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Children of war

BAGHDAD -- Thirteen-year-old Marwa never cried, even when I asked her to relive the night her parents were executed in their home. It surprised me. I wondered how she’d become so tough so quickly.

“Where were you when the gunmen came?” I asked Marwa as we sat together in a classroom in the orphanage where she now lives with her two younger sisters Alliya, 10, and Sora, 6. 

“I was asleep upstairs when I head the shots,” Marwa said. “I ran downstairs and saw my mother. She was shot all over and was dead. My father was barely alive.”

Her father died two days later of multiple gunshot wounds.

I swallowed hard and asked what happened after that.

“We lived with my uncle for about a year, and then came here.”

“Why? Why did you have to come here?” I asked.  I hated asking the question, but it bothered me that her uncle would send the girls to live in an orphanage. I wanted to know how Marwa rationalized it. She was very matter of fact.   

“He couldn't afford to keep us, so he brought us here.”

Editor's note: Read the rest of Richard's post in Blogging Baghdad and watch Nightly News tonight for more of the girls' story.

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Beirut, here I come

I was alone, reading a copy of the Saturday Evening Post last week from January 1962, when I thought to myself, "Richard, you need a life."

Evidently, the management at NBC News agreed. They decided to give me the opportunity to open a Middle East bureau based in Beirut, Lebanon -- a dynamic city with enough high-life and low-life to keep things spicy. I can have a home there. Life in Baghdad has involved a lot of nights reading old magazines in a dingy, poorly lit, empty hotel room. Ah, the romantic life of a foreign correspondent!

I will continue to cover the Baghdad beat, my daily diet for the past three years, but also be able to explore the rest of the region, which brings me back to the Saturday Evening Post article. It was entitled "The Seething Arab World." In words as appropriate today as they were 44 years ago, the magazine reported: "The observer, looking at the Arab world today and trying to predict what may happen there, is in a position of a seismologist peering at a great range of volcanic mountains and trying to guess which smoldering cone will explode first."

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It seems all sewn up, but will it last?

While it is not yet guaranteed, and certainly there have been last minute changes, political party representatives in Iraq tell us it looks very likely that Jawad al Maliki will be Iraq’s next prime minister.

Here’s a thumbnail analysis:

Why he's good
Sources told me Maliki is a pragmatic negotiator. He has been described as the ‘architect’ of the national unity government. He attended nearly every negotiating meeting over the past four months (a track record better than many of his colleagues) and was the one burning up the telephones, calling the Sunni Arabs and Kurds. In the process, he earned their trust. A negotiator said he’s "someone with mud on his hands."

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Life in a time of suspicion

Who can you trust? What do you do when the two people you trust most tell you not to trust anyone?

I was given the first of two frank warnings just after I had walked into my office this morning after a few weeks out of Baghdad.

I dumped my flak jacket by the door, and exchanged three kisses on the cheeks with an old friend I call brother. We had sweet coffee. He smoked, and as he twisted out a third cigarette he told me, "only dumb people trust these days."

An hour later, a young Iraqi who has risked his life to keep me safe several times told me, "Trust no one."

They are perhaps the two people I trust with my life in this land of opportunism, and perhaps still opportunity.  But both told me not to. So should I trust what they say? And then do what? 

It reminded me of a joke by comedian and master of irony Stephen Wright. He said he'd named his dog "Stay" just so he could torment it by saying, "Come here, Stay," "Come here, Stay." 

Editor's note: Richard Engel just returned to his reporting post in Baghdad after some well-deserved R&R.  Read the rest of his post in Blogging Baghdad.

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Serious professionals just doing their jobs

Cameraman Doug Vogt had it all figured out. He was set, settled, snug. Doug looked relaxed as we were having a drink at our bureau in Baghdad a few months ago. 

He told me how much he loved his house in southern France and that he was working less and spending more time with his family, finally. Doug had arrived at that elusive place in his life where he wanted to be, spending about half the year as a gentleman farmer (fixing his house, playing with his kids), and the other half paying for it by working in the worst war zones in the world.

There’s a deplorable tendency among those of us who report in Baghdad to blame the victim. I think it makes us feel better to say, "They took too many risks." But that’s impossible to do this time. 

Bob Woodruff and Doug are serious, well-prepared and disciplined professionals. I have worked with both of them. They were just doing their job, and were unlucky.

Editor's note: You can read the rest of Richard's post in Blogging Baghdad.

