Motlagh, a 2004 alumnus of our own University of Virginia, offered a deeply reported and gripping account of the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. It has emerged as the definitive account of the three-day coordinated assault on India.

This marks four National Magazine Awards and eighteen nominations for VQR in the past six years. Congratulations go out to Jason and the entire staff of VQR!

The winners of the print Ellies will be announced in an April 22 ceremony at Lincoln Center. We’re in the running for two more awards: Photojournalism and Fiction.

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An armored American soldier in the rearview mirror of an armored vehicle. (Dimiter Kenarov)

Taking cover from death, I live in a tomb. My CHU (Containerized Housing Unit) is tightly girded by twelve-foot-high concrete T-walls. Right in front of my door, a slab of wall has been pushed slightly forward, like an oversize tombstone, so I can sidle in and out through the convenient gaps. The T-walls would not withstand a direct mortar attack; they should, theoretically, make me feel safer.

US troops sleep in a cemetery of CHUs. At dusk they lie down in their fortified tombs, and come out at dawn, like vampires recoiling from the bright Baghdad sun. When they need to journey out into the Red Zone, they use giant steel caskets on wheels called MRAPs and wrap themselves like mummies in thick-plated body armor.

It’s all about survival.

The US Army believes Iraq is the Underworld, and to survive in the Underworld, one has to prepare accordingly. “Think like the dead” should be the unofficial motto of the Iraq War. To blend in, American soldiers are feigning death.

But Iraq is not the Underworld. It is a devastated country, poor, tragic, but it is not dead. There is little or no electricity, little or no garbage collection. Unemployment is rampant. Corruption is the norm. All the middle-class professionals, who emigrated during the war, the individuals who could have made the real difference here, are never coming back. The lack of educational opportunities for the new generation of kids is perhaps the most serious and underrated problem. And yet, in spite of everything, people still laugh and cry and go shopping and talk on their cell phones and drink tea and gossip and have families and have lovers and play soccer and just walk aimlessly down the streets. The ruler of this country is not heartless Pluto but a vicious plutocracy.

Iraq is still dangerous and explosive, no doubt. Sectarian killings, though down from a few years ago, have not ceased. Occasional bombs throw the cities into panic. Militias are roaming the dark alleys, doing their dirty job, but nowadays they prefer handguns with silencers rather than AKs. Quietly, quietly, the war goes on, and there seems to be no stopping that. But Iraq is not the Underworld. Iraq is not Hell.

Among all the terrible blunders that the US has committed in Iraq—the lies, the lack of coherent political strategy, the abuse of prisoners, the atrocious waste of money, the privatization of the military sector—none seems more ruinous to the war effort than the failure to recognize that simple fact. In the American imagination, the Tigris might as well be Lethe. IEDs, EFPs, IDFs: these are the infernal acronyms burning in the heads of citizens and soldiers alike. For most of them Iraq remains an alien, mythical netherworld which they can see only through five inches of filthy ballistic glass. Many prefer not to venture outside the safety of the base at all. All hope abandon, ye who enter here. The cultural and emotional disconnect—the reality gap—between American and Iraqi citizens is cavernous. The notion that only those who have been in Iraq could have authentic opinions about this place is totally false: civilians at home have as accurate (or as distorted) an idea of what Iraq is as most troops on the ground.

A soldier bows his head at a ceremony on an American base in Baghdad. (Dimiter Kenarov)

Seven years into the war, Americans are more foreign to Iraq than ever. Part of this is a result of last year’s Security Agreement, which stipulated the withdrawal of US forces from all urban areas. Even so, it is obvious that for all this time Americans and Iraqis have failed to forge the most basic emotional bonds, apart from a few purely professional relationships. Always hiding behind their walls and armor, feigning death, pursing a risk-free policy at any price, the US Army has managed to keep casualty levels to a minimum, while gradually alienating the Iraqi populace and compromising the entire peace process. Iraqis are very social people, for whom personal contact and face-to-face interaction hold high importance. Unfortunately, the US command has been acting for years with more arrogance than amiability, underestimating the significance of the cultural dynamic. The rather short nine-month troop rotations have not helped the mission either: just when soldiers are getting to know their Iraqi counterparts better, just when a human familiarity of sorts develops, just when alliances are beginning to take hold, new faces arrive on the scene, with very different agendas in mind. Every nine months a new war in Iraq is born.

