Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [101]
With curfew in place, they hadn’t been able to bring her broken body back from Samarra. All the roads were closed, the checkpoints tight. Nobody could move; nobody could get to work. Only militiamen, gun-toting gangs, and soldiers moved like spirits on the roads. It took days to get the bodies through the routine tests at a forensics laboratory. There would be no sunset burial.
“They were not treated like martyrs,” the Arabiya bureau chief, Jawad Hattab, told me in quiet indignation.
Somebody had already printed makeshift posters of Atwar’s face; she stared down from the walls, portrayed in cheap blurs of color, tacked up with Scotch tape. I ran my eyes over her features, thinking of the yellowing faces of suicide bombers that peeled from the walls of the West Bank and Beirut. They had made Atwar into a martyr.
Hattab related all the eyewitness details of the deaths, and he told me about the other deaths—eleven Arabiya employees had died in Iraq since the invasion. At that time, sixty-six journalists had been slaughtered. Of those, forty-seven were Iraqi. By now, those numbers have more than doubled. They have been shot by U.S. forces, gunned down by their countrymen, crushed by bombs. They were liberated to tell the story of their lifetime, to write their own national history, but only if they flirted with death. All things light, and all things dark.
“If I give up my position, if I am weak, who will be the substitute, who will carry this message?” Hattab said. His voice was oddly flat. “Every day we are exposed to many, many threats, killing or bombing or threats against our families. But Iraq deserves this from us, this sacrifice. If we are defeated, and we consider ourselves the educated segment of this country, what will the people in the street do? What will happen to our country?”
Looking at him, a fifty-year-old man, I wrote in my notebook: Journalists in Iraq are hardened. They have scars and heavy eyes. They believed more in journalism than any American reporter I knew. Clinging to it as if it would save them in the end.
We stood.
“We’re not telling the truth when we say we’re still strong,” he blurted. “Inside we are broken. Our aim was to give the message of truth and the only thing we got back was bullets.”
Even her burial had a death toll.
They laid Atwar’s body in a plain wooden box, and strapped it onto a flatbed truck. The men gathered around the casket, and the wind pushed back their hair as the truck began to roll. They had fastened a black banner to the grille—a promise from other reporters to continue Atwar’s work. We will finish the message she was carrying. Atwar, too, had spoken of her message. As if they traveled a one-way road, as if they would finally get to Athens from Marathon and then collapse. It sounded strange, perhaps because I thought of news not as something you could carry, but as a force that defined its own terms. I was still a part of the world that was not Iraq, and these journalists were marooned in the land that was Iraq, and they wanted desperately to be heard. American reporters of my generation vied to write the story of the wars—it was something we strove for, competed for fiercely, a privilege. And when we were done with it we simply went away again. Iraqis covered the war because it had landed on top of them, and they would have to keep on covering it until it killed them or went away altogether. It was their fate and their destiny and in many, many cases, the death of them.
The truck cut through empty streets, between ragged palm trees. Mourners straggled behind in a rough column. They were headed into the badlands west of Baghdad, to the Sunni cemetery in Abu Ghraib.
The funeral procession was passing through the town of Hassuwa when cracks of gunfire erupted: sniping between followers of one of Iraq’s most important Sunni clerics and the Shiite policemen who were escorting Bahjat’s funeral convoy. Those first bullets drew more bullets, and soon the air was crackling.
The mourners abandoned the coffin on the side of the road to hide behind the walls