Waiting for Iraqis to flee 'Shock & Awe'
Posted: Thursday, March 20, 2008 9:44 AM
Filed Under:
Baghdad, Iraq
By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
Five years ago today I was standing in a large, recently built UN refugee camp inside Jordan, on its desert border with Iraq. With my NBC news team of cameraman Maurice Roper, soundman Stan Ouse, producer Paul Hijaz, and engineer Lenny Venezia , we were filing live shots on the hour from our, well, more modest version of David Bloom’s ‘Bloom-mobile’ – a customized white KIA pick-up truck-turned-satellite link we named ‘Odd Job’.
The story here was obvious, at least to us: when ‘Shock & Awe’ rained down on Iraq, Iraqis would flee to Jordan, perhaps by the hundreds of thousands. The international aid community certainly knew it – that’s why it built Camp A – for Iraqi refugees – and Camp B for non-Iraqis – in record time. But there were no long lines of Iraqis. In fact, there were no Iraqis coming over at all.
Still, we didn’t flinch: we filed “empty camp” live shots for at least week into “Shock & Awe”. Then we did what we call “as-lives’” – pre-recorded reports, to camera, from the empty camps – for another week or so.
Palestinians arrive
By week three a few Palestinian families DID make it to the so-called no-man’s land between Iraq and Jordan. These Palestinians were, in a sense, fleeing the war: abused at the hands of Iraqis, rankled by the favoritism shown over the years to “our Palestinian brothers” by Saddam Hussein who – at this point – was losing power. We did the Palestinian refugee story but no news program took it.
One day a couple of trucks full of disoriented Sudanese workers actually entered Camp B. We were back on air, LIVE. Finally, there were “refugee camp” pictures to be shot: families carrying worldly goods in plastic bags; setting up as best they could, with tired, screaming kids, and only thin burlap tents to protect them from the freezing desert winds.
We shot footage of the Sudanese – perhaps 50 in all - getting their first decent meal in the camp’s soup kitchen and we asked a few UN officials in the camp why no Iraqis were heading our way. I recall one Western aid worker telling me, ‘’I guess we just got it wrong. But, in this case, getting it wrong is good. It’s much better if Iraqis seek shelter inside Iraq.’’
'Getting it wrong'
It was still the very early days of a chapter I’ll call “Getting it Wrong” if and when I write that book. Iraqis didn’t flee to Jordan because those who HAD to move sought help with extended families. Others who were on the brink of fleeing didn’t because they feared they would lose the little they had if they DID leave. They got THAT right. We didn’t.
After THREE weeks of covering the empty refugee camp, waiting for the story which never came, we packed up and rebased to Amman. Not for long.
On April 4, 2003, hearing reports of clashes between coalition forces and Saddam’s Republican Guard in western Iraq, near the transit town of Rutbah, we repacked Odd Job and Minnow (our armored Land Rover) and returned to the desert reaches of the Iraqi-Jordanian border. Our new base became a two-camel way station of a town called Ruweishid, just a few miles from the border, where we found a few beds inside a derelict compound.
This is where we made our NEXT mistake: we decided we’d be the “Western Front” of NBC’s coverage of the war. Our thinking was this: any day now, Saddam’s remaining forces would collapse under the boots of the advancing US military juggernaut. US troops, after “clearing” Baghdad, would move west along Highway 10, past Fallujah, and Ramadi, opening that lifeline for goods coming from Jordan.
Border problems
The Iraqi border police would simply melt away. Odd Job and Minnow would be able to make their way into Baghdad from the newly cleared Route 10, and we would – finally – join the ranks of David Bloom, advancing from the South, or Richard Engel (then with another network), watching from a perch at the Palestine Hotel inside the capital.
But that plan – as good as it looked on paper – didn’t materialize either. We got it wrong, again. Oh, the Iraqi border guards melted away fast enough. But the Jordanian border police sure didn’t. They were ordered to keep a “normal” border no matter what was happening on the other side – an effort, we were told, to show the Arab world that Jordan was NOT part of a war King Abdullah disapproved of. (Despite reports that Jordanian Special Forces were helping U.S. “allies” into Iraq from the West).
Now, normally, journalist visas, approved by officials in Baghdad, were necessary to cross that border with Jordan. But there were no visa officials in Baghdad any more – they’d fled their offices days before, once the bombing got too close. So, we were stuck.
Looking back, it was no great loss – in the end there would be no “western front” – another miscalculation – as U.S. and coalition forces got bogged down in the looting and chaos of Baghdad and never really moved en masse to the Western border.
Still, as a reporter who’d covered Iraq for a long time, it WAS hard to watch it all unfold on a TV monitor…those iconic images of Saddam’s statue falling onto Firdos Square…seen from the confines of our satellite truck, Odd Job, in the freezing Jordanian desert.
Baghdad in flames
Then, on the morning of April 11, two days after Saddam fell, we – and fresh NBC reinforcements - were issued “special case” visas by the Iraqi embassy in Amman and – amazingly - the Jordanian border police let our 14-car “news convoy” through.
For the first time since leaving Baghdad in mid-January, I was moving EASTward again. I got to lead the convoy, in Minnow, feeling relatively brave behind all the armor. Fifteen hours later, we entered a Baghdad in flames, in the dark, trying to find an unfamiliar hotel with a broken GPS handset, swerving in and out of several firefights along the way. But we had made it, late, but safely, 23 days after Shock & Awe’s opening salvo.
That wasn’t the end of the mistakes. Only days later, we accompanied former UN weapons inspector and NBC News consultant David Kay to the old Tuweitha nuclear facility, south of Baghdad, on a very strong hunch we would find traces of WMD. But there weren’t any.
Jim Maceda is an NBC News correspondent based in London, who has extensively covered Iraq.
