Baghdad 'is for the dead, not the living'
-Marty Gervais
Saturday, August 18, 2007
SULEIMANIYA, Iraq - The head of the Iraqi National Olympic Committee was celebrating the arrival of Windsor's Josh Canty in Suleimaniya when a phone call at dinner put an end to the good feeling.
Bashar Moustfa couldn't believe the news from Baghdad.
The vice-president of the recently victorious Iraqi soccer team was sobbing over the discovery of his murdered son's bloodied body dumped on his doorstep that night.
When Basem Al Rbiae answered the doorbell, he discovered Thark-ham, his 35-year-old son and personal bodyguard, lying in a pool of blood.
Moustfa tried to console his distraught friend on the phone, but the message was clear: Move the Olympic teams out of Baghdad to Kurdistan and move them now.
But this isn't going to happen, said Moustfa Friday morning.
Although training camps for the teams have been set up outside Baghdad, including nearby countries, they remain based in the capital.
In the case of the boxers, the camp is in Suleimaniya, in Iraq's more peaceful north, where athletes are escorted at all times by Kurdish military guards.
Thursday night, when the boxers crammed a small makeshift gym and dressing room, two guards paced outside keeping watch.
Friday morning at dawn when the boxers hit the streets and jogged to Azadi Park, a guard followed close behind in a truck.
He took a position on the steps and observed the boxers working out and sparring in the cool morning. He also drove them back to their hotel.
They crammed the truck he was driving. And they were back at the hotel before the shops were opening.
"Nobody is willing to take any chances," said Flah Ahmad, a former Olympic boxer who is assisting Canty, the Border City Boxing Club trainer who has come from Canada on an invitation from the Iraqi National Olympic Committee. He brought with him 22-year-old Iraqi-born boxer Andre Gorges.
"We want them to feel safe," said Ahmad.
But wherever you go in this city of a million, the subject that dominates the conversation is Baghdad and its safety and why more people don't leave the city when there are areas of Iraq that are safer.
Moustfa knows this well. His car has been sprayed with bullets and smashed with rocks, but he has survived the attacks and continues to take precautions.
"I have 20 body guards that care for me," he said. "Of course, I still fear something will happen."
After all, Moustfa was named president after his predecessor, Ahmed Al-Samarrai, and 23 members of the Olympic committee were abducted a year ago.
"We know we're being targeted," said Moustfa, who explained that Al Qaida terrorists seek "to undermine the government in Iraq."
'FOR THE DEAD, NOT THE LIVING'
An effective way of doing this is to attack those involved in sports because sporting events and teams have ways of "uniting" factions. This was the case last month when Iraqi's soccer team won the Asian Cup.
As for Moustfa, he will continue to work out of Baghdad. "This is where most of the athletes are. Ninety per cent of the teams are based there."
Others take a different opinion.
At breakfast Friday morning Ahmed Maan, a 22-year-old civil engineer working on a new medical centre in Suleimaniya, said the city is "for the dead, not the living.
"If you travel to Baghdad you wouldn't get far," he told me in all seriousness.
"They would cut your throat with a knife they use to shear sheep."
Yet the dilemma for many is that if they do leave, they lose everything. If his family departs Baghdad, the Americans will "blow up the house."
Maan said, "they know the terrorists will take it over and they can't afford that to happen, so if they see no one is living there, they bomb it."
Sihran Fullana, a civil engineer from Kuwait, now lives in Baghdad and blamed the Americans for the chaos and civil war.
"When the Americans came in, they destroyed everything. They left us without a government, without police and without laws. Imagine if you took away the government, the police, everything from New York City, what would happen there? It's the same here."
Maan carries two fake passports -- one that identifies him as a Muslim, the other a Saabi, a lesser known religious sect. "If the Americans are asking me, I show them Saabi, but if it's al-Qaida, I give them Muslim."
As Maan speaks, he gets angry and tells the story of his 10-year-old brother being stopped by terrorists because he wore a pair of American military-style shorts.
"They grabbed him by the shirt and threatened him that if he wore that again, they'd kill him. Believe me, they would."
It seems now the fashion in Iraq is to carry a cellphone that captures the work of the terrorists. Maan played a video on his phone of the day the soccer team won the Asian Cup and it shows his young brother and his sister in a car, waving the Iraqi flag. Suddenly across the street a car explodes, sending people running and screaming.
Maan says it is not uncommon to find others who keep these videos on their cellphones. "It's a reminder. It's there to remind us that we must honour fear and that means doing the sensible thing, like leaving the city."
Ahmad's cellphone also shows a car bomb, this one at a checkpoint with an American armoured car passing through, followed by an automobile that pauses as it is approached by military police, then suddenly explodes.
Mohammad, a dentist and former professor at the University of Baghdad, who gave only his first name because he fears recriminations, moved out of the city two months ago and now lives in a hotel in Suleimaniya. He left behind a large house. His son, also a doctor, has gone to Paris where he teaches medicine. The last time he was in the city, the car Mohammad was driving was riddled with bullets.
"We don't want to die," said the 67-year-old doctor. "If I stayed there, I would die."
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