An Unseen Lifeline in Iraq

By James Rainey

July 15, 2006 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

BAGHDAD — He is proud of the enormous armored sedan. “Two inches, the glass. Very strong.”

He is proud to have survived the bombings -- two of them so far.

He is proud that he is routinely trusted to navigate this airport road, the unpredictable scene of ambushes and assassinations.

Black smoke spirals skyward on the horizon, and swarms of Iraqi men in camouflage and dark masks tote rifles by the roadside.

But the driver puts me at ease.

He has driven other reporters down this road. He names them. They were brave. And all survived.

Then there is a sudden thud. The driver’s eyes dart across the asphalt and along brown apartments lining both sides of the highway. He fumbles for a walkie-talkie, speaking in Arabic to bodyguards in another car. Even at a distance, the explosion creates a deep tremor.

He cranks the wheel to the right, making a hairpin turn.

Drivers shuttling Westerners around this beleaguered city change course frequently to throw off kidnappers. But this about-face is sudden and unnerving. Our driver is taking us the wrong way up a highway off-ramp.

Cars streak past in the opposite direction, a foot off our left front fender. My chest tightens.

“Is this normal?” I ask. “I mean, driving the wrong way like this?”

“In Iraq,” the driver answers, “broken is the normal.”

The Iraqi men and women who drive, cook, guard and interpret for American correspondents in Baghdad have much to teach.

At any given time, there are generally three American correspondents covering Iraq for The Times. Roughly 25 Iraqis support them: interpreters, drivers and bodyguards, cooks, a computer technician and an office manager.

From a single floor in a once-elegant, badly faded building across the Tigris River from the fortified Green Zone, this team of Americans and Iraqis tracks the U.S.-led occupation -- covering the budding parliament, measuring the mood from Mosul to Basra, trying to make sense of the daily violence.

Without exception, the Western journalists I met during a recent three-week tour in Baghdad acknowledged their increasing dependence on Iraqis.

Americans routinely trust their lives to their Iraqi colleagues, but they also worry whether these aides can deliver the fullest picture of the country’s struggles. These locals, after all, are mostly of a certain caste: English speakers, comfortable with Americans. Few hail from, say, Sadr City, the poor Shiite Muslim neighborhood in northeast Baghdad.

But a similar critique might be leveled at journalists in the United States. And the Iraqi staff does not lack for diversity of opinion.

One day, an older interpreter said he had felt safer under Saddam Hussein. “At least then,” he said, “I knew who to be afraid of.”

A younger colleague immediately disagreed. “This is crazy,” he retorted. “Of course it’s better he is gone.”

These nationals help conduct interviews. They gather information on their own by telephone or on visits to politicians, police chiefs, sheiks, aid workers and Iraqi citizens. They sift through

e-mail and phone reports from stringers, part-time reporters scattered across Iraq. They go places a foreigner cannot. Their daily experiences help keep their American colleagues connected to the realities of life in Baghdad.

The work is dangerous. Out of concern for their security, their names are not used in this article. Of the 73 journalists reported killed during the war, 52 were Iraqis. All but one of the 27 support workers and technicians killed were Iraqi.

But work is in short supply here, and the Western press never lacks for new recruits.

Drivers and bodyguards can earn $500 a month. Capable interpreter-

reporters can make as much as $2,000, occasionally more.

“I know for the Western world this is not a lot,” said one of The Times’ veteran interpreters, who once worked in the medical field. “But in Iraq, this is a very good salary.”

The interpreter spoke with pride about the stories he has helped cover: a string of assassinations that targeted physicians, water contamination that caused a deadly outbreak of typhoid, insurgent dominion in the northern city of Mosul.

“I had to leave my family during Eid” for the Mosul story, he said, referring to the Muslim holiday that follows Ramadan. “But no one else from the press was there. It was worth it.”

It’s not safe for him and the others to broadcast their achievements too widely. Most describe their work only to close family members or a friend or two. Others might dodge the question by saying they work as interpreters for government agencies.

The threat of exposure wears on them and can grow acute when they venture into public with one of their pale-faced American colleagues. Tension swirls around routine visits to the Convention Center -- the seat of parliament and the fledgling government -- because dozens of television news crews gather outside.

Being caught in the background of a TV news spot could reveal their ties to the American press. “That would not be a good thing,” says one of the younger interpreters, a man in his late 20s and the father of a newborn.