It is too late for regrets now. So many lives have been lost, so many opportunities wasted. The US government has removed Saddam Hussein, but the greater goal—that of transforming Iraqi society for the better—remains elusive. The recent Iraqi elections took place in a relatively calm security situation, but any genuine social gains are a long way off, if the peaceful political dialogue does not collapse in the meantime and Iranian radicalism does not engulf the country in another sectarian war.

US forces are now trying to make their exit from Iraq as quietly as possible. Perhaps, when they finally leave, tensions in Iraq will begin to subside. I certainly hope so, although I have my doubts. The US Army, whatever its faults, is still a strong balancing factor in the region, at least symbolically. It would be a mistake, then, to get out of this place in haste without so much as a backward glance. When Orpheus went into the Underworld to reclaim his dead wife Eurydice, he was warned not to look back on the way out, lest he lose her again. In this world, things are a little different. We’ve had enough myths.

Dimiter Kenarov is in Baghdad with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Learn more about this project on the Pulitzer website.

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Captain Donald Lipscomb on base in Baghdad. (Dimiter Kenarov)

[I met Captain Lipscomb in Baghdad. The following entry is an arranged text, culled from my conversations with him.—Dimiter Kenarov]

My Vietnamese name is Le Hoang Dung. My American name is Donald Lipscomb.

I was born in Vietnam in 1973. It was the year major combat ended, the year things started to fall apart. Father was a surgeon with the US Air Force. He met my mother in Saigon, on an American military base. That’s what I’ve been told.

Father went back to America the year after I was born. Mother took off after him soon after. She left me with my grandparents in Vietnam.

It was difficult, growing up. Always struggling. We left Saigon and moved to a farm near Lameng. Five people in all. My grandparents, my aunt, her husband, and me. I didn’t know much back then. Times were difficult. All the kids were picking on me. Growing up, I had to fight almost every day. Fistfights. Because I was half-white, half-Vietnamese nobody liked me. In 1975, when the Communists took over, grandpa had to hide me in a closet. He shaved my blond hair, rubbed charcoal all over me. Everybody knew what the Communists would do, if they found me.

My grandparents were poor. We grew rice but didn’t have much farmland. We always struggled. We’d cook a little rice, make soup out of it, so we’d have enough food for the family. I always wished I had my parents with me. I’d see kids from the neighborhood, their parents hugging them, and I’d start crying. It was difficult, but I was grateful I had my grandparents. They gave me their love and helped me survive.

I dropped out of school when I was in fifth grade. My grandparents didn’t have the money to pay for my schooling. I was twelve. At thirteen I started working the paddy fields, away from home, at the town of Mabua, by the border with Cambodia. I had to harvest rice, do all kinds of farm work. I was gone six to nine months every year.

When I was eighteen, I found out I could go to America, my dad being American. I didn’t know any English. I could barely write in Vietnamese. I left Vietnam in 1990. Before I arrived in the US, I was at a refugee camp in the Philippines. There I received the first letter from my mother.

I met my mother on May 16, 1991, in Seattle, Washington. There was a lot going through my head, but when I met her she didn’t show any emotion. At that point it didn’t really bother me. She told me she’d wanted to go back to Saigon but couldn’t. In the States she had married a man, not my father. And then, I guess, what she had left behind had started to fade away.

My mother told me my father’s name: Lipscomb. She told me he lived in Jackson, Mississippi. The Red Cross helped me track him down. The first time I spoke to my dad I could only say “Hello” and “How are you?” Later, my dad sent me a letter saying he apologized he hadn’t taken care of me. And that he wanted to do whatever it takes to pay back for the time he had lost. That letter was read to me by an interpreter. That letter touched my heart the most, and those words I remember to this day and will remember for the rest of my life.

I went to Job Corps in eastern Washington State. It’s the place where they give you an education and a vocation. I slowly started to learn English. I didn’t have good schooling, so I had to start everything from scratch. Not only language but everything. At Job Corps I learned how to cook. That was my vocation. My English was getting better and I spoke to my father more and more often. After graduation I started working as a cook. My first job was flipping burgers at the Burger King at Sea-Tac International Airport. That was 1993. I was sending money back home to my grandparents, helped them buy a house in Saigon. I even went to visit them.

