The Kuwaitis were smiling and gesturing grandly as they led us to the bodies. Half a dozen reporters who had arrived in newly liberated Kuwait City the night before wanted to see evidence of the atrocities inflicted by the Iraqi army during its final, frantic hours of occupation. The locals were happy to oblige.
The dead had been laid out on tables in a makeshift morgue in an abandoned warehouse on the edge of the city. A dozen stiffening and bloated forms, perhaps three days old, were covered with burn marks and scars from whippings. Some were missing arms and legs. Others had no heads.
"Do you see what they have done to our people?" cried one Kuwaiti. "Come closer and see," he urged.
The reporters were hesitant to move forward. We had come to see the bodies, but once in their presence we wanted only to be somewhere--anywhere--else. Some took a few halting steps, furtively snapped a photograph or two and hurried out the door. A young BBC camera operator muttered, "Oh, my God," dropped her equipment and ran outside to vomit.
"What?" sniffed one of her colleagues. "Didn't she expect this?"
He was right. We had been warned.
But the stories we found were not just of the dead. They were also of the living. Stories of a transplanted Arizona woman who, crouching terrified in her tiny apartment in darkened Kuwait City, waited for news of her missing husband. MD120 Of a father who mourned the death of a son arbitrarily shot by a hastily organized Iraqi firing squad. Of tortured, beaten and burned bodies placed on public display as a "lesson" to the populace. And of conflicts between the city's Kuwaiti and Palestinian populations that threatened to erupt with murderous intensity, providing ominous evidence that the bloodshed in Kuwait may not yet be over.
FOR MONTHS SINCE the August 2 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, smiling, friendly Kuwaiti expatriates had been corralling any reporter within earshot at the press center in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, regaling journalists with horror stories filtering down from Kuwait City. These rotund little men, unfailingly polite and sincere in the flowing robes that are their traditional dress, told of the beaten children, the random killing and the misery endured by the Kuwaitis--which they said had increased dramatically in the days before the counterinvasion. They had glossy color photographs of torture victims, inserted into slickly packaged press kits. Their approach was professional. Too professional.
The more cynical members of the press corps were openly questioning the authenticity of the atrocity reports, believing Kuwaitis were simply trying to drum up support for a ground invasion of their country and destruction of Saddam Hussein's army, rather than allowing time for a cease fire and a peaceful withdrawal--which would leave the Iraqi army largely intact and still menacing across the border. Jonathan Rawlkin, a Reuters correspondent, said he believed the reports of thousands of torture victims and "disappeared" in Kuwait were merely "bullshit propaganda" from the Kuwaitis and the Bush administration aimed at keeping the fight going. They want to kill Saddam's army, Rawlkin theorized, and this is just a good way to get public support for it.
"There have been abuses, I'm sure," he said. "But it can't be as bad as they say."
Unfortunately, it was worse.
The Kuwaiti stories, as the reporters who rolled into Kuwait City on the heels of the advancing allied army the night of February 27 discovered, were all too true. Driven by their sorrow and a compulsive need to explain and share the brutalities they had endured, the Kuwaitis were quite conscientious about preserving evidence of their ordeal. Not wanting to trust photographs--which a thick, gray fog that utterly enveloped the road. At first, it appeared to be a huge storm cloud, quickly turning the bright, sunny afternoon into a dank, dreary and foreboding twilight. Then suddenly, the gray fog turned black, and the afternoon glow disappeared completely, totally wrapping the convoy in darkness. Visibility was reduced to an arm's length, and navigation consisted of obsessively staring at the taillights of the vehicle in front, staying within a yard or two of its back bumper, afraid of losing the way in the strange midday night that had descended upon the desert.
We had encountered what the Saudis call "The Great Cloud," the enormous mass of greasy smoke produced by the 500 burning Kuwaiti oil wells set aflame by the Iraqis. For more than 150 miles, this cloud remained a thick soup, the sickeningly sweet smell of burnt petroleum filling the lungs and depositing a gritty black soot on cars, clothes and skin. At regular intervals, a light misty rain would begin to fall, and the black water droplets made what would be permanently gray stains on the paint of trucks and cars.
As the convoy slowly felt its way through the darkness near al Kafji, the site of the first ground battle of the war, we encountered a checkpoint where the Saudi army had erected huge strobe lights, bathing the surrounding burned-out, shelled building and hulking, destroyed tanks and jeeps along the side of the road in an eerie, apocalyptic glow.
