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It looked more and more real that this is it. It is happening. In fact, I had a to-do list that was almost impossible to achieve, of preparing for the war.

What did the list say?

[CHUCKLES]:: That list said, starting with grocery-shopping, canned food, grains, fuel, kerosene, up to digging an actual well in your garden.

Operation Iraqi Freedom. The attack came in waves cruise missiles, followed by the F-117 stealth bombers, with so-called bunker-busting bombs.

[EXPLOSIONS]

Its the night that everybody was anticipating. Weve had all these conversations. Were staying, were staying, were going to, you know, weather it. Were going to stay here our home, our resources, our network of people. Were not going anywhere.

Then, the siren kicks in. My sister started panicking. My mother seemed very scared. And here, I realized this is my very small window to actually take them out of this mess.

I decided, OK, all the food we got in the car. Everything we need in the car. IDs, documents, everything, all the cash we had in the car, immediately.

And then, we drove. Its about 180 kilometers west of Baghdad.

And we find a small apartment through my brother-in-laws contacts and family members. They secure an apartment for us, and we stay there. But I had two Great Dane dogs that I had to leave behind, with some food and some water, because they were too big to take with us in the car.

So I established a routine of driving back every other day to feed the dogs and refill the water. They were not even my dogs. They were my brothers dogs. And when he left the country, I was like, I am counting on you to look after them. And this is something in me, that I dont like to let people down.

I know that about you.

[ALI CHUCKLES]

I didnt know what was waiting for me. What am I heading into? What are the risks? Working with foreigners, that is, like, an immediate death sentence with certain groups, because youre looked at as the collaborator, the spy.

My family, of course, didnt want me to do it. They were like, no, no, screw it. No money, no nothing is worth it. Stay here with us and be safe. And that was just not me. I thought, I will be doing something more important by joining the media.

You thought you were going to be doing something more important than being a doctor by being with the media. What did that mean for you at that time? What was that important thing that you thought you were going to be doing?

I thought I would have a chance at actually telling the true story. Youve seen the fog of war. Theres so much blabbering going on, so many inaccuracies. And of course, truth gets buried in the process.

And let me tell you, from an Iraqi perspective. Because we were sitting, back then in Baghdad, listening to all the allegations of WMDs and ties to al-Qaeda and 9/11. And for us, this was a sad joke.

Because we knew that the Iraqi army didnt have a functioning tank, barely had a rifle that could fire a few bullets before exploding. And the ties to al-Qaeda give me a break. Saddam would never have allowed any other group to claim power or to seek power. And it was so frustrating for us as Iraqis yes, we wanted to get rid of Saddam, but not based on a false-flag operation like the invasion.

Let me ask you this. I have, literally, no recollection of when we first met. Do you have a do you know when we first met?

Yes, in a car, in a moving car. We stopped very quickly. You jumped in, in a very Lulu fashion.

And James introduced you. I

Was Yasser driving the car?

Yes, yes. Yasser was driving the car.

Yasser was the driver that we were very close to, and I still remember his laugh in my head someone we all loved very much. Can you, for people who may not understand, what was a typical day like for us?

I mean, I remember I would be dressed in my abaya, my robe. You would tell me to pretend I was mute, in case we got stomped. Because I look Iraqi, but I certainly dont sound Iraqi. I guess every day what I remember is that every day was very different.

Well, we dont really what is happening at the moment. All the press is assembled there, but they have not been led into the actual chamber where Saddam Hussein is tried. So we dont really know what

You would be meeting, maybe, a top official one day, and another day, youd be rushing towards a bombing.

Well, it was a double bombing. It happened near the center of town, near a bridge that leads to the green zone, which is the seat

Yes, a typical day in Iraq back then was anything but. There was nothing typical about it. But let me tell you about that abaya and the hijab. That was my favorite attire for you. [LULU LAUGHS]

And I always wished that in my head, I was like, can we just leave James behind, please, with his blond hair and blue eyes?

Well, do you remember when he dyed his hair black and he looked like Elvis? Yeah.