In 1997 I decided to go to college. I started taking college classes at South Seattle Community College. I guess I decided to go to college because of my father. He was a doctor and I didn’t want him to have an uneducated son. I wanted him to be proud of me. It was hard, working full-time and studying. I failed a lot of classes but didn’t get embarrassed. I did not give up; that’s the whole thing. It took me four years to get my AA.

Right after graduation, in May 2001, I decided to join the American military. Vietnam didn’t even let me finish school. The American government opened its arms out for me. They gave me education, gave me opportunity. And that’s when I said to myself, it’s time to give something back to this country.

My father was happy when he heard I’d joined the military. He didn’t have any objections. We didn’t talk much about his experience in Vietnam. I never really asked him about that. As a doctor, he hadn’t seen much fighting.

The day my basic training began was on the morning of September 11th. I remember I was at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I had just received my first military ID. Then everything stopped that morning. It was very emotional. We were pissed off because our country was being attacked. We wanted to do whatever it takes. If we had to go to war, we’d go to war.

My unit didn’t get deployed, so I went back to university, Washington State University. I majored in international business and management of information systems. I jointed the ROTC. It took me two and a half years to get my BA and my commission. I found acceptance in the Army. There’s nobody more accepting than the military. That common bond, you can’t get it anywhere else.

After graduation, I moved down to California. I was with the engineer branch. I went to Officer Basic Course in 2005. Two months later, I went to Afghanistan as a platoon leader. It was a great experience because I was with an engineers’ company and we helped with the building of roads and schools for the Afghanis. And they were happy that we were there because they didn’t have any roads. They’d invite us to their houses for tea. If they found an IED, they’d come tell us. I came back from Afghanistan in 2007.

In Iraq now, I’m doing my job. I’m helping with the rotation of units. As a military man it doesn’t matter for me what the public perception is. I’m doing my job. We’re called upon to do our job. Wherever that is, doesn’t matter if it’s a good war or a bad war, it’s our job to defend out Constitution and our country.

Of course, growing up in Vietnam and seeing the aftermath of the war over there was important for me. Knowing how the American troops pulled out and left devastation for all of us who supported them. I don’t want to see the Iraqi people go through what we went through. And that’s my personal view. And I’m kind of happy we’re here and we’re making a difference. Even though I haven’t been outside of the base, I know from what people say that we’ve made good progress, we’ve helped this country develop and helped the good people in Iraq. Hopefully, by the time we pull out, the Iraqi people will be able to sustain themselves.

Dimiter Kenarov is in Baghdad with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Learn more about this project on the Pulitzer website.

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Reporting from the Front Lines of Pakistan and Afghanistan
Time: Thursday, March 18, 4:00 PM
Location: Harrison Institute Auditorium, UVa Central Grounds

Nicholas Schmidle, J. Malcolm Garcia

Nicholas Schmidle (To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan)and J. Malcolm Garcia (The Khaaijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul) discuss their recent work as reporters in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Both are regular VQR contributors, Nicholas in “Homegrown Jihad” in our Winter issue, and Malcolm in our forthcoming Spring issue on Afghanistan. Part of the Virginia Festival of the Book.

Louie Palu: War Audio and Photos
Time: Thursday, March 18, 8:00 PM
Location: The Bridge, 209 Monticello Road

Louie Palu

Award-winning documentary photographer Louie Palu debuts his audio slideshows, combining stunning black-and-white frames with pulse-pounding audio, collected in the heat of battle at the height of the “fighting season” in the Farah and Kandahar Provinces of Afghanistan. The slideshows were edited and coproduced by Charlottesville’s Jesse Dukes. Look for a photo essay by Palu on Afghanistan in our Spring issue. Cosponsored by The Bridge Progressive Arts Alliance and LOOK3: The Festival of the Photograph.

The Future of Print
Time: Friday, March 19, 10:00 AM
Location: UVa Rotunda, UVa Central Grounds

MaryAnne Golon, Donovan Webster

Ed Barber (senior editor at W. W. Norton), MaryAnne Golon (former director of photography, Time), and Donovan Webster (regular contributor to National Geographic) discuss the future of print and publishing in the digital age.

