She is in Iraq for six weeks. On her first week, suicide bombers drove trucks into two nearby villages occupied by a religious sect called the Yazidis and killed maybe 250 people, maybe more, definitely the worst death toll of any suicide blast since the US invaded Iraq. McNaught went to the villages the day after they were attacked, and saw a pair of muddy feet that were not attached to a body.
American military claimed it was probably the work of the Islamic State of Iraq, a group linked to al Qaeda. McNaught said, ‘If you call yourself al Qaeda here, you’ll attract international funding and foreign fighters. Often, the US forces tell us, when there’s something massive, like a suicide truck bomb, it’ll be the real fanatical foreign fighters whom they use to drive the vehicles. These are people who come to Iraq expressly to die. These are people who are really quite off their heads with hatred. According to the people I’ve spoken to, who have arrested them and interrogated them, you can’t talk to them, you can’t reason with them, they’re beyond that, far beyond that.’
President Bush tells the world that the US military has Iraq under control. McNaught said, ‘Iraq is in the grip of a low-level civil war. You never know where it’s going to flare up next. I mean, those Yazidis – there are so many strange religious groups in Iraq, and they’re just one of the more distinctive because they’ve got this colourful pageantry of angels and peacocks. They’re a gentle, discreet group of rather powerless people. They were only living in those villages in the middle of the desert in the middle of nowhere with nothing because Saddam Hussein moved them from somewhere else in the 1970s. But they were living quietly.
‘While it’s true the Americans have been conducting quite an effective security operation, it’s driven some insurgents and militants out of what were really no-go areas for anyone, but they haven’t all been killed. A lot of them just left town. They turn up somewhere else, and they want to say, “Hello, you haven’t killed us!” to the Americans, so they bomb ancient communities living in mud-brick homes. There are so many factors playing into the violence here, and there are still foreign fighters coming across the border from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey. That’s all playing into the violence. So Iraq is not under control.’
The phone went dead.
After my fifty-three attempts at redialling, the signal picked up again just after Anita had eaten breakfast; she was walking towards her portacabin holding two polystyrene cups of tea. She said, ‘We are remarkably well catered for. At breakfast there are five different kinds of porridge, two kinds of scrambled eggs, and so many kinds of doughnuts you want to run screaming.
‘I share my shower with about fifty female soldiers. The water is so hard you can barely get a lather up for your shampoo. The drinking water tastes something indescribable. But the hygiene standards are very scrupulous, and there’s air-conditioning everywhere. The amount of electricity – the dominant feature on this base is big diesel-powered generators every couple of hundred metres, and they make the most demonic noise. Sometimes if you get far enough away, you can hear doves. This is an old Saddam Hussein army base, and rather bizarrely it was planted up with eucalyptus trees; all around is stony desert, but doves sit in the eucalyptus trees and coo all day long.’
I asked about her assignment for Fox. She said, ‘There’s something special going on here in Mosul. It’s the story we came to get. What we’ve witnessed over the past couple of days is really something quite extraordinary. The community leaders, the sheikhs, and the Iraqi commanders of police and military now understand what America is about, and have personal relationships with the commanders and the soldiers, and really, really like them. And the American commanders and the rank and file really like their Iraqi counter parts. They now have a common goal, which is to get Iraq back on its feet in whatever window politically is left for that to be possible.
‘And the warmth was palpable. I mean, these guys go in, and the embraces, the warm smiles, the jokes – the interpreters are working so fast to keep up with the banter – the intimacy, the pleasure they take in one another’s company, the lunch that gets laid on, the knowledge they have of each other’s families, it’s very real, it’s very human, and it’s producing results. They trust each other now. Iraqis will now die, and have died, protecting American forces. Americans will act at lightning speed to an intelligence tip-off. And the partnership in the space of four months has reduced the levels of fighting by about fifty percent, which is to say there are only six bombs a week in Mosul now, as opposed to twelve. You know, there was one right outside the base the night before last, leaving a rather large hole, killing a few locals. I mean, Mosul is still a nightmare.
‘But there’s finally now a partnership of mutual respect in Mosul, and I can tell you this because I’ve seen it. The Iraqis have begun to understand that America is not a demonic presence. The Americans have learnt Iraqi culture, they’ve learned respect, and they’ve learned how to work with Iraqis. A lot of them are exhausted and are sick of the fight. But they feel – and it’s shared with the Iraqis I’ve met here in Mosul, because I’ve got out, I’ve got off base – the outrage and sympathy for ordinary Iraqi families about the suicide bombers
