The Circuit (13 page)

The colonel’s response was cold and curt. ‘We have many casualties. You are welcome to join the queue and see what bodies we have,’ he said.

Martin and I spent hours looking at dead Iraqis; from Fedayeen and civilians, right the way down to body parts and lumps of meat. Of the bodies that were identifiable, none matched the description of Fred and Hussein. As for the lumps of tissue, none revealed any identifying marks. We soon realized that if the rest of our search went the same way, ITN would have to bring in DNA experts at a later date.

There was still a slim possibility that Fred and Hussein were alive somewhere in the city. With that in mind, Martin and I left the hospital and began plastering telegraph poles and walls around the city with the ‘missing’ posters we’d been given in Kuwait. The posters generated a lot of interest as we taped them up. The downside was many people claimed they could tell us where the missing men were – for a price.

The people looking to make a quick buck were fairly easy to spot. But when one man told us he’d seen two men resembling Fred and Hussein in a hospital near Saddam’s palace on the east side of Basra, we had to check it out. We asked the man to take us there. He jumped into our vehicle. I didn’t want to rely on him to translate for us, so I called Tariq and asked him to meet us. Tariq was waiting at the hospital gates when we arrived. We thanked our ‘guide’ for his help and told him we’d take it from there. Just as we’d feared, he demanded money for his services. I gave him bottles of water and food for his family instead. He seemed satisfied enough.

Even though we’d probably been led there on a lie, Martin and I still felt the hospital was worth searching. Tariq waved us through the gates to the main car park. The place was heaving with angry, desperate people trying to find missing loved ones. A group of six doctors in white coats was engaged in a very heated, emotional exchange with a crowd of no fewer than fifty local residents. The doctors were struggling to maintain order. Voices were getting louder and louder, arms were flailing and people were pushing one another.

We showed one of the doctors a poster of Fred and Hussein and asked him if he knew anything about them. The doctor hadn’t seen them but said we were welcome to search the morgue. He accompanied us to the back of the hospital. Even before we turned the corner, Martin and I knew we were in for a grisly task. The stench of decaying flesh was overpowering. When we got to the morgue, we understood why. The hospital’s cold storage unit was big enough to accommodate only about a dozen bodies and the overflow had been placed in two unrefrigerated, twenty-foot sea containers. The stench from the corpses baking inside was so intense it seeped through the metal doors.

Rows of people were lined up to look for their loved ones. The doctor explained our situation to the morgue keeper, a little old man with an expressionless face who was kind enough to let us jump the queue. He led us to one of the sea containers and opened the door. The stench hit us like a rugby scrum; it nearly had us on our backs straight away. Martin graciously volunteered to have the first look. I was happy to oblige him. He put a handkerchief to his nose, inhaled deeply and ducked inside. After three minutes Martin emerged, blue from holding his breath and gagging from the stench. ‘That was horrendous,’ he said, doubling over like he was about to vomit. ‘There’s no need for you to go, Bob. They’re not in there.’

‘I believe you,’ I said, slapping him on the back. ‘I’ll give it a miss.’

We spent the rest of the afternoon visiting other locations but found nothing. As the day dragged on, general elation gave way to lawlessness. Chaos gained traction with each passing hour and by late afternoon full-blown anarchy had broken out in neighbourhoods around the city. Basra was no place to be after nightfall. We made our way back to the hub, still no closer to finding Fred and Hussein.

At the hub, Martin and I tried to avoid the press corps and keep ourselves to ourselves. By that point, I, at least, had given up hope of finding Fred and Hussein alive. I had seen dozens of dead bodies that day and watched dozens more Iraqis looking for missing loved ones. The desperate faces, the smell of death and lumps of lifeless flesh rammed home what Tariq’s intelligence had already suggested; Fred and Hussein were dead and no one could tell us what had happened to their bodies.

I was depressed. I had always felt like we were racing to catch up, having landed in Iraq ten days after the incident. In my mind, our main goal had been to bring Fred and Hussein back alive. I knew the only way we could succeed with the assignment was to tackle it aggressively – which we did. From probing the edges of Basra before the invasion to cultivating Tariq as a contact, we’d pushed our skills and luck to the limits.

