Death is no mystery to them
Olympic supporters targeted
-Marty Gervais
Thursday, August 16, 2007
ERBIL, Iraq - The 30-minute ride to the airport from Amman, Jordan, is an odyssey of sweltering, dusty streets, open-air markets, shoeshine boys, beggars, men pushing heavy wooden vegetable carts -- and the ever-present military.
Sitting in the front seat, our guide, Tiras Odisho, director of Iraq's National Olympic Committee, didn't mince words on what to expect on our two-week mission to his war-weary country.
"Just yesterday, my transportation director was killed," he lamented.
The former karate fighter didn't stop with the details of Aziz Makuf being gunned down outside Baghdad Olympic Stadium, listing off the officials of his committee who have been targeted by insurgents, either kidnapped or killed, or both. They were men, like him, using sports in an effort to restore normalcy in Iraq.
It's a jarring welcome to the Middle East for Andre Gorges, 22, an Iraqi-born Windsor boxer, and his coach, Windsor Boxing Club's Josh Canty, here to help prepare the Iraqi National Boxing Team for the Pan-Arab Games in Cairo in November.
I'm along for the ride.
FEW KNEW
The select few back home who knew of my decision to join Gorges and Canty naturally wondered whether I had lost my mind.
"Are you forgetting there's a war going on there?"
And, as we made our way to the airport in Amman for the flight to Iraq, I confess that I began to feel slightly uneasy as Tiras continued his inventory of the slain friends and colleagues who, he said, posed no political threat. He said they were among "the innocents," the casualties of a war that doesn't make any sense.
Unbeknownst to us that same day, four truck bombs killed at least 200 people in two villages in a Kurdish-speaking area near the Syrian border, destroying houses and sending hundreds of the wounded to at least six hospitals as far as 240 kilometres away.
I'm not sure if that would have changed our minds, but I suspect Gorges and Canty, too, wondered why they were en route to Iraq.
We couldn't help but show surprise at Tiras's attitude toward death. However, we soon learned it is common among Iraqis. They live on the edge of death each day. They take it for granted. Yet, in another way, they also respect it.
Take for example, an Iraqi woman in Baghdad who was mourning the death of a daughter in a car bombing at the time the Iraqi National Soccer Team was on its way to winning the Asian Cup recently. She put off holding the funeral, said Tiras, until after the celebrations of that rare victory.
"She felt it was important -- this win -- because it meant so much for the turnaround the country needed to experience," said Tiras. "She didn't want to mourn on a great day for Iraq."
Tiras shrugged at the casual attitude toward violent death: "People are used to it. Those who were born in the 1980s don't know anything else -- our country has been at war.
"Death is no mystery to them -- it happens. People have learned how to kill, and it happens every day."
Tiras naturally worries about his own safety, considering the abductions of his colleagues and friends, including the former president of the National Olympic Committee a year ago.
"But really, there is no point thinking about that," he said. "I get up each morning and I go out and I never know if I'm going to be coming back."
But he takes no action to prevent it.
"I go about my work. I go where I want. I used to wear body armour and I had bodyguards and I carried a handgun, but I don't anymore. If it's going to happen, it will. I keep the gun at home now, but I got tired of wearing all that body armour. I go out like I am now."
Tiras wears a golf shirt and ball cap, and carries a briefcase. Around his neck is a lightweight wallet with his passport.
"I have been fortunate -- I don't have a lot of enemies, but you never know," he said. "Someone could ask me for something that I can't deliver, and the next day, they'll send someone to kill me. That could happen. I know it. I live with that possibility."
The picture that Tiras painted for us of Baghdad -- where no one ventures outside after 5 p.m. -- didn't prepare us for the peaceful Erbil where we were scheduled to stay for two days in anticipation of meeting the Iraqi Boxing Team.
In the Kurdish capital Erbil, 390 kilometres north of Baghdad, we found just the opposite of a city shut down by terror.
A booming downtown, a city that defied terrorism.
It was already getting dark as we made our way through several security checkpoints to the city.
We were picked up by the affable former weightlifter Sarhang Abdullah, director of the Kurdistan Olympic Committee. But we had to take a bus to the parking lot a five-minute ride away because civilian cars aren't allowed near the terminal for security reasons.
The windshield of Sarhang's car was cracked in a spidery pattern and Canty joked with him, wondering if was a bullet hole.
"No, my wife hit her head on the windshield," said Sarhang with a broad smile.
We drove with the windows open. The temperature hovered at about 36 C. Darkness fell around us as we headed for the city, and we were surprised to find the streets filled with people. You could see them milling about the shops, haggling with street vendors selling watches and cellphones, forking over dinars to buy shish kebob, or sitting and arguing in front of dilapidated store fronts sipping sugared tea.
We saw the young boys weaving through the crowds carrying baskets of bread, and families making their way to the monstrous night markets, their children carrying boxes and bags out to the cars parked helter-skelter along the streets.
And of course, the military was stationed at what seemed like every intersection.
"You see," said Sarhang. "We do things differently here. You are safe here. We won't let what's happening in Baghdad (happen here).
"You wouldn't think there was a war going on here," Canty said. "Look at everyone -- it seems so normal."
Sarhang said his job with the Olympic committee takes him to Baghdad from time to time. And he will be going there in a week.
"But I am always picked up by a special car and taken to the committee headquarters there, and I stay there. I don't go out at night. No one does. And when it's time to leave, I am taken by a special car and we travel only during the day and I am taken to the airport."
Erbil is his home. It is also being called "the dream city" of Iraq, and you can see why as you drive through it. Everywhere you look, new buildings are rising from the rubble.
"The war is over here!" Sarhang said.
Still, that first night in my hotel, even with the presence of the military at the intersection just outside my window, I braced whatever furniture I could against the door.
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