April 28th was an overcast day. Our BBC convoy drove for hours across the border from Jordan. As we entered Baghdad we could smell smoke. Many buildings were set on fire. Strangely, the city didn’t feel chaotic. It was in shock. I hired a local fixer, Muhammed, and for the next six weeks we would drive together around Baghdad, Najaf, Karbala, Falluja, talking to people and collecting stories.

It was shortly after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. I was summoned into the office of the newsroom editor of BBC Arabic radio in London. I had joined them six months ago, and he wanted to know if I’d be willing to go on assignment to Baghdad.  

The “war” was over. Saddam Hussein had disappeared. An old colleague of mine, Tareq Ayoub, had just been killed in a US missile attack on Al Jazeera’s office and I was still in shock over his death. I had to convince my parents that it was safe to go, which wasn’t easy. This was going to be my first foreign assignment. 

But the word “foreign” feels wrong. I had never been to Baghdad, yet growing up in Kuwait I had been exposed to Iraqi culture because we could receive transmission from Iraqi state television. I grew up on Iraqi dramas and comedies. I was a huge fan of stars like Shatha Salem and Muhammed Hussein Abdul Rahim. I understood the Iraqi accent. Iraq was the beacon of Arab nationalism. A symbol of Arab dignity in the face of Western imperialism. Although very few would admit this today, Saddam Hussein, to us, was a hero. 

Many Palestinians had hoped that the 1991 Gulf War would be a decisive moment in history. Saddam was firing Scud missiles into Israel. My family, like many Palestinian expats in Kuwait, had to relocate and adjust to a new life in Jordan. Such was the fervor for Saddam’s war against Western imperialism that many people claimed to have seen his face reflected on the moon. Some believed his rockets would liberate Palestine. We were deaf to everything else we should have known about him.  

This enthusiasm gradually waned over the years, and by 2003 we no longer rooted for him but our hearts ached for the country. We all felt kicked in the stomach that his downfall came at the hands of the West. 

April 28th was an overcast day. Our BBC convoy drove for hours across the border from Jordan. As we entered Baghdad we could smell smoke. Many buildings were set on fire. Looters who had started their rampage into official buildings two weeks ago were still going in and grabbing anything that was left in those gutted buildings. The streets were lined with garbage bags.  Garbage collectors had not been showing up for work since the city’s fall. Traffic lights were out of order. There was no police, and yet somehow traffic organised itself.  

Strangely, the city didn’t feel chaotic. It was in shock. 

Beneath the clamour of looters and street vendors – I had never seen so much alcohol being sold on the streets as I did in Baghdad at that time- there was an eerie layer of silence. People appeared dumbfounded. It was the kind of shock you feel when someone suddenly slaps you in the face – those few seconds after the assault when you’re frozen, trying to understand what just happened. Iraq was still frozen from the slap and it would remain that way for weeks to come. 

I hired a local fixer, Muhammed, and for the next six weeks we would drive together around Baghdad, Najaf, Karbala, Falluja, talking to people and collecting stories. It was so easy because people wanted to talk, to vent, to curse the dictator or the Americans. Sometimes they just wanted me to record their greetings to send to relatives in Kuwait or Jordan or the US. Working for radio made things easier. People would talk into the microphone and say whatever they wanted because there was no camera to identify them. 

In the first week or two, I was filing “feel good” stories: the first football match that took place after the end of the US-led operation; the story of two brothers who took some of the most treasured items from the Iraqi national museum to protect them from the looters; the journey of Shia pilgrims to Najaf and Karbala for religious celebrations. 

But as time went by, things became grim. 

One morning, a group of disheveled men came and stood at the barbed wire surrounding the Palestine Hotel- the temporary headquarters for the transitional government in Iraq  which later became known as the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). They had come from the Kurdish town of Irbil after being chased away from their homes by Kurds. These men were part of a large Arab community that was settled in Irbil as part of the regime’s campaign to “Arabise” the Kurdish region. The Kurds were taking their revenge on them. I tried to record an interview with the men, but they screamed into the microphone out of desperation and anger. The sound was so distorted that I couldn’t tell that story with their own voices. 

Many Iraqis who were exiled in Iran returned to claim their old homes, now mostly inhabited by poor families. Sitting in their living rooms, men and women cried because they had no power to stop their imminent eviction. They spoke into the microphone firmly believing that I was going to help them simply by telling their stories. All I could say was “inshallah”. 

One day, Muhammed called to tell me that people were going to dig up a mass grave in Salman Pak to the south of Baghdad. We got there before the digging began and found several media crews on site. It was the first time there were more journalists than Iraqis and the people there didn’t like that. They tried to chase us away. “What have you done for us?” shouted one man, but Muhammed stepped in and convinced the diggers that it was important for the world to see what happened. There were many sites like that around Iraq. People knew about those graves but never dared go anywhere near them while the former regime was still in power. 