Yet, despite all our efforts, we hadn’t even succeeded in finding the missing men’s bodies. That was the toughest blow of all – not being able to offer Fred and Hussein’s families some sort of resolution.
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It was difficult to accept that we’d come away with nothing. The only concrete accomplishment we could point to was that we’d clarified what had happened to Terry and Daniel.

More details of the incident have come to light since my involvement in the early days of the investigation. Tariq’s intelligence that Terry Lloyd had been loaded into a green minibus was spot on. It was eventually determined and widely reported that Terry was wounded by the Iraqis in the initial contact and fatally shot in the head by US troops as they fired on the minibus. In 2006, an Oxfordshire coroner ruled that Terry was killed unlawfully.
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What happened to Terry and his crew was horrendous and my heart goes out to the men’s families. It was a terrible tragedy, one which I dearly hope others will learn from. In my view, journalists should never attempt to report unilaterally from war zones without taking along a properly trained and skilled security adviser.

Let me be clear; I do recognize the need for journalists to report from conflict areas independently and away from the restrictions of military embeds. But those assignments must be approached with the utmost caution. Nine tenths of a unilateral operation’s success hinges on the planning. The ITN lads had thought to bring extra stores of food and petrol but they didn’t take a security adviser, someone who could have proactively kept them out of trouble. Perhaps an adviser would have alerted them to the limitations of taping the letters TV to the sides of their vehicles. An adviser could have interpreted the Fedayeen waving as a sign of aggression and not, as Daniel thought, a gesture of surrender (if indeed an adviser would have allowed the clients to go that far forward in the first place).

Would the outcome have been different if Terry had taken a security adviser? It’s impossible to say. At the very least, Terry’s tragic ending was a wake-up call for the ITN crew stationed at the hub. They were very anxious to go to Basra and start shooting stories, but they were wise enough not to attempt it alone. They asked Martin and me if there was any chance we could take them into the city. We were happy to help them out.

Later that night, we called the bureau in Kuwait and they confirmed that they would like us to shift focus temporarily to looking after the hub crew. That night, I took some comfort in the thought that perhaps Terry hadn’t died in vain. ITN had learned the value of enlisting the help of security advisers in hostile environments. Surely Terry’s death would have convinced other British media organizations to do the same.

CHAPTER 13

As soon as I saw her, I knew there’d be hell on. The scene before me was utter bedlam: hundreds of people in the street; most of them young men, hauling away whatever they could get their hands on: furniture, carpets, paintings, appliances, refrigerators, TVs; you name it. The sound of AK47 gunfire cracked from the smoke-filled windows of the upper floors. Below, looters poured out of the burning building like cockroaches. Some ran away with what they could carry while others formed spontaneous clusters as they fought over the best spoils. Carving a path through the middle of this mayhem was an old man sat atop a tractor, sparks flying everywhere as he dragged an industrial-sized generator behind him.

The British ‘liberation’ of Basra was entering its third day and the people were letting their hair down, to put it mildly. The mostly Shiite residents of Iraq’s southern capital had suffered some of the worst atrocities doled out by Saddam and his Sunni regime. The preceding twelve years had been especially brutal. Not only had the people endured harsh reprisals for the failed Shiite uprising in the wake of the First Gulf War, they’d also lived with the crushing deprivation of economic sanctions.

The fear that had suffocated the people of Basra lifted with the arrival of the British Army. There once was a time when invading armies pillaged. In Basra, the liberated were the looters.

Of course, nothing attracts the attention of the international media like a lawless free-for-all and Basra was no exception. ITN had asked us to break away from our assigned task of looking for Fred Nerac and Hussein Osman and accompany a correspondent and crew as they filmed around the city. I for one welcomed the diversion. By then I was fairly certain that the missing men had been killed. The sweeps of Basra’s hospitals and morgues had turned up nothing and for the moment the investigation had stalled.