VQR Poetry Series Reading
Time: Friday, March 19, 12:00 PM
Location: UVa Bookstore, 400 Emmett Street S.

David Caplan, Joshua Poteat

A reading by poets David Caplan (In the World He Created According to His Will) and Joshua Poteat (Illustrating the Machine That Makes the World), both featured in the VQR Poetry Series published by the University of Georgia Press. Part of the Virginia Festival of the Book.

Obama’s Afghanistan
Time: Friday, March 19, 7:30 PM
Location: Jefferson Hall, Hotel C, West Range, UVa Central Grounds

Jason Motlagh, Neil Shea, Elliott D. Woods

VQR contributors Jason Motlagh, Neil Shea, and Elliott D. Woods discuss their recent reporting on Afghanistan, featured in the Spring issue of VQR. Cosponsored by the Jefferson Society of UVa.

All events are free and open to the public. For more info, call us at 434-924-3124 or email vqr@vqronline.org.

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A view of a Baghdad street through a dirt-caked windshield. (Dimiter Kenarov)

After the post-election glow, Baghdad is back in the real world. The streets are clogged with vehicles honking and people hawking. Men are walking to work (or, more likely, looking for jobs); women are out shopping (if their husbands are lucky enough to have jobs). The posters of politicians sag, peel off the blast walls, and fall face down, trampled under the shoes of millions.

Nobody is talking about it, but the elections were garbage. Lots and lots of garbage. The political messages are garbage. Democracy is garbage.

Let me explain. There were more than 300 parties competing for the 325 seats in the Council of Representatives. Each party had thousands of posters displayed all over Baghdad. Highways, trees, blast walls, fences, buildings, cars, bicycles. That’s a lot of posters.

Now that the elections are over, the posters are not even worth the paper they are printed on. Torn and muddy, they cover the pavement. Those serious, menacing faces, promising to clean up the country, have become part of the problem.

To talk about environmental pollution in Iraq may seem frivolous to some, a bit like worrying about the cholesterol levels of a suicide bomber. This place needs security first of all, adults need jobs, kids need a chance at a decent education. No need to worry about garbage just yet.

A father and daughter amid the flurry of obsolete posters. (Dimiter Kenarov)

I worry. Iraq is an environmental disaster. Iraq is a wasteland, a landfill the size of a country. Mounds of trash, like surreal sand dunes, pile up around residential buildings in Baghdad. Plastic bottles scattered everywhere, plastic bags flying from the barbwire like prayer flags. Burning tires. Feral dogs dig in the refuse; sheep and cows graze over industrial leftovers. And toddlers play among the sheep and the cows.

There is no reliable garbage collection system in Baghdad. The more affluent neighborhoods try to keep their streets clean, but all efforts prove pointless in the end: can the wind blow in one part of the city, but not in another? When it rains, the antiquated sewage system backs up, and human waste rises up to the surface, a thick layer of mud that is not mud. Sloshing through shit is more than a metaphor for the situation around here.

But, perhaps, what seems most striking for a chance visitor like me is the way the residents of Baghdad have managed to preserve their dignity in the middle of this dump. They endure—and always with clean shirts, with clean dishdashas, with clean hijabs, with clean shoes. There is nothing to clean up around here but the faces of politicians.

Dimiter Kenarov is in Baghdad with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Learn more about this project on the Pulitzer website.

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General Fares Hatem Abdel Hamid in the rec room of the General Counter Explosive Directorate with his son and Jamal Hamit Farkan behind him. (Dimiter Kenarov)

Three days after Iraqis voted amid a barrage of bombs and Hollywood awarded Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker six Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best Director), I’m at Baghdad’s General Counter Explosive Directorate, the center of Iraq’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal programs. It is here that Iraq’s government, with the help of American advisors, trains the EOD specialists who eventually will replace the kinds of teams featured in Bigelow’s film. In one of the classrooms, decorated with bombs of various shapes and sizes, lined up like snakes in jars of formaldehyde, thirty-six students are quietly sitting behind their desks, listening to the instructor. “You must apply yourself. You will not cut corners. If you don’t pass, you’ll not stay in the class. Study hard, you must do well. I will say this one time and one time only: Think Safety. Welcome aboard one of the hardest courses in the world: EOD.” There’s no pep rally response. The Iraqis sit in respectful silence. The only sound is the faint ticking of wristwatches.