Uh, he did, and it made it actually even worse, because it looked comical and attracted more attention. It didnt look real. It looked so funny.

And we were doing that, of course, because if youre in a car, you just dont want to attract attention from anybody, and you want to look like you belong there. And having a foreigner in the car, of course, is a problem.

Yes. One thing that I may have not always conveyed perfectly, I would say, is how much people resented your presence in the country, how much people, literally, hated foreigners, because they associated them with the invasion. And when I say that, of course, youre aware of all the groups that targeted journalists, but Im telling you, even the closest people to me, even the people who are educated, the people who know that you are there just to do journalism even those people resented your existence.

But of course I always had to find the balance between keeping you safe and aware of your basically, situationally, aware, but also not to demoralize you by telling you how much people hated your existence.

It is very complicated and sometimes puts me at risk of being seen as the collaborator. And I would wake up in the morning. I would deliberately go to work different time of the day every day. I will take a different route, because we knew that some groups were watching.

So if someone spotted me or seen me with foreigners, then that is it. That is the end of it. And I remember a very funny now, its funny, it wasnt back then incident where one morning, I was leaving home, and I saw one of my neighbors who waved me down and [INAUDIBLE]..

And he goes, are you going to work? I instinctively said, yes, I am, because I was. And he goes, great. Because my son has an X-ray appointment at Baghdad hospital. I need to take him there. Can you please give us a ride?

Oh.

And of course, I wasnt heading there. Of course, I was heading to the media compound. So he jumps in the car, and we drive completely the opposite side of town. I drop him off. As soon as he leaves, I rush back to the office. Of course, James was sitting there, waiting, asking where the hell have I been. And that was the story of my life the double life I lived because of this job.

That must have been really, actually confusing.

Yeah, its its an identity crisis of some sort. And who am I, and how long will this last for? But remember, there was no clear

End in sight.

way out, yeah, of it.

Ali, I think about and thought about the risk to you a lot. And I think one of the moments where that really hit home was in the moments where you actually saved our lives. You know, James got kidnapped in Sadr City. Thats a Shiite area in Baghdad. It was overrun at the time by militia members.

How do you remember that day?

I was going to say, when you said, the moment you saved our lives, I was going to say, which one?

But that was part of my job, or my commitment, to be honest. And I remember that very clear.

We get stopped by two cars filled with gunmen, who jumped out. They started yelling and screaming and shouting at us, pointing their AK 47 towards us. We step outside the car, and I start hearing them saying, only the foreigner, [SPEAKING ARABIC] which means, foreigner, in Arabic.

And then, I realized that I had a choice to make. I can just let them take James, and here I am, safe and sound, and I can leave.

Or I can help James. Then in a split second, I realized James chances of survival were almost zero.

And without me helping translating, James would be clueless of what was going on. So I immediately started yelling, Im with him. Im with him. And they kept saying, just the foreigner.

I jumped into the kidnappers car. And I kept saying, Im with him, Im with him. Take me. Im with him. And I ended up sitting in Jamess lap, actually, because the car was so crowded. At least some fun funny moment in that not-so-funny situation.

And Yasser followed you in his car. He also

Yes.

put himself in harms way.

Absolutely. Yasser, instead of just driving away, as he was instructed he goes, no, no, no, no, Im also with them. Im coming. So I immediately started talking to them and reassuring them, Im just an ordinary Iraqi. And then, I tried to, basically, psychologically manipulate them into thinking Im on their side.

And after many hours, they eventually let you go. And I think the story about this, for me, is just how unbelievably brave you were. Did you think, like, why are these people here

Oh, trust me, I asked this question every day. Why are they here? Its so much nicer on the other side of the world. Just go away, go live your lives. You dont have to be here. And actually, that brings me to a question to you. Why were you there in the first place?

I mean, I dont know that I asked myself that question then. I think 20 years on, I ask myself that question a lot now. And Ive come up with a different answer now than I had then.

I would say I believe that we were really there to tell the story of this country, to make sure the real story got out, that when the government of America would say everything was going great, we were there to say that it was a catastrophe. I felt that it was, on balance, important.