An American doctor, on loan to a Saudi tank battalion on its way north, leaned against his jeep while waiting for the convoy to proceed. He shook his head when describing the conditions. "We're all right in this for a few hours. But people who are in it for a long time are going to suffer some serious mental and physical damage. In this stuff, you are smoking the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes every fifteen minutes."
His companion, a Saudi officer who had been stationed at the checkpoint for a week, said the smoke that day was the thickest of the war. The doctor laughed. "You know, throughout history, the blotting-out of the sun has been associated with the end of the world," he mused. "It is only 4 p.m., and I can't even see my own ass, much less the sun. Maybe Armageddon is upon us."
The wind suddenly began to blow the noxious mix of smoke and dust around the headlights of the convoy vehicles. "Or maybe we're just in hell," the doctor The city was quiet and apparently deserted. Everywhere burned and stripped cars littered the landscape. A large group of four-story apartment buildings across the street was riddled with bullet holes, and huge cracks and blast patterns left by near-miss Iraqi mortar fire defaced the walls. Although the city was officially under martial law and curfew imposed by Kuwaiti resistance forces, we could see a small group of robed figures lurking in the shadows near one of the buildings, their cigarettes glowing in the darkness. They waved for us to join them.
We were met with whispered greetings and offered cigarettes by an old man, who insisted that we smoke. Like all Kuwaitis, many of whom have endured the seven-month Iraqi occupation inside their homes, fearful to venture out except for food, these people were hungry for news of the outside world and eager to tell about their lives during the war.
A nearby gunshot sent Peter and me scrambling for cover behind a wall, but the Kuwaitis didn't flinch. They chuckled at the sight of us crouching on the ground, then whispered an apology. "We are not making fun of you," said one, "but we have heard so many gunshots, we do not hear them anymore."
Amro Kamar, who worked as a salesman for Nikon before the war, said the Iraqis were especially brutal to residents of this sector of the city, because it is near the airport, the scene of the worst fighting during the allied advance. He said the Iraqis took "maybe 40,000" hostages north during the final days of the war, and killed 20,000 more. He described a scene of utter destruction--almost all the hotels except the Holiday Inn were burned, and the government buildings were stripped of equipment, as were the newspapers and the television station.
Amro introduced us to Atta al-Sallam, the old man with the cigarettes, who, in broken English, told how his seventeen-year-old son had been executed by the Iraqis three days earlier for possessing a copy of the New York Times, smuggled into the country from Baghdad. "They shot him there," Atta said, pointing 25 yards to the apartment-house wall. Atta fell to his knees when we reached the site, his fingers tracing the jagged lines that ran down the rough concrete wall. Amro, translating now for the weeping old man, said they were bloodstains left by the boy's body. There were three bullet holes in the wall, very near the trickles of blood. Amro helped the old man to his feet. "Come, my friend," Amro told him. "It is over now."
In the darkness, Amro and the other Kuwaitis, who all live nearby, told of what they say was a common Iraqi practice--the public display of the corpses of slain Kuwaitis.
"They would kill some of us for petty offenses like walking on the wrong side of the street," Amro said. "Sometimes they would kill for no reason. Then they would line up the bodies in the street. The idea was to keep us in line. No one was safe. Many were just taken away, never to be seen."
I asked where I could find someone looking for a "disappeared" family member. Amro laughed. "There are so many. So very many. Not finding one will be your problem." He thought for a minute. "You are an American. You must meet Cynthia. Come."
AMRO LED THE WAY about 100 yards down the deserted street to a decrepit apartment building. Tattered drapes and blankets covered most of the windows, which had been demolished by explosions. Each landing along the way to the fourth floor was littered with scraps of food, broken bottles and old Kuwaiti newspapers, dating from early last summer. Rats scurried away from the beam of my small flashlight.
Amro banged loudly on a wooden door, shouting in Arabic. There was no reply. "She is afraid," he explained, pounding on the door again. Finally, a young boy cracked the door an inch and peered outside. "Get your mother," Amro instructed. A moment later, a woman in her mid-twenties appeared, clutching a sleeping baby and holding a red candle. She smiled at Amro.
"He wants to hear about your husband," he said, waving at me. The woman ushered us in.