General Fares Hatem Abdel Hamid, the commander of the Federal Police EOD program, takes me on a tour around the complex. He proudly shows me the new bomb-disposal suit propped up like a museum piece in the hallway, more a status symbol than anything the Iraqis would ever use. The suit is so large and bulky that it looks as if two of his men could fit inside. Next, we pass by the “wheelbarrows,” the remote-controlled robots on tracks, the latest in bomb-disabling technology. The EOD team seems especially fond of these. “When we gave them the robots,” a major from the US Army tells me, “the Iraqis sacrificed a lamb on the occasion and consecrated them with the blood. I can show you the gory pictures.” Robots smeared with sacrificial blood—this must be the modern parable of Iraq.

At the end of the tour I visit the recreation room, where the Iraqi soldiers relax after a day of cheating death. There is a pool table, a ping-pong table, a foosball table, some dartboards, a mini-bar. Posters of soccer clubs like Real Madrid and Barcelona give the room extra color. The general’s son, a boy of about twelve, is playing a soccer videogame in the corner. He is a miniature replica of his father, dressed in child-sized army fatigues, complete with an EOD patch and a general’s three-star epaulets. “He is very good with guns,” his proud father tells me and takes out his cell phone to show me a clip of the young lad shooting a rifle. He is good with guns. Somewhere in the background another TV set is playing a music video by the popular Iraqi singer Hasan Al Rasam. “Don’t leave bombs in the streets, leave roses,” he blares over documentary scenes of carnage and bomb explosions.

“We are people of peace,” the general tells me, “but the situation has forced us to do this job.” Then he launches into a harangue about the terrible things Saddam did. To illustrate his point he takes out his cell phone again and makes me watch the graphic beheading of two men by Saddam’s police. “You see? That’s why we hate the man. He killed so many Shi’a. The US should have invaded in 1991, but instead they let Saddam go scot-free.”

“My idol is Henry Kissinger,” one of the officers, Jamal Hamit Farkan, jumps in. In his fifties, a small but spirited man, Farkan used to be a truck driver before he joined the Federal Police’s EOD team. Now his dream is to visit the US. He wants to have a car, he tells me, and drink scotch. He takes my hand in his and begins to recite the names of American cities, using my fingers as an improvised abacus: New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Dallas. “I thought we’d be the fifty-first state,” he says, “and look what happened. We became the zero state.”

Then the general: “I want the Americans to stay. I want them to stay. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the Iraqis cannot control their own land, but if there’s a riot, there’d be nobody to say ‘Don’t shoot at the people.’ Also, when the Americans leave, I fear that the militias will take over the Iraqi Security Forces. You see those guys with the black turbans on TV. They are the problem. I really hope the US will not leave us high and dry.”

“Aren’t we the fifty-first state?” Farkan keeps asking, again and again, still holding my hand. “Why do we need visas to the US? Texas, California, Michigan, Ohio. I’d give one of my kidneys for a visa.”

Dimiter Kenarov is in Baghdad with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Learn more about this project on the Pulitzer website.

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In the Fiction category, two stories are jointly nominated: “The Vanishing American,” by Leslie Parry, and “Fauntleroy’s Ghost,” by Vinnie Wilhelm. We’re up against The Antioch Review, McSweeney’s, and The New Yorker. And in the Photojournalism category, the nomination is for “The Young Mothers of Port-au-Prince,” by Ruxandra Guidi, featuring photographs by Bear Guerra. Also finalists in that category are Foreign Policy, National Geographic, and New York.

The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony at Lincoln Center on April 22.

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American soldiers in the headlights of their armored vehicles. (Dimiter Kenarov)

Under the quarter moon, in the high beams of their armored vehicles, US soldiers are gearing up for the most important day of the Iraq War. Seven years ago, this month, the United States and its “Coalition of the Willing” invaded in a bid to oust Saddam Hussein and seize his cache of weapons of mass destruction. When WMDs turned out to be a mirage, bringing democracy to Iraq became the war’s new raison d’être. Seven years after the beginning of the war, on March 7, 2010, the reality of Iraqi democracy is put to the test.