Martin and I were well positioned to help a crew of enterprising journalists. We had already searched every corner of the city for the two missing lads. We also had Tariq, our local contact. We asked him to alert us if he saw anything he thought might be of interest to a news crew. Our primary aim was to keep the ITN crew safe but with Tariq on our side we could take it a step further and hopefully help them trounce the competition.

The morning after Basra fell, Martin and I transferred ourselves and the ITN crew to Saddam’s palace complex on the east side of the city. The gaudy splendour of our new accommodation couldn’t have been a starker contrast to the Spartan conditions of the hub. The crew weren’t content for long, though, to film the palace’s gilded staircases and gold-plated loo fittings. They wanted to hit the streets of Basra and get stuck in, but there was no way Martin and I could take them there without doing a recce. By way of compromise, we agreed to take a camera so they’d at least have some b-roll for their broadcast that night.

Many of the streets on the city’s perimeter were relatively quiet. At that point, the liberation was being measured in hours, not days. The majority of the population still weren’t convinced it was genuine and many were staying behind closed doors waiting to see what would happen.

One of the first things Martin and I encountered was a British foot patrol dumping boxloads of weapons and ammunition abandoned by the Iraqi military into an oil-slicked canal. It wasn’t an efficient disposal method; the tides would wash the boxes back up on shore and some were already floating to the top. I’m not criticizing the lads who were doing it. I’m sure if they’d had a choice, they would have loaded the weapons and ammo onto a truck and driven them to a non-populated area for decommissioning. But the Brits didn’t have the manpower or equipment to do that.

A few miles up the road, we encountered our first sporadic outbreak of violence; two rival Iraqi factions shooting at each other across a roundabout. There was no way of telling whether their dispute was ethnic, clan based or a business deal gone wrong. Blood or treasure, Martin and I weren’t going to hang around and find out.

The next scene we drove past was another sign of things to come in Basra: a small riot outside a bank building. Later we found out that a group of locals who’d robbed the bank had been apprehended by a British foot patrol. In the ensuing mêlée, a British soldier had been shot in the stomach.

Amazingly, just two hundred yards further up the road, we stumbled upon a completely opposite scene: a British patrol wearing their regimental berets and no body armour handing out water and food to a very large crowd of obviously grateful locals. It was another example of the British Army moving swiftly from an aggressive posture to one aimed at winning hearts and minds. Hundreds of people had gathered round and the soldiers were working hard to maintain some kind of order. It was like trying to feed the five thousand without the aid of a miracle. Despite the turmoil, I got the impression that the majority of Basrans were glad to see the Brits. After all, they represented the only organized authority left in their city.

Our recce completed, we headed back to the palace with a few minutes of daylight to spare; the situation was far too unpredictable to be on the streets after dark. While driving to the palace we were suddenly caught out by a huge fireball thundering above our heads. It shot out of the upper windows of a building like dragon’s breath. Below, we saw a group of Iraqi children darting in and out of the entrance. Children are fearless by nature and rarely know when enough’s enough.

Before, when Martin and I had seen a group of Iraqi youths playing with unexploded ordnance near the Terry Lloyd incident area, we couldn’t afford to intervene. This time, however, we could. I got out of the vehicle to investigate while Martin kept the engine running in case we needed to move quickly (there’s nothing scarier than an angry child with a loaded weapon and some of those kids could have been armed). I told the kids in Arabic to stay away from the building.

‘La, la’ (No, no), they said, pointing towards a ground-floor window.

I looked inside and saw rows of boxes stacked five deep containing high-explosive mortar shells. Sooner or later, the heat of the fire would set them off, possibly triggering a chain reaction that could take out the entire block.

‘Mushkilla, mutafajeraat!’ (Problem, explosives!) I said to the kids.

They didn’t listen to me, perhaps because I was a foreigner, but probably because I was an adult. Luckily, an older boy who’d been watching from across the street came over to ask me what I was doing. After explaining the situation to him, he cracked one of the kids on the back of the head and ordered the whole lot out of there.