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ANTON ANTONOWICZ'S SAD FAREWELL TO IRAQ Apr 14 2003
From Anton Antonowicz
IT IS 60 days since it all began. More than two months of wondering what might happen. Would we be bombed to death if the war started? Gassed? Shot? Fall foul of some freak accident?
Well, no one was gassed. No one fell victim to weapons of mass destruction. But some of my colleagues were killed and the two in my hotel died from an American tank shell 24 hours before we were "liberated" by them.
As I sat down to begin writing this, the hotel phone rang. The woman said she was Sa'la's wife. She has not seen him for four days.
Sa'la al-Mousai, 55, a driver, the former chief steward of Iraqi Airways. Impeccable English. A father of four. His sister married to a British consultant. Sa'la who was a friend to all the British journalists. Sa'la who lost a brother in the Iran-Iraq war.
Sa'la whom, we all agreed, was one of the kindest, most pleasant people to meet here. Nothing was too much trouble. He would bring hot meals and usher forward his 16-year-old son Ali, who behaved as impeccably as him. A proud father and his boy.
And now I'm standing in the hotel foyer when Ali runs up asking: "Mr Anton, Mr Anton. Where's my Dad?" I tell him and his mother that Sa'la had been working for my colleague Steve Martin and that Sa'la had insisted on taking home some washing for him. He was due to return next day.
He did not. That was last Monday. Then yesterday, the day I finally leave this country, the news came through that Sa'la had been found, dead in his car.
 KILLED: Sa'la al-Mousai
My colleague Steve Martin approached his wife Zoubaiada and heard the dreadful news. It seems that after leaving his office in the Mansour area he drove across a junction and was caught in crossfire. Iraqi troops were at one end of the street, Americans at the other.
His family found him on Saturday night, still at the wheel, a bullet wound in his head, the windscreen smashed.
They buried him yesterday morning.
I have always said that being in Baghdad, as awful as it has been, meant that the story would come to us. We would not have to chase it.
And that has always been the case.
The restrictions mounted by the once-strutting Information Ministry goons which meant we worked in filth, paid a fortune for the privilege and were treated like idiots.
The bombings above us. The denials by pot-bellied men puffed up with Ruritanian swagger. Generals who wouldn't make corporals.
 MARCH 21: Saddam riverside palaces in Baghdad explode in flames
And the Information Minister himself, Mohammed Sayeed al-Sahaf, reptilean, lying, cursing. The man who once ran Saddam's street gangs. A man who wouldn't recognise a fact even if it were his mother.
The one who declared the Americans would be incinerated, had been repulsed from anywhere near Baghdad, and would have their throats cut by Iraqi women — while a US Abrams passed by on the other side of the river.
This black-tongued creature now disappeared. Gone, so far, without trace. Slithering low and strangely silent.
Intent only on escape.
So many of them all on the run from here, the centre of the story.
 MARCH 24: Shahd Khalil, aged 7, severly injured in a raid
THE hotel hit by that US tank and the terrible 24 hours we spent. Next day the Americans turning up and jubilation.
That huge statue being roped, strangled, chained and toppled. The brief interlude when they placed the Stars and Stripes, which flew atop the burning Pentagon on September 11th, upon Saddam's face.
The explosions around us. Bullets flying. The baying mob burning the river's papyrus reeds for a phantom US pilot. Always the story came to us.
Looking back it is probably better to think in images than ideas. Images are more vivid. More real.
But many of these images I hope I can throw into some mental dustbin, for the sake of sanity, soon.
Like so many I have that image of Ali Ismaeel Abbas lying beneath a metal cage, his arms amputated, his torso a mass of burns, his lovely face untouched. No father, mother or younger brother any more and just a slim chance that he may survive. Ali saying thank you for the support his story engendered adding: "I'd shake your hand if I could."
And that awful day at the mortuary of another hospital, the Al Khindi — now looted — where we stumbled across the corpse of 33-year-old Nadia Khalaf.
 SO SAD: Killed Nadia Khalaf watched over by her distraught father.
She had just completed her PhD in psychology but her heart lay literally upon her chest after being pierced by a rocket.
And scores and scores of injured and maimed adults and children in hospital after hospital. And the little ones' cemetery where the poor leave their dead children at dawn to be placed in paupers' graves.
And the orange glow of that sandstorm in a marketplace where rockets killed so many. The dismembered hand placed in a doorway.