Light streaks the eastern horizon. The ghosts of date palms and eucalyptus trees come out of hiding. Somebody adjusts the straps of his Kevlar. Humvees and MRAPs are growling, impatient like hungry dogs. Then the troops gather in a circle for their mission brief and prayer. “Guys, today is the most important day you’re gonna have,” says Captain Barr, a man with the countenance of a child. Faces are serious, lost in thought. So this is it. The Big Day. If everything goes well today, we will all finally get to go home. When the convoy rolls out, the only thing missing is a marching band and a cheerleader twirling a baton.

11:00 AM

Hurry up and wait. The Army’s unofficial motto. We are waiting for the Special Representative of the United Nation’s Secretary-General for Iraq, Adrianus Petrus Wilhelmus Ad Melkert, to arrive at the Baghdad Airport on the Victory Base Complex, so we can escort him to polling stations around the city and then to a press conference at the Al Rasheed hotel in the International Zone. Engines are idling. We have all sloughed off our body armor, Kevlars carelessly scattered on the gravel lot like empty seashells. Though the March sun is still merciful, everyone is cowering in the iron shade of their vehicles. Soldiers are taking a nap, or reading, or playing around with their iPods.

The whole morning we’ve been hearing explosions out in the distance, toward central Baghdad. Boom. Then again, much closer. BOOM. Boom. BOOM. We are counting. Two, four, seven, ten, twelve. By noon I’ve counted fifteen explosions. They could be anything: mortars, rockets, IEDs, VBIEDs (Vehicle Borne IEDs), PBIEDs (Person Borne IEDs), RPGs, EFPs (Explosively Formed Penetrators). Acronyms concealing deadly shrapnel. Rumors are starting to trickle in but nobody knows much yet. Eighteen attacks. No, thirty. No, sixty. Soon, the numbers pile up and cease to matter. The blasts are like hiccups—annoying but easy to ignore. Boom. You turn the next page. BOOM. You turn up the volume of the iPod. Boredom seems a greater enemy than bombs.

I decide to walk around a bit and talk to some of the soldiers. What do you think about the elections? Boom. Do you think the Iraqi security forces will be able to take over? Boom. What do you think about the future of Iraq? BOOM.

Specialist Moser: “It’s a great day. It’s a beautiful day.”

Captain Richards: “Every day is dangerous in Iraq, but this one in particular—we’ve got lots of tension today. But it’s their country and they have to figure things out on their own. We are here just to assist them now. We are soldiers, and we go where we are told to go. It’s a job.”

Sergeant Gassler: “It’s a job.”

Private Zimerman: “It’s definitely time for us to withdraw. It’s time for us to head home and call the mission complete. I’ve been a lot around this country, and it’s much safer now.”

Sergeant Gassler: “The mission is a success so far. For me it’s a success just getting ourselves and our equipment safely back home.”

Sergeant Keen: “I don’t think the Iraqis are ready to take over. Their intelligence is not up to the task.”

Sergeant Thomas: “There’s been a lot of improvement. And that’s no talking point. I think we wasted a lot of money, no question. But the Iraqi security forces are doing much better now. It will be tough without the American forces here, but they need to be given a chance. They are doing that right now with the elections. At the same time, what are we getting out of this? A smile from the Iraqis? A smile for trillions of dollars. I’d smile for that amount of money any day.”

3:00 PM

We are still waiting and I’m getting antsy. By now, half of the world knows more about what is happening in Baghdad than I do. Ad Melkert, the UN representative, has arrived, but his personal security detail and the US commanders are trying to agree on the safest route into downtown Baghdad. There have been no explosions in the last hour or so, but our large convoy would certainly draw a lot of attention. “If he doesn’t go into Baghdad, what does that say to the Iraqis,” one soldier muses. “And if he gets killed on the way, what does that say,” another counters.