The tiny apartment was sparsely decorated but immaculate. Pictures of the ten-year-old boy, Abdulla, dotted the walls. The woman's name was Cynthia Bou Rabee, and she was born in Mesa, Arizona, the only daughter of Filipino parents who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s. She had lived in the southeast Valley ("off Apache Boulevard," she said) until she was fifteen, when her parents took jobs with oil companies in Kuwait. Cynthia studied to be a nurse and married a Kuwaiti man, Jamon Abdulla Bou Rabee.
We sat on an old couch, with foam- rubber stuffing bursting from the cushion seams, as she slowly rocked her baby. Though she spoke perfect English, Cynthia had adopted Arab mannerisms and inflection. She gestured liberally and had the disconcerting habit of smiling gently when overcome with sadness.
"My husband was returning from the mosque last Thursday with his two cousins," she said. "That was when the Iraqis got him. I could see him arguing with the Iraqi soldiers from my window, and they took him away, guns in his back."
She stopped and ran her fingers through her long, jet black hair. The tears that began to fill her eyes reflected the flickering candlelight. "I am so scared of what happened to him sometimes that I think I will go out of my mind. But I must be strong for them," she said, glancing at her children.
Cynthia said she believes Jamon, an airport worker, may have been taken by the Iraqis to unload airplanes in Baghdad. "I don't really know," she said, smiling helplessly. "He was such a proud man. He is a proud man.
"He would not let them order him about without a fight." The tears were overflowing and began rolling down her cheeks. "Can you help me? We don't have much food, and I do not know what will happen if the Iraqis come back."
Amro reassured her that the Iraqis were gone and not coming back, and we left some bottled water, a few tins of tuna fish and some American dollars on her coffee table.
"I would like to go back to Arizona some day," she said, "but not without Jamon." I promised to ask the colonel traveling with our party for news of her husband and visit her again in the morning. It was a futile gesture and she knew it but thanked me anyway. Cynthia unlocked the six latches that guard her apartment, and we filed down the stairs.
"There are so many like her," Amro explained, shaking his head. When I returned to her apartment the next morning, I knocked for fifteen minutes, but there was no answer at her door.
KUWAIT CITY HAD BEEN held captive for seven long months. On the morning of February 28, it was set free.
When we arrived the night before, the city was still a combat zone, a place where a terrified populace huddled within homes, the streets under the rule of martial law administered by nervous ground resistance fighters, some as young as thirteen, whose favorite activity consisted of pointing their Soviet-made rifles at passing cars. But as dawn broke, the fear melted away, and the celebration began.
Civilization as they knew it was primitive. The entire city was beaten and dirty from months of neglect and abuse, with garbage and the carrion of war strewn everywhere. But that didn't stop the Kuwaitis from throwing a party that one American Marine, on his way to guard the reopened U.S. Embassy, said "must have made the liberation of Paris look like a slow night in Albuquerque."
From every doorway they came, honking their car horns, clutching Kuwaiti flags, embracing soldiers and reporters--anyone who looked American--and climbing onto the Saudi tanks parked in the streets.
This cathartic love-in went on all morning, climaxing in a parade down the coastal road to Flag Center, a kind of public park across from the seashore. There Kuwaiti children, dressed in the national colors of red, green and white, swarmed around reporters, begging for autographs. Normally reluctant about having their pictures taken, these Kuwaitis pleaded for a photograph--as long as an American was in the frame.
"Jesus Christ," Robert Unger, a reporter for the Kansas City Star, exclaimed. "I feel like MacArthur returning to the Philippines." Hundreds danced, sang and watched the soldiers fire their guns up into the air for hours, once again causing the easily rattled press corps, which is generally unaccustomed to automatic-weapons fire before breakfast, to jump out of their seats and look for cover--to the great amusement of the Kuwaitis.
"God bless Bush, God bless America," the crowd chanted. Major Hal Walker, from Sierra Vista, leading the Marines into the Embassy compound, laughed and flashed the "thumbs up" sign at the ebullient Kuwaitis. "It's nice to see people in other countries holding an American flag with no intention of burning it," he said.
But as much as the scene looked like a commercial for President Bush's New World Order, it was not all peace, hope and good will toward man. There was a darker side to this gathering.
As more Kuwaitis arrived at the celebration, talk began to turn to the "Palestinian problem." Amro appeared with dozens of his friends, who sat in a large circle on the ground and began a discussion in serious, harsh tones. Normally, when Arabs speak of Palestine, they do so in terms of efforts to regain the land from the Israelis. But this "problem" was of a different nature.
