's disconnects
A new day for culture and consumer goods
For women, freedoms under fire
Suspicious minds in a squatters' camp
Colonel helped with the ‘Surge,’ then his past came calling

Related stories:

Koppel: Is the U.S. really leaving Iraq?
Engel: A look at the US bases, Iraqi troops and other legacies of the US presence