After some more deliberation, our convoy is finally on the move. I’m riding in a non-tactical vehicle (NTV), an up-armored Chevy Suburban, with five soldiers. Of course, IEDs could easily destroy a Humvee or even an MRAP, but our civilian car is more like a bark in the middle of the ocean. The smallest wave and we would be heading straight for the bottom. There are attempts at gallows humor (“If you get shot in the head,” a soldier tells me laughing, “I’ll apply a tourniquet.”), but the mood is still bleak. On the car radio, faint but audible, I can hear the Cranberries. What’s in your head, in your heeeeead, Zombie, Zombie, Zombie . . .

4:00 PM

The abandoned streets of Baghdad. (Dimiter Kenarov)

Baghdad is a ghost town. In this city of monstrous traffic jams, where driving is a form of war, the empty boulevards look alien, as if some genie has made all vehicles disappear with a snap of his fingers. It is not, however, the absence of moving cars (required by the election curfew) that makes everything nightmarishly calm. It is the complete absence of people. And, most of all, the election posters lining every street, every sidewalk. Faces everywhere—hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of faces—not one of them living and real.

We drive on, passing through the neighborhood of Al Mansur and Al Mutanabbi. Here, too, except for the Iraqi Federal Police idly sitting and smoking cigarettes by their blue-and-white armored personnel carriers, there are few signs of life. Two men digging a ditch, a boy drinking water out of a hose, construction workers mixing cement. But where has everyone else gone?

Our convoy arrives at the polling station. The Humvees and MRAPs cordon off the area, and we all step out. Move, move, move. While we are waiting for Ad Melkert to make his appearance, I spot a father and his little daughter walking hand in hand down the street. Then another family of five. Four young men with their index fingers newly purpled by ink—the sign of having cast a ballot. I approach one of the Iraqi policemen standing guard and ask him about the voting atmosphere. “A lot of people showed up to vote in the morning, but after the multiple bombings around noon, almost everyone disappeared. Some have returned to the streets, but most people are scared.” I take a few more shots with my camera. Here, in this ancient land of suffering, even the sufferers has become invisible.

The two men in the middle have inkstained index fingers, indicating that they have voted. (Dimiter Kenarov)

5:00 PM

End of the elections. Reports are coming from all over the country. People were initially scared off by the intensity of the attacks but remained defiant in the face of danger and voted in great numbers. At the press conference at Al Rasheed, Ad Melkert, says: “Overall, the organization was quite strong and definitely the best Iraq has seen in the series of elections.”

Outside of the hotel, I stop to talk to Shuan Abdul Hassan, a man in his twenties. Dressed in well-pressed pants and dinner jacket, he wears a huge smile. His index finger is inked, the color of a bruise. He tells me that his father and uncle were killed by Saddam’s regime, and he’s happy that Iraqis are finally free to choose their own leaders. What would happen to Iraq after the Americans leave, I ask him. His mood darkens. “If the American leave, this country would probably collapse. People will once again start fighting each other and terrorists might come back. They’ll say ours is a puppet government set up by the Americans. This country will go boom.”

Dimiter Kenarov is in Baghdad with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Learn more about this project on the Pulitzer website.

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A lieutenant from the US Army offers to escort me inside the compound of the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC). It is, supposedly, the most heavily-guarded building in Iraq right now, the high fortress of democracy, the central control room of the Iraqi parliamentary elections. I haven’t registered with the IHEC, so I doubt they will let me in but decide to try my luck anyway.

A man at the reception searches fruitlessly for my name in the list of accredited journalists. “Sorry,” he says. “You can’t go in.”

In the meantime, the lieutenant has gone inside to see if he can find anyone who can help me out. He comes back with a middle-aged woman in a black hijab. She introduces herself, shakes my hand, and immediately gets down to business. I don’t know what she is telling the receptionist, but her animated voice—first allegro then andante then adagio, full of coloraturas and arpeggios—seems to be working miracles on him. The stern features of his face soften, his eyebrows relax, the corners of his mouth begin to quiver, and soon he is laughing out loud. “Give me your ID,” he says, and I oblige. Before long, I’m walking towards the checkered white-and-blue entrance of the IHEC with a visitor’s badge in my hand. A cursory pat down and I am inside the citadel.

Hundreds of computers buzz everywhere. There are probably more computers and scanners here than in the rest of the country combined. Several flat-screen TVs, mounted high up on a wall, display blue Windows XP password screens. If the Iraqi elections crash, I hope Bill Gates is ready to take responsibility for the future of this country.

