Donate NowThis wasn't the best trip for blogging, since it was much easier to work than it was last year. (Less time locked in hotel means less time for blogging.) On the bright side, we have about 50 hours of video to sort through and edit.
Tomorrow morning Rick and I will take the land route out of Iraq, rather than risk being grounded at the airport by the dust storms that have marked much of our trip. It will be the first time I've driven out since 2003.
Leaving Baghdad is always bittersweet. First, there is guilt: I can leave, but most of the people here cannot. Second, there is the feeling of the unfinished: I wish we had been able to do this, that, or the other. Missed interviews or chances to shoot, things we didn't have enough time to set up or might never have pulled off had we spent months here. But the greatest feeling of the unfinished is that the war will roll on, it just enters new phases — today the Sahwa strike an alliance with the American military, tomorrow — as many of them have claimed — they will fight the US again if it does not make good on its promises to withdraw.
Third, there is the feeling of relief. Tomorrow I will stroll freely through the streets of Amman, not worried about being shot, detained, blown up, spied upon, etc.
I am looking forward to editing the video. This trip has produced some unprecedented scenes. After spending four years trying to gain insight into Iraq's Sunni armed resistance, spending time with the Sahwa is often fascinating. We were even able to track down a former al-Qaeda operative in Falluja, who spoke frankly about why he supported the group and eventually turned away from them.
For the last five days, Abo Ahmed, the "al-Qaeda guy" as Rick and I have come to call him, has been calling my cell phone, asking whether I can find out anything about one of his nephews whom the US has detained. I have tried to explain to him that there is nothing I can do for his nephew and that the military will not tell me anything more than that he is a "security detainee," but even five years in, the assumption that simply because I am an American journalist I somehow have greater access to the military than others still holds.
Only in Iraq, in the year 2008, can I get a call from al-Qaeda and not even bother picking up.