From Baghdad with Love by Jay Kopelman (a court of thorns and roses ebook free .TXT) 📕

That same day, claims appear on the Mujahideen Brigade’s Web site that the kidnapped Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena has been executed. Almost immediately another militant group, the Islamic Jihad Organization, states on its Web site that they have the journalist and she is not dead yet. As Anne returns from interviews that morning, an American convoy passes her vehicle, which is being driven by an Iraqi, and turns around and then follows her for a while through the streets. They eventually stop the car, concerned that she has been abducted.

Anne reports that twenty-one people have been killed by a suicide bomber at an Iraqi army recruiting center. “They are clearly targeting Iraqi Special Forces,” she says. And indeed, the Iraqi Resistance Report announces that an “Iraqi Resistance car bomb exploded near a truck carrying recruits to a puppet troop base in an unused airport in the western part of Baghdad . . . the blast took place near a recruiting center for the puppet troops and killed at least 21 and wounded about 27 more would-be soldiers serving the USA.”

Anne e-mails me at the end of that first week.

“He saved my sanity today. I was just so fed up with this whole place, and the whole job and went over and romped with him for awhile.”

And I imagine it is almost as if Lava’s presence at the compound allows all humans a temporary exit pass from reality and maneuvers them through various checkpoints into the Land of Make-Believe where puppies romp on plush, green grass and it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

CHAPTER TWENTY

February 2005

The Syrian Border

Trying to coordinate Lava’s escape from the Syrian border through e-mail—getting the vaccinations, arranging for the paperwork, keeping him alive one day to the next—feels like being on the moon trying to shoot fish in a barrel on earth. But a mission on the Syrian border and a mission on a distant planet are little different anyway. While a lot of the country’s violence depends on what comes and goes across the border, the vast stretches of sand and horizon make it feel like a lunar outpost.

My job here includes providing support to the army officers who are training the new Iraqi border police—the Desert Wolves—and to the Marines who man the forward operating base. I travel up and down the desert checking in on the dozens of forts where the new Desert Wolves stare out into the desert, fidget with their weapons, and smoke heavily as they wait for payday and their next vacation.

The Desert Wolves are supposed to patrol the Iraq–Syria border, which foreign mercenaries, weapons smugglers, and jihadists move across easier than ants through a chain-link fence. During the past year, corruption raged here in Iraq’s “Wild, Wild West,” and the equivalent of fifty dollars bought anyone a one-way ticket through the checkpoints. While the Marines tracked and fought the insurgent sympathizers in the desert at night, the former Iraqi border police made extra cash by waving them through in broad daylight.

The new guys, the Desert Wolves, seem on the up-and-up so far, but between the constant threats to their lives and the worsening economic conditions in Iraq, I know it’s just a matter of time before the huge amounts of cash coming out of Syria, where many of Saddam Hussein’s high-ranking Ba’athist party members now live, tempt the new guys beyond endurance.

I understand the instinct to take what you can when you can, especially when your future is locked so deeply within somebody else’s battle plan, but if these guys are going to oversee their country’s security and US troops are ever going to pull out, then they have to sprout more discipline out here in this barren, unfertile grit.

And the pressure is on. Just this week General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the United States won’t pull out of Iraq until the country’s security forces develop the capacity to police their own country. He then assured the committee that the training process was “moving along.”

Likewise, in a visit to Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that “They [Iraqi security forces] are developing confidence and skill.”

In Baghdad the US Army general in charge of training the forces told reporters that while there had been “some setbacks,” the training of the new Iraqi police and military forces was gaining “considerable momentum.”

But as far as I can see, the only thing gaining considerable momentum is the insurgency’s attacks against the Iraqi recruits. Though they’ve been issued 79,000 pistols, 60,000 assault rifles, 94,000 sets of body armor, 5,900 vehicles, 20,900 radios, 2,400 heavy machine guns, 54,000 Kevlar helmets, and 79 million rounds of ammunition, the new Iraqi forces are being killed faster than Americans. More than thirteen hundred had died since we started training them. During the same week that US commanders extolled their “progress” to the media, twelve Iraqi soldiers died in an ambush near Kirkuk, twelve more were killed in Mosul by a suicide bomber, twenty-one died in an explosion outside an Iraqi Army base in Baghdad, six were killed by a car bomb in Baquba, three were killed and eleven others wounded by gunmen attacking an Iraqi Army convoy, twenty decomposing bodies of Iraqi police and soldiers were found on a road near the town of Suwayrah, six Iraqi National Guardsmen were found dead and dumped on a highway near Mosul, and the Associated Press received a videotape of masked gunmen shooting four Iraqi policemen.

So we make day trips out to the forts where the Desert Wolves just watch the border day and night. We go to make sure they’re taking turns on watch, that they have the proper security setup, that the lookout posts are where they’re supposed to be, but mainly we just want to make sure they’re still alive out there.

The insurgents’ methods of targeting the Iraqi troops evolved as the war raged on. Because