I walk around the building undisturbed. I go up the stairs, to the second floor, where rows upon rows of brand new filing cabinets will soon house all the paper ballots. I try one of the cabinets and it slides open. If I had a few ballots on me, I could have easily slipped them inside and nobody would have noticed. But don’t worry: if the results of the Iraqi elections are disputed, you can’t blame me.

Dimiter Kenarov is in Baghdad with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Learn more about this project on the Pulitzer website.

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Iraqi soldiers scuffle amongst themselves on the street in Baghdad. (Dimiter Kenarov)

Pickup trucks, SUVs, military trucks, Humvees, fire trucks, ambulances. Honking. Singing. It all looks like a big tailgate party. “If we were in America, there’d be shitloads of beer,” observes Dave Lee, a US Airman and now a cop with the International Zone Police in Baghdad, as we slowly drive past the commotion. It is the 4th of March, sunny, high 60s. Today all Iraqi Security Forces—army, police, and emergency personnel—are scheduled to cast ballots, a few days ahead of the official elections, when their job will be securing other people’s right to vote.

There is only one polling site in the International Zone, located in the so-called 215 Apartments, but access to that area is highly restricted, even for the IZ Police. “Normally, it shouldn’t be a problem to get in, it’s all part of the International Zone, but the IA [Iraqi Army] wouldn’t allow us that. They like to show who’s in charge now,” Matt Farr, another IZ cop, tells me.

Ever since the Security Agreement transferred official responsibilities to the Iraqi government, the IZ Police don’t have much authority. Staffed by US Army Military Police and Air Force Security Forces, they try to keep a low profile, as all other US agencies in Iraq tend to do nowadays. Their motor pool is now reduced to a few black armored SUVs and eighteen people. The occasional traffic accident is the most exciting part of most days.

Today is no different. First, two Peruvians, working as security guards for Triple Canopy, are detained by the Iraqi Army for taking pictures of the street gathering, and the IZ Police have to negotiate their release. Next, someone finds an old rusty EFP (Explosively Formed Penetrator) by the Monument to the Unknown Soldier, and the IZ Police arrive on scene to secure the area. Later, a traffic accident involving an Iraqi Army lieutenant and a KBR worker escalates into a bureaucratic nightmare.

Then a voice comes crackling over the radio. “Small-arms fire near LZ Washington! Small-arms fire near LZ Washington!” And we’re off. Today will not be like any other day. Lee and Farr are ecstatic. Lee cranks up the stereo: “The Meaning of Life” by heavy metal band Disturbed. Farr steps on the gas pedal, indifferent to the speed bumps on the road. My head knocks hard against the ceiling. In a few minutes we are at the scene, body armor and Kevlars on, their M4s on red. We are the first responders, and we have no backup. We stay in the car for a few minutes to assess the situation. Next to the hideous, half-ruined Blackhawk palace, in front of the compound for Blackwater (now Xe), a crowd of IA troops brandishes rifles and turret gunners on top of their Humvees nervously scan the area with their .50 caliber machine guns. All of a sudden, two Iraqi soldiers break out of the crowd, running and shouting, one of them reaching out to grab the other’s AK. It takes us some time to realize what is happening. Iraqi Army units are fighting each other. The tailgate party has ended in a brawl.

Our backup arrives and we cautiously step out of the car. “Keep your safety on,” Lee tells Farr. The firefight is obviously over, but tensions are still running high. One of the interpreters, codenamed Snake, goes out to the Iraqis to find out what is going on, while we advance by the T-wall. A minute later he comes back with the scoop: a car accident involving two vehicles; heated words; an exchange of fire. The counterterrorism unit vs. another army unit. This is the new Iraqi Army.

Later in the afternoon, while we are resting by the Hands of Victory, the famous crossed-sabers monument in Baghdad, another IZ cop named Sergeant Mariani says, “There was no reason for us to get out of the cars.” He is still seething, pissed that American troops could have been caught in the middle of a dispute between Iraqi soldiers. “Let them kill each other,” he says. “Why should we get involved?”

Dimiter Kenarov is in Baghdad with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Learn more about this project on the Pulitzer website.

Subscribe to VQR today.