July 29, 2007 | By AYUB NURI
I was born in 1979 in the northern Iraqi town of Halabja. In Kurdish, Halabja means “the wrong place,” and that is how the town felt when I was growing up, because I never knew a life without war. My father worked in Halabja’s electricity office, and we farmed for a few months every year.
When I was 4, an Iraqi Army convoy passed by our farm. It was the summer of 1983, three years into the Iran-Iraq war, and as my family stood in the fields, a rocket was fired at the convoy from the Iranian mountains. It exploded yards from our house. Shrapnel took half my right knee. My grandmother was hit in the head. She died from her injuries a few months later. Mine healed, though never fully. Halabja always seemed to be under bombardment. Finally Iraqi airplanes attacked my town with chemical weapons, killing 5,000 civilians in just a few hours. Many were family friends and relatives. Growing up in this situation, I grew weary of war, but I also, in some way, lost my fear of it.
In 2003, when the United States threatened war against Saddam Hussein, I was thrilled. I thought a U.S.-led invasion would overthrow the dreadful man whose wars took my childhood. At the time I was in Turkey as a refugee, and I was hoping to reach Europe or America. But as the war became imminent in early March of that year, I changed my mind. I bought a bus ticket and took a 21-hour trip to my home.
It was spring, and the entire region had turned green. The mountain peaks were still covered with snow; the hillsides were colorful with wildflowers. I arrived in the city of Sulaimaniya at nightfall as a light rain washed the city. It was too late to continue my journey to Halabja, which was another hour away by car, so I checked into a hotel.
The next morning, I met a friend at a nearby teahouse. As I was enjoying a glass of black tea, my friend told me about all the foreign journalists pouring into town. Then someone called out, “Which one is Ayub?” It was a man in a brown coat. He drove me to a house where two American journalists needed an interpreter to do an interview. They worked for this magazine: Elizabeth Rubin, a writer, and Lynsey Addario, a photographer. They were sitting with a local Kurdish commander waiting for someone to help them talk to him.
When the interview was finished, they asked me to be their “fixer.” The word initially puzzled me. I was two years out of the Teachers’ Institute in Sulaimaniya, trained to instruct children in the English alphabet and vocabulary. I would have taught those children that a “fixer” is a person who repairs broken machines. But in a war zone, a fixer is a journalist’s interpreter, guide, source finder and occasional lifesaver. Every major media organization in Iraq would come to have its fixers. And fixers, it turned out, were well paid. I was offered $100 a day, about 25 times what I could make as a teacher.
I was 24, and suddenly I was the eyes and ears for some of the world’s top journalists. I would spend the next three years as a fixer and watch as my country learned a painful lesson: sometimes when you try to fix something, you break it even more.
The trigger of war was pulled on the morning of March 20, 2003. It wasn’t long before fixers were dying in the line of duty, which made me and others like me think twice about our new jobs. Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed was a fixer with BBC-TV. Soon after the war started, he went to help film what was to be an American bombing mission aimed at an Iraqi Army position. A U.S. warplane mistakenly dropped a bomb on a convoy of U.S. Special Forces and Kurdish soldiers. The accident killed 18 people and injured 45, among them Kamaran. He later died.
When Baghdad fell, on April 9, 2003, journalists in the north wanted to go south. Until then I had never seen Baghdad, the capital of my country. As a child I always thought of Baghdad as a big city crowded with people and cars at night, but now the city was dark and lifeless - a sad place.
In Baghdad, too, the journalists were hiring fixers. I quickly became friends with fixers for National Public Radio, Knight Ridder, The Boston Globe, the BBC and The Times of London. To them I was a novelty because the Kurdish areas of Iraq had essentially split from the rest of the country in 1991. The fixers would quiz me about the north, and I asked them for directions and addresses in Baghdad when I needed them. I supported the war, as did many of my countrymen and pretty much all the fixers. We thought that only a powerful outside force could take on the job of ousting Saddam. The war also brought an economic boom. People began to refurbish their houses. In some streets, the sidewalks were piled with boxes containing TV sets, air-conditioners and other appliances. People thought Iraq would become a kind of 51st state. Everyone wanted to find a job with a news agency, a foreign company or the U.S. Army. Speaking English was a key for success in “the new Iraq,” so English schools sprang up around Baghdad.