Looking at a group of bereaved mothers crying and waiting patiently for the digging to begin certainly made me feel like an intruder. One of them told me how her son was dragged by soldiers from their home more than 20 years ago, how she pleaded for them not to take him away. She had no idea if he was buried here but came in the hope that she could find his remains and give them a decent burial. 

“Where are you from?” asked one of the diggers. His face turned grim when I told him I was Palestinian. He looked away and carried on digging, then suddenly turned back to me. “At least Sharon is giving you back Gaza!”.  

It was May 2003, and there was news that the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was planning an official strategy to pull out Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip. I knew better than to correct a grieving man searching for his relative’s body. But I would go on to hear that same sentence from several interviewees. I decided it would be better to remain quiet. 

Then there were the children.  

Many of them were sleeping under American tanks that were stationed at Firdous Square and they were almost always high from sniffing glue. People said that two orphanages had been inexplicably evacuated by American soldiers during the military assault. The same thing apparently happened with a psychiatric hospital in Shama’ia. Walking around Baghdad, I would occasionally spot someone who seemed to have a mental health disorder. It didn’t take long for the staff of the orphanages and the hospital to get back to work and try to bring everyone back. They didn’t know who was going to run those facilities or when they would receive their next paychecks, but they were duty bound to save those children and patients. 

One Friday, Muhammed and I decided to take a break and go for a stroll in Shorja, Baghdad’s famous street market. I took the sound recorder with me just in case. 

“Who wants photos of Uday and Qusay?” shouted one of the vendors. He had stacks of photos from parties of Saddam Hussein’s infamous sons. Relatively speaking, they were benign. In one photo, Qusay had his arm around a blonde woman in a low-cut dress. In another, Uday was surrounded by women. He was holding a rifle and firing shots in the air, while the women duck down with their fingers in their ears. None of the women looked like they were having fun. 

I was sifting through stacks of CDs in one stall, going through bootleg copies of movies and pop albums, when one title caught my attention: “the gassing of the Kurds”. 

The vendor was selling all sorts of gruesome videos, many of which had been looted from the offices of the security apparatus. They say Saddam Hussein demanded that executions be documented, either as proof or a deterrent to dissidents. As the vendor described the content of some of the videos to me, a customer came over and asked him if he had a video of the chemical attack in Halabja. He paid for the copy and left. 

Later, the CPA set up its headquarters in the Green Zone. We received an invitation by email to attend a briefing on Friday May 23rd. By then, the BBC had set up its office in a beautiful two story villa. Top guns from Jeremy Bowen to Jon Sweeney, Stephen Sackur, Barbara Plett, Caroline Hawley and others, were coming in rotation. They had received the same invitation, but did not intend to go because it was taking place on Friday – a weekend. 

I arrived at the press briefing and found only one journalist there – CNN’s Jane Arraf. CPA staff waited patiently in a large room full of empty plastic chairs. They decided to start with just the two of us. The briefing everyone ignored was to announce that Paul Bremer, the head of the  CPA, had dissolved the Iraqi army. 

As soon as we left the building, I called the newsroom in London and went live on air with the story. BBC Arabic radio ran the story as a headline two hours before the rest of the BBC picked it up. It’s not exactly a triumph for me that the only scoop in my career was due to the fact that other journalists didn’t show up. However, I did feel smug that day when the BBC’s top correspondents came down the staircase with their notebooks to get the story from me. 

That was a time when local journalists couldn’t even dream of being hired by Western media as anything more than local fixers or drivers. They had all the knowledge but not the right ethnicity. I would watch Western reporters from various outlets taking notes from their Iraqi fixers and translators. Many of the Iraqis had​​​​ the local knowledge, as well as the ability to sum up complex information in a concise manner – a key skill for every journalist should have. People in the industry would say that’s just the way it is. Iraqis – in the time that I was there, at least – were not trusted to tell their own story. Who knows what their biases are? Were they anti-Baathist? Or just pretending to be so in order to get work. On many field trips, I watched some Western reporters behave as if they were an extension of the US-led coalition. 

The worst such incident came during a press conference at the Iraqi Ministry of Health to announce that a new high-ranking official had been appointed. One reporter exposed that official as a member of the Baath party. I could see the official getting tense. The conference ended abruptly and he was  quietly escorted out of the building. An American journalist from Associated Press chased him. He kept getting in his way, shoving his face in the official’s nose, asking him in broken Arabic to confess whether he was a member of the Baath party. At one point, the journalist would have grabbed the official if it weren’t for the assistants who screamed at him and put an end to the spectacle. 

By the end of my six week stint in Iraq, the piles of garbage had become higher. I can see the bottom layers now becoming dry and baking slowly in the sun. We would hear explosions from time to time, but were told this was just American troops blowing up Iraqi weapons’ ordinance.  

But there was another story emerging. 

The road we took to Iraq from Jordan was now closed because it was no longer safe. There was talk about armed groups attacking both military and media convoys. The only way out of here was on board a British military plane into Kuwait. It was my first time back in Kuwait since my family left in 1991. Some would say it was Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait that year that sealed Iraq’s fate.