"It is a very good day," Amro told the group, speaking in English for my benefit. "We may one day soon have what the Americans call a `new order.' I think we can have peace. It is a good day to be free. But we must first deal with the traitors, the Palestinians, among us!"
During the occupation, Amro explained, the Palestinians in Kuwait supported Saddam, because the Iraqi leader attempted to link the issue of Palestinian independence on the West Bank with any possible withdrawal from Kuwait. The Palestinians, some Kuwaitis say, were given special privileges--only their children were allowed to attend school, and their families were provided with extra food and healthcare.
In return, some Palestinians allegedly provided information on Kuwaiti resistance fighters and helped the Iraqis hunt down "subversives." The bad blood between the two groups runs deep, and the Palestinians say they are fearful of reprisals. Consequently, even as the Kuwaitis were flocking out of their homes to celebrate, Palestinians were locking themselves in.
One Palestinian, who observed the victory parade from the nearby Hilton Hotel lobby because he was afraid to walk the streets with the Kuwaitis, said he was considering applying for asylum with the American Embassy. "The Kuwaitis think we have acted as traitors toward them," he said. "Some of us did. But not all. But now we will all suffer."
He may be right. As Amro and his friends talked, an American, Linda Williams--who has spent ten years in Kuwait as an oil company administrative secretary and who returned to the city hours after its liberation--listened intently and shook her head. "It's all peace and happiness today, but don't be fooled by all this. Tensions are very high, and once the initial euphoria passes, things will change very quickly. Reprisals will come soon."
Although the Kuwaiti government says it will not allow any violence to befall the resident Palestinian population, it may be making promises it cannot keep. Once Kuwaitis take stock of the almost total destruction of their nation's infrastructure, resentment toward collaborators is likely to deepen. Moreover, there are traditional forces at work in Kuwait that will almost certainly defy government control.
In his best-selling book on the Middle East From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote that in the "lonely world . . . of the desert [Arabs] learned that the only way to survive was by letting others know that if they violated you in any way, you would make them pay, and pay dearly." It is a merciless Darwinian ethic, known on the streets of America as "payback," that has dominated regional politics since long before the British drew the arbitrary lines that divide the Gulf states. It is a tradition that seems to be the driving political and cultural force even today.
As we listened to Amro and his friends talk, they suddenly leapt to their feet, pointing and yelling at a young Arab man across the street. He began running down the road toward the beach, followed immediately by Saudi soldiers warning him of land mines in the sand. I asked Amro why they were yelling at the man. "He is one of the Palestinian traitors," he said. "We are now talking about revenge upon them. His time will come when there are not so many soldiers around."
The group went back to its animated discussion, working out the details of a neighborhood "committee" that would "deal with" traitors. Amro asked the group, in English, "Where can we find the guns?" What guns, I did not know, but the purpose for them was clear.
I looked over at Williams, who shrugged her shoulders. "See what I mean?" she said.
On this, their liberation day, before the Kuwaitis even had a chance to bury their tortured dead, they were plotting ways to take more lives. Later, as I walked with Amro back to his apartment, I asked quietly if the terror he had in mind for the Palestinians wasn't identical to the tactics of the occupying Iraqis.
He looked at me in surprise, shaking his head vigorously. "It is not the same. [The Palestinians] do not deserve to live."
But how will your "committee" determine, I pressed, which Palestinians collaborated and which did not?
"They did not worry about guilt or innocence when they helped the Iraqis, and neither should we," he replied, turning away and setting his eyes forward.
"You are not from here. You cannot understand. You will never understand." He went inside and closed his door.
This war is over.
But in the Middle East, it is never too early to start planning the next one.
Suddenly the gray fog turned black, and the afternoon glow disappeared completely, totally wrapping the convoy in darkness.
"Throughout history, the blotting-out of the sun has been associated with the end of the world," he mused. "Maybe Armageddon is upon us."
There was no electricity in the dark city, but in the moonlight the surrounding carnage was easily visible.
"They shot him there," Atta said. And there were three bullet holes in the wall, very near the trickles of blood.
"They would kill some of us for petty offenses like walking on the wrong side of the street," Amro said. "No one was safe."
The entire city was beaten and dirty from months of neglect and abuse, with garbage and the carrion of war strewn everywhere.
On their liberation day, before the Kuwaitis even had a chance to bury their tortured dead, they were plotting ways to take more lives.