I rented an apartment in Karrada, a Christian neighborhood in Baghdad. One Friday I was wandering Mutanabi Street, which has a book market with a popular teahouse. In one of the bookstores I found 27 Agatha Christies in English. I wanted to buy them all because I love her books. Instead, Elizabeth bought them and gave them to me as a present. I sat and relaxed at that teahouse, drinking tea and browsing through my new books. It was one of the happiest days of my life.
n a televised address on May 1, 2003, President Bush announced, “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” But the war had only entered a new phase. A few weeks after Bush’s announcement, American troops were battling insurgents across Iraq. Humvees were being blown up by roadside bombs, and some Iraqis were beginning to settle old scores among themselves, often fatally. All of these were stories for the Western journalists.
My responsibilities as a fixer were rapidly expanding. I was not only taking reporters around the country and interpreting for them and then choosing safe routes home, but I was also finding people to be interviewed. Then, five months into the new phase of the war, Elizabeth was leaving Iraq, which meant I was out of a job. But before she left, she introduced me to Quil Lawrence, an American reporter for the BBC who worked for the show “The World.”
Quil needed a fixer, and I was very excited to work with him. I grew up listening to the BBC; my father was fond of radio, and he used to listen to the Arabic and Persian services. Almost every morning I woke to the sound of Big Ben. At 19, I bought my own radio to listen to the BBC; this is how I started learning English. After a while I memorized the names of all the BBC programs and their reporters. I would daydream about being a radio reporter and having a “sign off” as a foreign correspondent.
Every morning, Quil and I would set out for interviews along with our driver, Abdulrazzaq. We did political reports as well as human-interest stories on reconstruction, the printing of new textbooks, the release of new albums by local singers. From the beginning, I watched carefully as reporters asked questions. When I began working with radio reporters, I also learned the techniques of recording. But I was still trying to figure out the rules of journalism. Every time we interviewed someone I thought we had enough to write a story, but the reporters always wanted to meet a variety of people. I thought to myself, But that guy told us everything. I did not understand the concept of interviewing multiple sources.
Other Iraqi journalists were getting a similar education. During Saddam’s regime, the media were controlled by the state, and journalism was not an enviable profession. But only a few months after Saddam was toppled, there were more than 100 newspapers being published in Baghdad alone. Newsboys stood on street corners with packs of colorful newspapers on their shoulders. It was a turning point in the history of the Iraqi media.
Soon, however, the situation in Iraq grew much worse. The insurgency spread to cities, and all foreign nationals became targets. The fixers were in danger, too. The insurgents hated fixers. They called us “collaborators.” They broke into my apartment three times in Baghdad, but luckily I wasn’t there. Many of my fixer friends received letters from armed groups ordering them to quit their jobs or they would be killed. At times, fixers have been killed without warning. Just two weeks ago, Khalid W. Hassan, a 23-year-old interpreter and reporter with The New York Times in Baghdad, was on his way to the bureau when he was stopped by gunmen and shot dead.
Though fixers run as many and often more risks than Western reporters, we haven’t had the same protections. There have been no insurance plans to cover us, no guidelines on what we should wear or when it is O.K. for us to travel for a story. As Iraqi natives, we have been expected to use our judgment about these things. Even large American newspapers like The Times can’t guarantee that they will be able to help fixers if they become targets. And while American news organizations have often supported fixers’ applications for visas to the United States, the U.S. government does not see itself as having a special obligation to them.
Many Americans don’t realize how central Iraqis are to bringing them the news they read every morning - that if Iraqis didn’t risk their lives everyday, Western reporters wouldn’t be able to do their jobs. But most of the journalists we worked with knew, even before we did, that they would come to rely on us more and more.
One day, Quil and I were sitting in our hotel-room studio when he turned to me and said it was time for me to learn how to edit sound on the computer and file radio pieces myself.
I asked him why.
“One day we won’t be able to come to this country anymore,” he said. “You fixers will have to replace us.”
In March 2004, insurgents in Falluja killed four American contractors, mutilating their bodies and hanging two of them from a bridge over the Euphrates. As U.S. troops entered the city to battle Sunni insurgents, the followers of the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr began clashing with coalition forces throughout Iraq. This countrywide revolt signaled the end of even the little safety foreign reporters still enjoyed. Often, now, they were afraid to leave their hotel rooms. Increasingly, they were asking their fixers to go out and do interviews for them. It was challenging, but we were happy to do it on our own - and honestly, it was a huge relief to no longer have to worry about the reporters’ safety. I began going out with the radio equipment to interview the police, militia leaders and people on the street. I would take the tape back to the hotel and give it to the reporter or reporters I was working for. Sometimes a reporter would call me on my cellphone and tell me whom to interview and even what questions to ask. And sometimes I would do my own article. Some fixers had so much autonomy - this was especially true of those who worked with print journalists - that after doing interviews and research for an article they would get a byline in a foreign paper.