The telephone exchanges, one after another, blasted with total precision. The first real night of bombing and the awesome, awful display of power it gave as if the angry hand of God the Vengeful was punching through every rib of resistance the Big Moustache could mount, whether in his glorified Republican Guard or in the mighty monolithic palaces he erected in homage to himself.
And the insides of those palaces. Most empty mausoleums. Sinister. Grotesque. An unreal world of unreal power. Monuments built to a man whose real power, the only power, was built on fear. He was Stalin. He was Hitler. He was Nazi. He was Fascist. And he was none of them.
He was a perfect example of what happens when a Mafia boss grabs political power. But maybe I'm libelling the Cosa Nostra.
 ANGUISH: A woman screams for her husband, believed dead in a blitz on Baghdad
Other images: looters launching their Ali Baba frenzy. Orphans, the poorest of the poor, crouching in terror, as thieves come to take from the most needy. A foreign woman journalist in intensive care being made to leave another hospital because it is being stripped of everything. Hotels trashed. New fires replacing the black oil flames of Saddam's last resistance.
And then the hotel, uncleaned for more than a fortnight, stinking of decay even before then. The uncertain water, non-existent power. The constant groan of generators. The reliance on torches. The stench of petrol fumes. The creaking lifts. The real goodwill among most of us to pull through a hard time.
That first night arriving at Baghdad Airport, a notorious place, and smuggling through my banned portable Thuraya satellite phone. The late-night knock at the door to see whether our other satellite phone was being used against rules.
AND me asking them if these three goons were married. They all shook their head. "Take the advice of someone older," I said.
"Go and find yourselves girlfriends instead of bothering me at this time of night." They burst out laughing and go.
But I am spooked. Next day I wrap the Thuraya in an old black plastic bag and stuff it in a hedge near the now-destroyed Press Centre. A week later I manage to retrieve it with a friend under the guise of obeying a liquid call of nature.
 APRIL 9: Statue of Saddam about to be toppled
I mention this only to try to convey how these people, the regime's henchmen, tried to maintain their Republic of Fear.
It wore away at you. Not that you quaked in your shoes, but because you always had to stay a step ahead of this plodding, deeply nasty enemy.
So you try to maintain focus. Don't lose your head even if others round you are losing theirs in a world turned upside down. A world where families ate ice cream never thinking it would come to this. Where minders denied to the very end that there would be a chance of bombs on Iraq. Where a regime existed in a parallel universe.
And where I had to maintain a constant pretence. That was that I had never been to Iraq before. And, excuse me, but I lied. I reported on the Iran-Iraq War for the Daily Mirror in 1983. I stayed at The Palestine. I interviewed the Big Moustache himself.
His views were rubbish. Barely literate. I may have spent an hour or more in his company but I only gave his words a paragraph of that story. They were the words of a strutting idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
And so the statues topple. People walk through his bedroom and toilet. Infantrymen from America catch a few hours sleep on his bed. And, dismiss those terrible images of maimed and dying children.
I have to.
And so I say farewell to Baghdad, climbing into the huge 4-wheel drive which is the standard transport west to Jordan.
 APRIL 11: US infantrymen bury one of Iraq's fallen
The driver is sweating panic. I tell him to take it easy and just tuck himself into the convoy of 17 trucks making the trip.
Impossible. Once the vehicles leave the hotel it is every man for himself, each driver racing the other. All of them frantic about snipers. We hear a few shots being fired but none seemed aimed at us.
Eventually, after a lot of strong advice, Mohammed the driver calms down and does what he is told. Take it easy.
There are road blocks and burnt out vehicles. A bombed bridge, gutted bus beside it. A check point manned by Australian Special Services, all of them bearded. Not a single Iraqi soldier shows himself throughout the six hours to the frontier.
And, at last, that border.
The American border guards wave us through. The Jordanians, for reasons best known to themselves, keep us waiting two hours while they demonstrate their complete incompetence. But we are in, and I check into a hotel overlooking the Dead Sea. This is supposed to be the lowest point on earth. After the past two months it is my highest point.
The few optimists in Iraq have a saying: "Bukra fil mish-mish — tomorrow there will be apricots." I'd been hoping all along that I would have apricots tomorrow.
Instead of apricots, there will simply be a profound sadness for my friend Sa'la, a very good man caught in a bad time and place.
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