And I was also willing to put my life on the line for that. But as you know, I ended up getting PTSD quite seriously. It started at these multiple bombings in Karbala very early on in the war, when I was in the crowd there, and all of a sudden, these suicide bombers started detonating their vests.

And there were so many people, that the bombs acted like meat grinders. And I remember running through the crowd and seeing these pools of blood and the chaos and the fear. And it broke something in me, and over the course of the war, that only got worse.

Did you have something like that at all?

Of course. If I didnt, then probably, theres something wrong with me. In fact, it is something that we Iraqis always joke about that if youre an Iraqi with no PTSD, there is something wrong with you. But maybe it manifested differently.

Because for you as a foreign journalist, when you come to Iraq, you know that youre leaving after, lets say, six weeks, eight weeks, or however long youre going to stay. For someone like me, this is where I am. This is where Im going to be.

And it is different. It is like that boiling frog effect, where you dont really sense the water boiling. You just keep adapting. But at a huge cost, though. Because this is not normal.

So it does break something in you, but differently. Because for you, you know that you can go out of it and seek, maybe, help. For someone like me, there is no way out. You have to deal with it.

But finally, something did happen, where you kind of broke. I never saw you as wrecked as when the assassination attempt happened in 2008. I wasnt there for that, but you were there with a colleague of mine, Ivan Watson.

NPRs Ivan Watson and a team from our Baghdad Bureau were reminded of that yesterday.

Residents say Rabia Street was once one of the prettiest places in Baghdad, a boulevard of boutiques

What happened on that day?

Yeah. That day started like any other day. We were reporting, ironically, on how the security situation in West Baghdad has been improving. And we were sitting with a restaurant owner, talking to him about how the situation is improving, and whether it is or not.

RPGs were everywhere in the street, and gunmen were everywhere, clashes, regularly.

Mojud invited us in for lunch.

And as we concluded our conversation and walked out, we hear people running and screaming at us, saying, stay back, car bomb. Car bomb.

Iraqi Army Lieutenant Mohammed

So we I remember, we hunkered down from just [INAUDIBLE] away from our our car.

[EXPLOSION]

[BLEEP]

And then, our own car explodes.

Its in our car!

Its our car. They put a sticky bomb in our car.

Wow.

Later on, we figured that apparently, what had happened is someone passed by our car and stuck what was called a magnet bomb back then

Sticky bomb.

A sticky bomb, yeah. Im sorry, sticky bomb. You can tell its been 20 years now.

Anyway, so they were trying to kill me and the rest of the crew, because we were foreigners. We were collaborators. We were considered the infidels.

And at that moment, I felt how real it was.

Later on, we went to the wreckage of the car. And I looked at my backpack. It was completely burnt. And the recording device that I left behind. And I was thinking, this was supposed to be me.

So in my head, I was like, when is it ever going to stop, though? And when is the time for me to say, this is it, Ive done my part? And that was, to me, the cutoff moment. I didnt want to be that boiling frog anymore.

This brings me to something, which is, during the worst of the civil war, I stopped going for quite a few months while I got treatment for PTSD.

Im wondering if you ever felt resentful that I could leave.

I was away when this happened. I wasnt there, because I didnt have to be. Even though I lived in Iraq and I worked in Iraq, I was able to go out when I wanted. Did that feel unfair? It must have felt unfair. It is unfair.

Unfair, yes. Maybe resentful is a big word. I would say I felt and specifically that time I remember I was on the phone with you after.

I remember.

And you were telling me, Im coming, Im coming. Im going to be there soon. And I, in my head in fact, you said, dont leave just yet, because I need to see you. I want to talk to you.

And I knew, deep in your heart, you wanted to make sure I was OK. Because like you said, we were friends. Were not just colleagues. But for the first time in my head, I was thinking, Lulu, you just dont get it. You dont get it.

Originally posted here:
Opinion | The Shameful Secret at the Heart of My War Reporting - The New York Times