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My Iraq: a reporter's 20-year retrospective

The longest-serving Western correspondent in Baghdad tracks the lives of two Iraqi friends – from dinners under the moon and palms to the heartbreak of war.

from the May 3, 2009 edition

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I met Nermeen in 1998, during a window in which Saddam was trying to improve relations with the West. The regime had invited American TV networks to open bureaus, and CNN's Ted Turner was convinced Iraq and the rest of the world needed to understand each other. I became the only Western journalist permanently based here, a country of 26 million people at war with the West. I hired Nermeen to help me understand the country. It wasn't exactly a plum job for her.

In Saddam's Iraq, every foreigner was thought to be a spy. Iraqis in too much contact with them came under suspicion. My phone was tapped, my hotel room was bugged, and when I moved into a house, it was, too. It was a system so effective that Iraqis worried even their own families were informants.

I knew Nermeen had eloped at 18 and chose to raise her son in Iraq herself, rather than emigrate to the US with her Lebanese husband. "I could never imagine myself living outside Iraq," she says of that time, an echo of the choice she makes today.

I didn't know a lot of other things about her, until the regime fell. In 1991, her closest friend, another journalist, was taken away and hasn't been seen since. Sometimes cold reality is too much even for someone who's seen as much as Nermeen.

"One day, maybe, I always said, he would come back, but because of these concrete barriers and these tons of barbed wire he lost his way to my house," she says. "Maybe he will find it one day and he will come and knock on my door."

"After all this catastrophe in Iraq, there has to be a free press," she rails. "It's not a gift; it's a right from the tons of promises they gave us."

In April, a day after she was voted one of the five best journalists in Iraq by young colleagues, her name was put on an Internet insurgent list of media people targeted for execution. More than 100 Iraqi journalists have been killed since the war began.

"Threats and violence have become the Iraqi way of life," says Nermeen. She takes precautions – not staying home alone, making sure she's not tailed – but believes the only list that determines when you die is that drawn by fate.

I knew dozens of Americans and Iraqis who died in this war. For Nermeen, it numbers in the hundreds. The challenge is to find meaning in it.

On a recent day, I went with her to her apartment on Baghdad's Haifa Street, scene of some of the worst fighting in the war. She has only been back here four times in three years after moving to the relative safety of her parents' Kirkuk house.

"Welcome to my dusty home," she says, her high-heeled boots clicking on the parquet, coated in a layer of fine sand. The kitchen window has shrapnel holes.

Seeing Nermeen again is like having a part of my life back – a part I'd lost while covering the war embedded with the US Army and Marines.

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