Iraq News Now

Robert Fisk: In Iraq, ghosts provide the glue of unity in a story of survival - The Independent

On the road north of Amara, the storks have built their nests on top of the electricity pylons. Some of these aerial homes are more than six feet wide, a cluster of sticks and long grass at the top of the iron work by Mr Siemens’ descendants. From these fairy houses, the birds espy each other. You can also see their long beaks pointed down as they survey the tiny people of Iraq below them, driving sheep or – amazingly, in the early summer heat – waving green flags in the central reservation of the highway, inviting Shia Muslim pilgrims to stop for free food and water. This is a generous tradition and it is all true. Villagers really do gather beside the road and wave at the drivers heading north, many of them Iranians on their way to Najaf and Kerbala. I got caught in a traffic jam of pilgrims waiting to eat. Not a dinar is paid for this act of kindness.

Perhaps the storks, sweeping down from their pylons on their kite-like wings, appreciate the weird architecture of piety and money below, the human ability to build shrines of such blue- and white-tiled magnificence beside rows of grey garages and cheap concrete furniture stores, lining the old road towards Basra. Can we not create beauty and absolve ugliness from the countryside where the floodwaters are now seeping back into the land of the Marsh Arabs, “droughted” by Saddam in the terrible 1990s? But then I remember how the hovels of the poor were built right up against the European cathedrals of the Middle Ages. Perhaps one gives meaning to the other.

It is the same in the great shrine cities here. You can stumble your way through dust and exhaust fumes before you reach the burial place of the Imam Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law. In Kerbala, the mosques of Hussain and Abbas nestle amid streets awash with grime and slaughtered animals hanging from hooks in fly-blown butchers’ shops. And yet I grew used to it.

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Each evening, I would take tea in a run-down cafe where old men smoked hookah pipes. And one evening, I dared to light a cigar which a friend had given me in Beirut. There was a middle-aged farmer sitting on my right. From where did this come, he asked?

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From Cuba, I said. Two other men discussed this faraway location. Yes, they knew who Castro was, and I preferred to forget – the moment I remembered it – that Saddam had a liking for cigars. The three men debated this unlikely foreigner in their midst. One of them had a brother tortured and killed in Saddam’s prisons, another brother killed in the 1991 Shia insurrection. Then the farmer fumbled in the chest pocket of his robe and produced his mobile phone. All three surrounded me. They wanted a selfie with the foreigner and his cigar in the holy city of Kerbala.

I hesitate to recall how many times the Shias shook their heads in horror and grim wonderment at the memory of Saddam. We correspondents always fear the obvious headline – “Ghost of Saddam Still Looms over War-Torn Iraq” – when it was the Bush-Blair invasion which tore ancient Mesopotamia apart. But Saddam did indeed loom among the Shias.

An acquaintance of mine recalled his 10 years in Saddam’s prisons, watching through the bars as strange lights swished past the gratings in 1991. They were America’s Cruise missiles on their way to Baghdad.

And it is remarkable how often strange sparks of honour shine through these memories, from far-away, distant times when integrity and respect were as rare as they were under American occupation. Here, for example, are the words of an Iraqi friend, speaking of his long-dead father:

“In the early 1950s, the government was throwing the Jews out of Iraq. Tens of thousands of them were forced to sell their lands as cheaply as possible. And of course the Iraqis took advantage of this and bought lovely homes at ridiculously cheap prices. They virtually stole these houses from the Jews. But my father refused to do this. He offered to buy a house from a Jew but insisted that he paid the full price for it, what it would have been worth before the Jews started leaving. He even went to the bank with this man to ensure he received all the money that the house was worth. And, do you know, my father never told me about this? It was my aunt – his sister – who told me what my father had done, long after he was dead.”

And that same evening in Kerbala, I was reading through a bunch of French newspapers I had bought a couple of weeks before in Paris. I have a habit of squirreling away articles to read later. And – by extraordinary chance – I came across a review in Le Figaro of an exhibition about the sale of Jewish art in France under the Nazis between 1940 and 1944. And there was a photograph of the Galerie Charpentier in Paris in July 1944 – after D-Day, I reflected – in which the elite of Parisian society can be seen sitting in the front rows, surveying what appears to be a Renoir portrait.

In the picture, there are chic ladies in feathered hats and bespectacled businessmen with homburgs on their knees. The French, I thought, bought this Nazi loot at rates just as cheap as Iraqis did the Jewish houses of Baghdad in the early 1950s. In the French case, many of the Jews had already been exterminated. One estimate suggests that two million objects – works of art, vintage wine, whole buildings – were sold off under French occupation.

But my friend’s father had kept the faith of his family and, in racist Baghdad of the 1950s, had paid the real price for a Jewish home. It’s only one tale, I know, but it somehow repaid the hope that in a land of such suffering – under Saddam, and then under the Americans and their apparatchiks in the initial occupation governments, and then under attacks from the Isis cult – a profound dignity could still exist, the value of which my friend understood very well.

When we arrived in Baghdad next day, he waved his arms out of the car window across the baking expanse of the city. “It’s much safer, Robert. You can walk in the streets now. Even the Green Zone is open to traffic at night.”