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Saddam, media militant

Saddam Hussein walked into court today, turned and smiled to reporters. It was a big toothy grin. It was clear from then, that we, not the court, were his target audience today. Throughout the day Saddam talked about the importance of world public opinion and the feelings of the Arab world. He seemed reluctant to talk about the events in Dujail, but he did want to talk, to re-invent himself, to make a transformation from captured dictator defeated by the Americans to a resistance leader, and Arab and Islamic hero. (It's no accident he has a Koran in his hand every time he wants into the courtroom.)

Covering the trial is historic and exciting, but it does feel a bit like we are watching animals in the zoo, seeing how they react when poked with sticks through the bars. There is a voyeuristic aspect that is disturbing and fascinating. One reporter joked, "I hope tomorrow they bring Saddam in like Hannibal Lecter, complete with face mask."  Everyone laughed, because everyone I think secretly wished it would happen.

Editor's note: This is but one of the six, count 'em, six posts Richard filed today in NBC's latest contribution to the blogosphere: Blogging Baghdad: The Untold Story.

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Faces of war

Editor's note: Warning to readers: this post contains graphic content.

Sunday I met the suicide bomber who attacked our bureau nearly two weeks ago.  At least I saw him.  The encounter was macabre, but not unusual in Baghdad these days. I saw the bomber’s face, curled up like a piece of leather parchment on the pavement in front of our bureau. It was a flap of skin with eye holes, the nose and half a mouth. It had been blown into a tree during the bombing and then dislodged yesterday by a bird. (We buried it in a bed of flowers near the bureau Monday morning. The local guards didn’t want to bury it at night, fearing that would bring bad luck.) 

Then I went inside and began to prepare for the Saddam trial. Oddly, it wasn’t the only face I’d seen recently. Last month after another suicide bombing I saw another face -- of the bomber or a victim, I don’t know. It was stuck to a shrapnel-pocked wall like a mask. I started to talk about the odd coincidence with another reporter -- seeing two faces, who would have thought? We traded stories for a few minutes, one more grotesque than the next. I think it occurred to us at about the same time: "What happened to our sensitivity? Our humanity?"

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President Saddam?

Editor's note: Richard Engel filed this post Wednesday from Baghdad, but because of technical difficulties, I am just posting it now. He was in the courtroom for Day 1 of Saddam Hussein's trial in Baghdad.

Saddam sat laughing. When his former vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan followed his lead and declined to give his name to the court (their way of slapping it in the face) Saddam said, “Afiya! Afiya!’ -- the Iraqi equivalent of ‘good for you!’ It was a favorite phrase when he was president. All Iraqis know Saddam for it. 

Wednesday, it was part of Saddam’s running commentary on the trial he clearly disdains. On display was his demeanor as president: smug, patronizing and extremely confident. When the chief judge tried to show a CD with images of documents the prosecution says incriminate Saddam (including an approval for a death sentence supposedly with Saddam’s signature), Saddam interrupted.  “Recordings are not legal under Iraqi law,” he said.  It turned out the court never was able to get the video player to work, one of many technical problems that plagued the opening day.

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A big week ahead in Iraq

Saddam seems to be planning to pull a Milosevic and use his first day in court, Oct. 19, and the trial itself, to put America and the war on trial instead of himself.

I have been trying to get in touch with Saddam’s lawyer Khalil al-Duleimi for days. The guy is like a ghost. He rarely answers his phones, keeps changing numbers and is always vague about where he is as he moves between Amman, Baghdad and Fallujah. Today we finally got him on the phone and I was able to speak with him (over a terrible satellite line) for about 20 minutes. It was obvious Saddam will try to play on Iraqi dissatisfaction with the American occupation and international opposition to the war to divert attention from himself and de-legitimize the court.

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Iraq's constitution true to its history

BAGHDAD - The U.S.-brokered compromise here this week to make Iraq’s constitution flexible may have saved this country from collapsing into civil war — or at least postponed it a few months.

But it is a deeply flawed document, peppered with religious slogans, and leaves plenty of room for Shiites and Kurds to govern themselves. Iraqis vote Saturday in a referendum on the constitution, which has been the cause of rancorous debate here since it was written.

Secular Iraqis, women’s groups and Arab Sunnis — who had almost no say in drafting the constitution — have been complaining that the constitution is a formula for dividing Iraq into three pieces, with the Sunnis getting the worst slice: a triangle of desert without known oil reserves. Critics also say the draft constitution gives too much authority to Shiite religious leaders friendly to the regime in Iran.

Editor's note: Richard wrote this analysis piece for MSNBC.com. You can read the rest of it here.

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