In the fall of 2004 Iraq’s political parties were preparing for general elections. At the same time, American troops were preparing for their second attack on Falluja - to make the city “safe for voters,” they said. In this assault many hundreds of Iraqis, among them civilians, were killed. The attack came seven months after the disclosure of the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. I had always justified the war by saying it would bring democracy and freedom. But when I saw the pictures of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, I was so disgusted that I wanted to give up my job as a fixer and anything else that had to do with the English language and America.
Amid my anger and disillusionment, I recognized that as a journalist I was in the right place to help Iraq. A few weeks before the elections, Quil told me it was time for me to do my own radio pieces. With the recording equipment in my bag, I set off. First I went to the headquarters of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. At the gate I introduced myself as a BBC reporter and showed the guard my press badge.
They ushered me into a room that had a set of new and comfortable sofas. A man in a blue suit stepped into the room and introduced himself as the party’s spokesman. A moment later a young man brought us two cups of tea, which we sipped while talking. When the interview was over, I noticed the man seemed very happy to meet a BBC reporter. If only he had known how I was feeling. I was so nervous the entire time, sitting with the spokesman of the most powerful party and dealing with all the equipment. The minute the interview ended, I couldn’t remember the taste of the tea or a single sentence he said. Luckily I managed to work the tape recorder properly.
Over the next two days I met a range of politicians and people in the street. The Iraqis I talked to were angry about the plan to attack Falluja. One man told me, “You cannot hold an election on the blood of Iraqis.” I took the tapes back to the office, and I sat down to write my script. Finally it was time to read my piece over an ISDN line that would allow me to be recorded in the studios in Boston. My report was broadcast the next day. The only way for me to listen to my story was via the Internet, so I logged in and listened to it over and over again. I was not paid for that story because I was still in training, but my “sign off” dream had finally come true.
“For The World, this is Ayub Nuri, in Baghdad.”
There was so much for me to learn. I especially wanted to improve my writing skills so that I might one day write for foreign newspapers. I often found radio frustrating. I would work on a story for a week, and it would air for only four minutes. A newspaper article would stay around for at least a day, I thought to myself. I had also had enough of covering the everyday violence and needed to get away. My American journalist friends encouraged me to apply to Columbia University’s journalism school. It was an online application, with which I was unfamiliar, but my friends helped me out with the process.
Last summer, I received a scholarship from Columbia. I was very excited to begin that new experience and get away from the war for a while. Unfortunately, the American Embassy in Baghdad - the biggest U.S. embassy in the world, with thousands of employees - does not issue many visas, so Iraqi citizens have to risk their lives driving through hostile areas where the insurgency is still at its strongest to get to Jordan and apply for visas at the embassy there. I spent several thousand dollars flying back and forth to Jordan applying for my student visa. Then I waited 47 days while the Department of Homeland Security screened my application. I checked my e-mail eagerly until the weeks of waiting killed my excitement. Finally, at 2 o’clock one morning, my phone rang, and I was told that my visa was ready. I had only a few hours to say goodbye to my family. I landed at Kennedy Airport the night before my classes started.
Soon I faced a big challenge. The first semester, I had a class called Reporting and Writing I. I was assigned to cover Sunset Park in Brooklyn. When I interviewed people there, I did not understand many of the things they said. In class, I would sit with a dozen American students, and the professor would be talking about something, and suddenly everyone was laughing - but I had no idea why. One day during a local primary election, I stepped into a class, and my adjunct professor said, “Ayub, you are going to cover the S.P. Maloney race.” I did not know what S.P. Maloney meant, and by “rac” I wondered if he meant a horse race or the human race.
Several other Iraqi fixers have also come to the United States to attend journalism school. We all face the same problem: understanding local issues. One, Omar Fekeiki, now studies at U.C. Berkeley’s journalism school. “In Iraq I was a king, but here I am nothing,” Omar complained to me on the phone one day. “Now I need a fixer myself.” When we left Iraq, we were all planning to go back after graduation. But the worsening war has made return all but impossible. We are stranded here. Every time we speak with our families on the phone, they tell us not to come home.
“At least one less person to worry about,” they say.
Many of the fixers fled Iraq and are now refugees in neighboring countries. Those who remained risk their lives every day. Some of them have big families to feed, so they stay. But some fixers I know refuse to leave the country merely out of loyalty to their trade. We welcomed the U.S. war with a lot of hope. We changed careers and became fixers to help Iraq. Some of us paid with our lives. Now we are no longer sure we will ever be able to fix anything.
Ayub Nuri, who is based in New York City, is a freelance reporter and has worked as a researcher on Iraq for Human Rights Watch.