When he and I cover parliament, we move around the sides of the lounge where politicians in suits and sheiks in headdresses hold forth. I position myself, like a shield, between my colleague and the cameras.

Official accounts of violence can quickly become numbing, but the stories our Iraqi partners relate make the fear palpable.

A 25-year-old whiz who keeps our computers running arrives at work one day and announces that his morning commute took him past a car stalled on one of the bridges crossing the Tigris.

“I look over, and the guy is leaning back in his seat,” he says, dragging heavily on the first of many cigarettes. “Bullet in his head.”

A colleague reports a similar scene on the way to the airport. But with two dead.

Another interpreter, in his early 50s, delivers a report from his troubled neighborhood in Baghdad. “There were three bodies piled on the street last night. This morning they were still there. Nobody moves them.”

I keep my hotel room door open most of the time, and the interpreter wanders in to offer another observation.

“You know what happened this morning at my home? They came and posted notices: Women must wear the veil -- really even girls, any that are over 12. If not, they will be targeted.

“Also, they must not wear pants, or sunglasses. And men, no long hair or shorts. And no goatees or jeans. They will be targeted, too, if they don’t obey. Killed.”

“Maybe,” I suggest, “it would be safer now if your wife wore the hijab?”

He seems exasperated.

“Then what’s the difference? What is different from before? This is Saddam. This is Saddam again.”

One day in late May, our driver and two other Iraqis are at the dirt parking lot outside the airport, awaiting the arrival of another reporter.

When a truck careens into the area and explodes, the driver and his colleagues sprint for his big armored sedan. A second suicide bomber roars up in a second truck and sets off the explosives.

At least four Iraqis die, along with the bombers. The windows are blown out of one of our cars. Our colleagues escape without injury.

The driver calls his wife, who has become well acquainted with danger. Not long ago, she joined him in the countryside to learn how to fire the family’s automatic rifle.

“Thanks to God,” he tells her, “because I am alive.”

It’s his third near-miss. Last summer, an explosion totaled his car. In November, he had the bad fortune to be nearby when two truck bombers attacked a four-story building, leaving it gutted. He spent months in recovery.

“My wife says if I am rich man, we leave Iraq,” he says. “But I have not money, so I stay.”

Most of the others constantly probe for routes to the outside world.

The new father has been researching the difficult process of obtaining a visa to the United States.

The only Iraqi woman on the Times staff has won a fellowship to an American journalism school. She hopes to leave late this month.

The veteran interpreter recently moved to another country in the region.

The inequalities between Western and Iraqi reporters can’t help but weigh on those covering the conflict.

The Iraqis’ appearance and fluency in Arabic mean they are usually the first to be sent into the field. When any one of them remains out of contact for even a few minutes longer than expected, a series of anxious phone calls ensues.

American reporters get to leave. Even the bravest and most intrepid correspondents count on regular rotations out of Iraq to regain their equilibrium.

Their Iraqi co-workers return each night to neighborhoods where they must rely on their survival instincts.

“In Iraq we have a saying, ‘To scratch an itch, it’s best to use your own nails,’ ” one of our interpreters says. “We must help ourselves.”

This soft-spoken, middle-aged father has suffered more than many. Last year, he looked on for more than a month as his son languished before dying in a hospital.

A bomb blast had torn out one of the young man’s eyes and crushed a large portion of his skull.

The threat could not get much more real for the interpreter himself. He already had been chased from a hospital emergency room in Fallouja, where a grieving visitor held a pistol to his head and ordered him to end an interview.

After his son’s death, relatives redoubled their efforts to keep him from dying in the service of Americans. “Enough is enough,” they told him.

His mother, nearing her own death, told her son, “I would feel much more peace if you would quit.”

But he didn’t.

He welcomes the chance to come to the Times newsroom in Baghdad, to forget for a few hours about the boy who once “filled our house with life.”

He sees what staying home and brooding has done to his once-vivacious wife. She is silent for long periods, her eyes filled with tears.

He talks about moving to Cairo or Amman, Jordan. He has saved a little money and might be able to rent their house. With the pension he has earned working for government ministries, they might have enough to live on. But unless the new Iraqi government comes through with the money, he will have to stay.

“Even though I know it’s intolerable here, it’s hard to think about leaving,” he says. “My aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, they are all here. My whole world.”

I tell him I am sorry that life is so hard.

He shrugs.

“This is our destiny,” he says. “This is our destiny.”