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Baghdad: Minding your Minder by Anthony Shadid 
Columbia Journalism Review, May-June 2003 DISPATCHES Baghdad: Minding your Minder BY ANTHONY SHADID Before the war, in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, one of the many things that made reporting there so difficult were the escorts - minders, in the language of journalists; guides, in the language of the government. They were dispatched by the information ministry to accompany any foreign reporter working in Iraq. Their job description left little room for subtlety: rigorous surveillance. For reporters who didn't speak Arabic, they made sure a lot was lost in translation. By virtue of reports they filed to their superiors at the ministry, some journalists found themselves on blacklists. In virtually every case, the minders delivered a healthy dose of menace. One of them assigned to a major U.S. network - a brooding heavy right out of central casting - used to show up at his job with a pistol strapped to his hip. I inherited my minder from a colleague, and within a few hours of meeting him, with the prospect of a U.S.-led invasion of the country just a week away, I knew I was remarkably lucky. Tall and handsome, with the obligatory Baghdad moustache, Nasir was a former manager of Iraq's tourism board. Twelve years into U.N. sanctions that banned air travel, the government could spare him for other duties. He seemed to enjoy the switch. Surrounded by hard-drinking journalists, he could socialize into the early morning. With a certain relentlessness, he brushed up on his vulgarities, insults picked up from American films that he used to introduce his every sentence. He was cavalier, as much as was permitted in Baathist Iraq. It was a trait that proved refreshing amid the ministry's ever-tightening control. During the three weeks of war, in the stifling paranoia that settled like a fog over the city, there were few people you could trust. But by chance and circumstance, I ended up putting a remarkable degree of faith in Nasir. In the end, he had a job, and I had a job, and we found a way to make sure those jobs at least overlapped. In reporting the war in Baghdad, I hoped to chronicle, to the degree that was possible, the war's impact on the city and its people. This required a measure of unvarnished opinions. In peacetime Baghdad, that was difficult enough. In war, it was the biggest challenge of my time there. In large measure, I relied on contacts that I had made in two previous trips, in 1998 and 2002. I had canvassed Iraqi friends in the United States for friends or relatives who might be willing to meet with me. And I pressed expatriates and Iraqis working with nongovernmental organizations in Baghdad for help in setting up private interviews inside residents' homes. In his own way, Nasir made those interviews work. On several occasions, he looked the other way as I visited the contacts - a clear breach of the ministry's orders that minders stay with reporters at all times. There was always a plausible denial - that I was lunching, that I was going to check up on a friend, or that I had errands to run. None were all that convincing, but with a shrug, Nasir accepted them. Time and again, he never asked questions. I had the sense that he felt the less he knew, the better. Yet on occasion, he was complicit, waiting in the car as I did interviews. And toward the war's end, he was downright cooperative, bringing me to people who trusted him and who, in turn, trusted me. In one of those interviews, about the suffocating presence of Baath party militia in besieged cities of southern Iraq, I was told one of my favorite lines of the war. "If you take your shoe off and throw it outside, it will land on one of the Baath party guys," his friend said. Hitting someone with a shoe is a great insult in the Arab world, and Nasir smiled. It was the grin that comes with a hint of subversion. We both understood that we were taking risks. "I'll be in prison," Nasir would say virtually every morning. "I'll be in prison tomorrow." And at times, we perhaps took too many risks. Just before U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad, we toured the outskirts of the city to gauge its defenses. We passed checkpoints, beyond the city's limits. The information ministry never knew of our trip, or so we thought. But the next day, I found my name on a list of fifty-two people to be expelled from Baghdad, and there were rumors - bluntly told to Nasir by his colleagues - that I was suspected of spying. With U.S. forces already on the outskirts, the order was too late and was never enforced, beyond a handwritten posting on the hotel wall. I still wonder why Nasir did what he did. My risks, after all, were his risks, too. No doubt, there was a current of opportunism in his cooperation - the kind of opportunism that filled the ranks of the Baath party for its thirty-five years of wretched rule. Like many others in the city, he could read the writing on the wall, even before the war started. Once, while we walked together in Baghdad, along a Shiite Muslim shrine with ornate tiles of blue, green, and black, he was bold in predicting the government's collapse. "Nobody here likes this guy," he told me, the reference obvious. But opportunism only went so far. It was a war, and in all the turmoil that bred fear and distrust, grief and anger, people long for camaraderie. In the war's last few days, Nasir stayed with his family at his home, in a neighborhood caught in often fierce fighting along the city's southern outskirts. I was far away in the Palestine Hotel, with the rest of the foreign journalists covering the conflict. After the American troops arrived, our relationship ended. I no longer had to keep up the pretense of working with a minder. The information ministry he worked for no longer existed, its senior staff having fled with money they bilked from reporters. He had no car, no way to leave. And for a moment, I hesitated about rekindling contact. For a moment. A day after the war ended, I drove to Nasir's home to make sure his family was safe. He met me at the door. "I thought you might come," he said, smiling the same subversive grin. © 2003 Columbia Journalism Review at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism |