Dr. Wilfried Buchta

What was living and working in the Green Zone like? A passage from the afterword of Buchta’s book from 2015 (Terror at Europe’s Gates, page 385-391) provides some valuable insight:

"... and on July 31st 2005, after completing a two-week-long safety training at the UNAMI field office in Amman (Jordan), the time was finally here. I arrived at the military airport in Baghdad on board of a US military plane, packed with US soldiers and ammunition. There was a hint of dust in the air and it was scorching hot, so hot in fact, that I thought the asphalt on the taxiway might melt. The sky was clear and there was not a single cloud in sight. Its color was the shade of a cornflower, so intense, that your eyes almost hurt if you did not look away fast enough. The airport was surrounded by a bone-dry semi-desert, nothing but shades of yellow and brown everywhere: From camouflaged aircraft hangars, concrete shelters, sandbag walls adorned with barb wire, enormous tent sites for the incoming and outgoing soldiers as well as civilian administrators and sprinkled in, a few provisional administrative buildings and some rusty, pretty bleak-looking trailers. When I arrived at Baghdad’s Green Zone the next morning, Iraq’s oven-like summer heat had reached its tentative peak at 49 degrees Celsius. The temperatures between May and October, as I later found out, typically ranged from 45 and 50 degrees and sometimes they climbed even higher. And it wasn’t just hot from a temperature standpoint, the political climate was, too. The negotiations regarding the new constitution, pushed heavily by the USA, were on the brink of failure. There was a palpable tension in the air, and from the beginning I had a physical feeling of impending doom. Almost on a daily basis mortar grenades and missiles were fired at the Green Zone, sometimes several times a day. Since they were typically launched from hastily thrown together shelters or from the beds of speeding pick up trucks, the accuracy of these attacks was typically not very high, but that did not really make anyone feel much better …

UNAMI in the Green Zone is a UN-peacekeeping mission established in 2003 with nearly 100 international employees from about 30 different nations. Its acting director from November 2004 to end of 2007 was the Pakistani career diplomat Ashraf Qazi. Qazi was a confident of General Parviz Musharraf, the pro-American president of Pakistan, who came to power through a military coup. The mission was divided into several large divisions, with one to two dozen employees each. The most important ones were the Political Affairs Office., PAO, the Office for Constitutional Matters, the Office for Election Matters, the Human Rights Office, the Refuge Office, the General Administration Office and the Security Office, that ensured our safety. Security matters were taken very seriously. No surprise there: The terrible AQI truck suicide attack from August 2003, that took the life of 21 UNAMI employees, was an unforgettable warning.

UNAMI members worked and slept at two separate locations. The work camp was the Diwan-Compound, which was located on the premises of the former military academy of the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. The buildings were sturdy, brick-built stone houses. That provided a certain sense of security, when grenades landed on the roofs or next to the buildings for example. In the first two years UNAMI utilized the Al-Rashid Hotel, a run-down luxury hotel, as sleeping quarters. In this hotel, the toppled Ba’ath power elite used to house their foreign guests or have wild parties in. Only a stone’s throw away from there, right across from the Al-Rashid Hotel, there was the Iraqi Parliament and the Prime Minister Office and the Ministries. That was quite convenient for my colleagues and I, since we dealt with members of Parliament and representatives and employees of the administration on a daily basis. Several hundred members of Parliament along with politicians of the executive branch as well as judges also lived with their families at Al-Rashid Hotel, due to the fact that they were scared for their safety and therefore no longer wanted to live in Baghdad’s Red Zone. In the hotel’s hallways, dining rooms and restaurants we therefore used to run into many of our conversational partners even after work.

Every morning after breakfast the UNAMI members formed informal carpools with each other. In small groups of 5 – 6 people we used to get into armored Toyota Jeeps and travel the four kilometers to the Diwan-Camp, while constantly having to stop at about half a dozen different checkpoints. The Al-Rashid Hotel as well as the Diwan Compound were protected by three defense rings, manned by (from outside to inside) US-Marines, Georgian soldiers and the Coalition of the Willing (MNF-I) and Melanesian soldiers from a battalion made available to UNO by the Fiji Islands for a steep price. Additionally, we all used to wear the obligatory bulletproof vests, which weighed 10 kilograms and a blue UNO steel helmet, weighing 2 kilograms, outside of the office. This gear was heavy, pinched everywhere and used to cause excessive sweat stains.

There were two main issues about staying at the Al-Rashid Hotel. The first one was the fact that two sides of the hotel were located only 50 meters away from blast walls bordering the Red Zone. This allowed snipers and rebels to shoot at the windows of the hotel from near-by roofs and high risers. To avoid being a target, we kept our curtains closed even during the day, which turned the rooms into dim, poorly ventilated dungeons. On the roof of the 14-story hotel there were 8 US-Army snipers posted at all times. They kept the enemy sharp shooters at bay. Every eight hours they switched with a new group.

Another disadvantage was the fact that the electricity and water supply was largely connected to the Red Zone system. When there was an issue with electric or water there, which happened a lot, or when they were forced to ration their supply, we also had to suffer. At least once a week UNAMI employees did not have electricity or water for at least 24 hours or longer. Knowing that you had to return to a dusty hotel room without being able to flush the toilet, take a shower or have fresh drinking water at your disposal, didn’t exactly put you in a good mood after a long day at Diwan-Camp.

After about two years UNO employees moved from the Al-Rashid Hotel to a different location. It had gotten too dangerous there. Besides the Iraqi regulars, the members of Parliament and government and their visitors, who flocked to the hotel on a daily basis, there were reports of suspicious individuals mixing in with he crowd. Our UNAMI-Security Team believed that there were countless spies among them as well as AQI fighters (Al-Quaida in Iraq, the predecessor of ISIS) in disguise. With 100 international UN employees, the hotel was a high-profile target for rebels. We were exposed like sitting ducks. The danger became more and more real, when the slowly festering civil war suddenly broke out in full force in February of 2006. Until then, we had sometimes heard machine guns, explosions or grenades in the near or far distance, but these incidents had been exceptions. In February however, everything changed. From that point forward, a couple of hours without hearing the fighting were rare occasions.

Since the Green Zone had been Saddam Hussein’s former government’s main area, the underground was reminiscent of Swiss cheese. There was a sophisticated tunnel system located underneath the city. Hundreds of secret tunnels and passaged underneath the ground, connecting Saddam’s presidential palace with all other power centers. Those tunnels reached far into the area that had been dubbed the Red Zone in 2003. On Al-Rashid’s large heating and utility basement floor alone there were 40 tunnel entrances that all led into different directions. These entrances had somehow been locked or boarded up and were guarded around the clock by armed guards of the US-led and financed MNF-I (Multi-Nation Forces-Iraq). This group mainly consisted of Peruvians and appeared to be made up of simple Andean farmers who did not speak a lick of English. When I went for one of my workouts in the basement gym of the hotel, which happened a couple of times a week, I always had to pass one of these mean-looking guards that was posted in one of the tunnel entrances. He reminded me of a figure from Greek mythology. Cerberus, the hellhound, guarding the gate to the underworld.

So in the fall of 2006 we moved to different sleeping quarters within the Green Zone. We ended up at the so-called Tamimi-Compound, a container camp which had previously been occupied by the engineer corps of the US Pentagon up until that point. Since the camp was close to the US Embassy, the infrastructure was excellent and we had stable access to electricity and water. Every UNAMI employee was provided with a 4x3 meter sized trailer made from corrugated metal, which had been secured from all sides with sand bags piled up to a height of approx. 1.5 meters to provide basic protection against shrapnel. One issue was, however, that there was no protection from grenades or missiles coming from above. While within one year there were provisional steel beams and thin protective sheets added to the roofs, everyone knew that they were too thin and would not provide enough protection in case of an emergency situation. Therefore, the protection was merely an illusion. We all were aware of the fact that we were constantly at risk of dying, though we tried to push that thought away as best as we could. I made a conscious decision to handle these dangerous moments with a professional distance and not take them to heart, if possible.

The Political Affairs Office, PAO which I worked for at the time, had twelve international employees. They were from India, Russia, Germany, Japan, Canada, South Korea, France, Sudan, USA and Great Britain. We were split into three subgroups which were working on the main political issues of the three large ethnic groups, namely the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds. I was head of the PAO subgroup for Shiites and therefore responsible for monitoring the Shiite government and opposing parties, as well as the Iraq-Iran relationship. At PAO we also had six local Iraqi employees that were all part of the main three ethnic groups of Arabic Shiites, Arabic Sunnis and Kurds. Our team was also supported by three secretaries, an Iraqi Christian woman with Greek roots, a Kurdish woman and a Sunni Arabic woman. We all worked very well together, despite of the civil war that was raging around us and around the Green Zone for three years starting in 2006. The extreme tension, the hate-filled atrocities and the excessive violence, that had a firm grip on the country, did not affect how we treated each other within the team.

The main function of the local Iraqi employees was to mediate and translate during meetings. With their help we were able build and improve relationships with different politicians of the very ideologically diverse and confessionally ethnic Iraqi party system. So being able to have locals as UN employees that were either Shiite Arabic, Sunni Arabic or Kurdish was extremely valuable. Based on their corresponding ethnic or confessional affiliation, they were able to bond with like-minded politicians better and faster than any of the international UNAMI members could have. Our Iraqi colleagues earned with a starting salary of US $ 1000 a good living, compared to the majority of Iraqis. But working for UNAMI also brought hardships and risks. All of them had to sneak into the Green Zone through one of the twelve checkpoints on a daily basis without being detected. That was a tedious and unnerving process. Before they reached the blast walls, they were forced to switch buses or taxis several times in order to dodge people that were following them or spies.

They constantly had to look over their shoulders to make sure that they would not be found out by enemies of the US occupying power who put UNAMI in the same boat as the USA. The rebels were known for killing collaborators that were working with the enemy, sometimes even their entire families too. They also had to equally worry about the many professional kidnapping rings in Baghdad. There were an approximate number of 150 different ones at one time.  The newspapers were filled with articles about the countless daily kidnapping cases. These gangs did not just kidnap obviously rich bankers or CEOs, but also small business owners, store owners or owners of gas stations, hair salons, butcher shops and bookstores. Any self-employed or high-ranking government employee that they believed to be worth a ransom of 50,000 to 60,000 US $, came into the crosshairs of these criminal organizations. Since Iraqi families are typically large and connected to other tribes of relatives, they were often able to come up with the money, even if that meant that they had to go into so much debt that they were financially ruined. The kidnappings usually had a happy ending, meaning the hostages were swapped for the ransom amounts. But there were also tragic exceptions, where the families only received a dead body for the money, or worse, they themselves ended up being taken or killed by the kidnappers. There was no certainty nor any rules to this game. With other words: Total anarchy had taken over.

I developed close relationships with some of our Iraqi colleagues. The Sunni Nihad al-Samarai, a former businessman and owner of a plant that produced household goods, ended up becoming a close friend of mine. His brother, Ayad al-Samarai, a leading politician of the moderate Islamist Sunni party IPP, even became President of Parliament for a year in 2009. Nihad was religious, but in a mild, not at all intrusive way. At the same time, he was very open, tolerant and eager to learn new things. In Saddam’s era he had refused to become a member of the Ba’ath party, a move that was not at all beneficial to his career. That left him in a weakened position when it came to competing against other company owners, that were close to the Saddam regime. In order to eliminate him, his rivals ultimately even recruited the help of the intelligence apparatus. In 1999 they caused him to get into a car accident right in the middle of Baghdad, which Nihad barely survived ...."

..... The suffering of my colleagues and friends was something that personally affected me. My good friend Fleih al-Suwaidi’s case was no exception. But who is Fleih, and how did I come to meet him? Fleih, a civil engineer in his civilian life, had returned to Baghdad after a 23-year long absence in Iranian exile. He joined our team of local Iraqi employees that were working in the Political Affairs Office in Baghdad in 2005. Fleih was Shiite – one of the main reasons why I pushed to hire him at the beginning of my assignment with UNAMI. Surprisingly, up until that point there was not one single Shiite person among the local employees at the PAO (Political Affairs Office), despite the fact that it is well-known that Shiite Arabs make up 60 to 65 percent of Iraq’s population.

I had met Fleih in 2002 in Tehran, through my friend Hassan Abdolrahman. Up until that point, I had addressed Fleih as Abu Hassan (meaning father of Hassan). According to Arabic customs it is common to name a person after their oldest son. Fleih appreciated this gesture, which he always acknowledged with a wide smile, before he called me Abu Kiyan, after my own oldest son. Fleih, a short, stocky man with a salt-and-pepper beard in his mid-fifties, was the kind of person that always had an open, friendly smile on his face. He had earned a degree in Civil Engineering at a university in Mosul during the 1970s. In Mosul he linked up with several other Shiite college students, including Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who was later to become the Iraqi Prime Minister. Together they all joined the forbidden opposition Daawa party led by Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr. Fleih and other men in his family had been arrested by the intelligence service on several occasions throughout the 70s because of their suspected Daawa party membership. Fleih’s brother ended up being killed while in custody, and Fleih, too, was subjected to severe torture during his last imprisonment. Saddam Hussein’s torturers had cut out parts of his scalp, hit him with clubs for weeks, shocked him, and strung him up at the ceiling of his cell with his arms tied behind his back. As if that wasn’t enough: In the end they took long, heavy iron rods to his knee caps and fractured them. This particular injury especially still affected Fleih on a daily basis, even 25 years later. He walked with a noticeable limp and was not able to walk very fast. 

Fleih embodied the typical, the conflicting and ambivalent values of Iraqi Shiites, which I came to notice again and again over the years. Most westerners were (and still are not) aware of the fact that there are cracks and tensions in the collective identity of Iraq’s Shiites. Most of them have two hearts beating in their chest. One for their strong Iraqi-Arabic patriotism and the pride to be an Arab of Iraq, the historic heartland of the Shiites, the birthplace of the Shia and the region that brought forth the largest number of Shiite Imams. The other heart is beating for the history and the confession-based connection to the Persian-speaking Shiites in the neighboring country of Iran, in which the Islamic confession of the Shia has been the official state religion for over half of a century. But their relationship to Iranian Shiites has always been damaged and full of tension.  Rivalry played a big role in this, as the Iranian leadership and theological authorities routinely attempted to bend their „little Iraqi brother“ to their will under the pretense of selfless brotherly support.

Nobody was a better testament of this ambivalent relationship than Fleih. In the spring of 1980 Saddam Hussein had ordered Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and his sister‘s Bint al-Huda’s arrest which led to them being barbarically tortured and finally killed. Parallel to this event he had started a merciless hunt for leaders and members of the Daawa party. All who could, fled into political exile, mostly to Iran.  It was a close call, but Fleih, too, managed to escape to Iran at the time. From that point forward he lived in Tehran with his family and earned a living as a civil engineer working for Iranian and western companies. When I met him in 2002 in Tehran, he was working for an Austrian company that installed elevators in huge central shafts as part of the enormous building project of Tehran’s subway. In his free time he was a board member of an association for Iraqi engineers in Iran that was several hundred members strong. In capacity of his role, he communicated their concerns to members of the Iranian administration or foreign embassies. I believe that the feeling of being discriminated against by Iranians may have been the reason for the close friendship Fleih and my American friend in Iran, Hassan Abdolrahman, had formed with each other. Having this in common, seemed to have forged a strong brotherly bond between them, as I felt.

Hassan had sometimes confided in me about the way Iranians sometimes openly, sometimes indirectly discriminated against him as a black person and a Sunni. Fleih on the other hand did not bring up the discrimination he experienced by the hands of his Iranian host often while he was in Tehran. But I still remember noticing on numerous occasions that it, too, bothered him a lot. But it was through him that I found out that the relationship between Iranian revolutionary clerics and Iraqi Shiite opposition members was already strained even before the 1979 revolution began. One of his rarely told anecdotes, the story about Ayatollah Khomeini’s behavior during his exile in Najaf in Iraq, really confirms this. But if you believe Iran’s propaganda after 1979, the relationship between Khomeini - pushed into exile by the Shah in 1964 – and Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr, the founder of the politically active Shia, was full of friendship and mutual respect. According to Iran, the younger al-Sadr supposedly submitted to the older Khomeini. 

Fleih however, who has family in Najaf, told a different story. He described how he spent a lot of time in the city during Khomenei’s exile (1964-1978). Him and his Daawa party friends sometimes visited Khomenei’s preferred mosque for Friday prayer. But from one day to the next him and his friends decided to stop going. What had caused this fallout? Fleih had told me that him and the other Iraqi Daawa party members had one day set up to pray in the second row, right behind Khomeini. This is when him and his friends heard something that shook them and angered them to the core. They heard that Khomeini spoke the fatiha that starts off every prayer in Persian and not in Arabic. The fatiha is the obligatory Arabic Lord’s Prayer of Islam which is also the first sura of the qur’an. Feih and his friends felt this was pure blasphemy. And therefore, they decided to boycott any further Khomeini-led Friday prayers in silent protest.

In October 2008 Fleih did not come to work for a week. His brother-in-law had been travelling by bus to visit family in Najaf. Taking the trip out that way was always a risk, because south of Baghdad you would have to pass a number of smaller Sunni cities, that were considered rebel strongholds. While on the way, the bus with Fleih’s brother-in-law was suddenly stopped by uniformed soldiers, who checked the luggage and the identities of the passengers. Soon it became clear that they were not in fact government soldiers, but rather Al-Qaida (the predecessor of today’s ISIS) fighters in disguise. After checking their papers and asking for their names the soldiers were able to determine which passengers were Sunni and which were Shiite. They separated the Shiites from the group and beheaded every single one right then and there. This murder weighed heavy on Fleih and I, too, was severely affected by it.

In the months after this event during his breaks at work, I noticed that Fleih quite frequently read from the book Nahj al-Balagha by Ali, the first Imam of the Shiites. Fleih was very much into the verses and teachings, which had a huge influence on the morals and values of the Shia for at least 1000 years. Many of the aphorisms in the book are exuding great philosophical wisdom and promote a level of humanity that is truly astonishing. Imam Ali, as described in the book, is a leader who calls upon his followers to restrain and overcome primal inner instincts such as cruelty and revenge. He asks devout Muslims to practice forgiveness, humanity and charity instead. At some point I was beginning to understand that Fleihs behavior, including his decision to refrain from engaging in blind revenge against his former Sunni torturers, stemmed from this source. Clearly Ali’s teachings were a well of inner stability and peace for him. A well, that could never run dry and that I envied him for.

The events from the lives of my Iraqi employees at UNAMI’s Political Affairs Office illustrate the hardships all Iraqis are forced to live with ever since 2003. The violence and cruelty that are ruling Iraq are hard to fathom for people from western democratic nations, who live in societies where state despotism, religious terror and brutality are just not a factor. And yet, many of my employees managed to hold on to their moral principles and never lost hope, despite of the adverse conditions they were subject to on a daily basis. They were people like Nihad, Fleih and many others that I got to know and learned to appreciate very much during my time there. I truly admired the fact that they followed their inner compass, unswayed and never discouraged, and they would not give up their fight for a better, more humane tomorrow. I am forever grateful that I had the opportunity to meet so many people that were heroes in their own right, simply by making humble daily contributions and doing their part to help keep hope in Iraq alive."