Day of Capture

Greetings everyone,

I was asked by a few people in response to my last letter to explain more
about my final day in Iraq, which also happened to be the day the U.S.
military announced Saddam's capture.

Early in the afternoon, I was sitting in the living room at our apartment
when I heard a few people shooting from the rooftops. We happen to live
next to a heavily-guarded branch of the Iraqi Communist Party, and it is
not unexpected to hear gunfire on a regular basis. However, it seemed the
shooters were coming from several directions this time. Was it a family
feud? This is also not unheard of. We had the curtains open and decided
the street looked clear enough to walk into the apartments' foyer and ask
our neighbors what was happening.

Our neighbors next door came out carrying pistols (since there's no police
force, every household has a gun). Their eyes lit up. "Saddam, Saddam,"
they said, and made a grabbing gesture. Then they went into the street. My
Arabic was failing me so I went upstairs to our landlord's apartment. The
doors were open, and BBC was playing. This house was a mix of emotions.
The landlord is Syrian Christian and quite westernized. Their housekeeper
is Muslim. While the landlord's wife was smiling and pointing to the
screen, the housekeeper was weeping. "Thank God, things will get better
at last," said the wife. Meanwhile, the housekeeper was touching the
pictures of Saddam's family on the screen and saying each one's name.
"They will hurt him, they will kill him," she said. Then the neighbors
below shot off their pistols next to the house. The housekeeper started
sobbing and yelling. The landlord's wife told her she could tell them
they were under orders to stop shooting. So they stopped. We stayed
watching the TV for about an hour. During this time, the landlord and his
daughter came back from the University of Baghdad. The daughter is driven
to school every day because of the instability. The wife began crying and
hugged them both because she thought they wouldn't make it home. The
landlord watched a few minutes and said, "It is going to be much worse
now." He predicted there would be retaliatory attacks in the coming
days, similar to the rash of bombings during Ramadan.

The shooting itself lasted only about twenty minutes, then settled. It
was much different when the sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed. (I was
mid-flight when that happened). Then, as my teammates report,the shooting
was much more populous and lasted throughout the night. Actually, the
celebration when Iraq won a soccer match against North Korea this fall was
also much more prolonged and intense. (That was a night where we didn't
know what was going on and huddled in the back of our apartment until well
after midnight, thinking a major uprising had begun and perhaps we were
going to die.) There were a few reasons for this subdued reaction, it
seems. One of the probably less obvious ones a few different neighbors
cited is that the U.S. occupation has gone so poorly and people don't feel
their lives have improved much, if any, since Saddam left.

Everyone in the building warned us not to venture far, in case anyone was
looking to retaliate. I was trying to say my goodbyes, so I stuck to our
little street and had to miss others. My Chaldean Christian friend up the
street had not ventured out at all that day. She stayed put with her baby
and toddler. She said, "Sure, I'd like to see him brought to justice, but
I can't even see him on tv now. We've had no electricity all day, and
also no water today either. All I can hear about the news is from my
balcony, since there's no phones either." The power did come on for ten
minutes while I was there, just enough to see a glimpse of the news
conference where he was being examined by a military doctor. Then it cut
out again. Their generator was out of gas due to the domestic fuel
crisis. (Iraqi fuel is being exported at record high levels by US
contractors while gas queues are consistently up to two miles long
throughout the day and night.)

Later we went to church in our neighborhood. It seems much of the
congregation either didn't know Saddam had been captured yet, or simply
didn't care much. People looked tired and strained as usual. The priest
put it well: "We don't really know what this all will mean."

I did venture a little farther onto the main strip to visit another friend
with one of my teammates that evening. People were milling about, but
there was no real mood of celebration. Just the opposite of what the
english news channels were suggesting. I had seen that another branch of
the Communist party held an impromptu street parade near the center of
town, but even footage of that seemed like a comparatively small
gathering. A few children had roman candles and were lighting them.
Still, who knows, they do that every day.

The next morning we left early. On the main street, people were looking
curiously at the newspaper photos of Saddam, but they seemed more
interested in staying warm on the cold day or in catching their taxis.
Whatever they felt, whatever the capture means, life was moving on as it
has been these past eight months under occupation.