Wrong Turn in Baghdad
I bootstrapped a defense contracting business in Iraq back during the war. How I got there is its own story, but it’s probably more interesting to write about individual incidents separately. This specific incident is from when I worked with an Iraqi expat-founded company with almost entirely local Iraqi staff (for about 6 months).
This is also almost 20 years ago so my memory is imperfect, but I wanted to wait long enough for operational details to no longer be particularly sensitive. Somewhere I have a bunch of digital photos of Iraq and Afghanistan and other adventures. Probably nothing I’m saying here is currently prosecutable as a crime due to time elapsed, too, but if it is, then it’s fiction or inaccurately remembered, of course.
The second day I was in Iraq on this trip (in 2004, summer?), I woke up in our company villa out in the Mansour district of Baghdad. (I don’t remember the exact address as there were no addresses, and streets were blocked off, and I never drove myself to/from the location — our local Kurdish drivers did all of that.). It was a pretty big villa complex (20k square feet?) with a residential area for ~6 of us (me, two other Americans, and some expatriate Iraqis who had returned), office space for about 50-100 engineers (local, primarily arab), and housing and facilities for the security force of (30? 50? 100? I never really counted) Kurdish security people. The location was relatively safe against crime (due to walls, with razor tape, and security force) but not against targeted assault, but by virtue of being outside the Green Zone (later International Zone), it wasn’t a target of the indirect fire (mortars and rockets) which plagued the compounds used by other contractors. There was lots of risk in driving to/from other locations, but when we were at home it was relatively secure.
(I think this is a satellite image of the correct part of Baghdad today, although it might be a km or two away, and it’s substantially more built up than I remember.)
I was given/bought a Browning Hi-Power pistol on the local market ($800-1600; I don’t remember), and some really questionable local remanufactured 9mm ammunition (and I think a single extra mag? maybe two?). The Hi-Power is an amazing design from the 1930s (I own several in the US now), but it’s a 9mm handgun, basically irrelevant in a fight where people have AK-47s as table stakes. Useful to prevent kidnapping, and sort of as a badge of authority, but in any real combat you don’t want to depend on a pistol, especially a 9mm with FMJ ammo of uncertain reliability. Making this even more interesting: we had no place to test-fire weapons or practice with them, so it was pretty much “here’s a gun, it probably works”. At the time I’d never actually fired a Hi-Power either, although it’s very similar to a 1911 and I’d shot those once before. I was a satellite/Internet IT guy, not anyone with any military or firearms experience (beyond some Olympic-style target shooting at MIT and Boy Scout summer camp), knowledge of security operations in war zones, etc. I theoretically knew about stuff from reading some books, cypherpunks mailing list, etc., but very little practical experience.
We mostly traveled using low profile vehicles (which I later found out is how the principals of most of the security companies did their own travel, and also was pretty extensively used by the “special” military and other government folks…). We had some minivans, some old sedans, and a Chevy Blazer or something from the late 1980s — the vehicles weren’t reliable or powerful, were cheap, blended in to a reasonable degree, and most importantly, weren’t themselves flashy enough to be attractive targets of theft on their own. Things changed a little bit over time, but on this day I was in a minivan (or maybe a light van), with two Kurdish security guys in driver and “shotgun” seat (with rifles, and some kind of ammo racks on chest), an (unarmed) engineer from our company sitting in a rear-facing seat behind the front passenger, and me and the other American guy sitting in the back seats facing forward, each in civilian/blend in clothing, with 9mm pistols.
We were driving from our villa to some other location in the city for some reason I don’t remember (I think maybe to the Green Zone to get badges? or maybe for shopping at PX? or perhaps a business meeting.). At the time, traffic was insanely heavy and chaotic everywhere, and we were trying to blend in as a local vehicle, so we obeyed traffic rules and weren’t particularly aggressive. We drove out along some road, and went through a checkpoint, manned by “Iraqi Police”. At the time, they were having a hard time recruiting for the Iraqi Police, after disbanding the Iraqi Army, so the IP were mostly existing militias/personally loyal forces of important people (Sheikhs) given authority and uniforms, rather than a neutrally recruited force. They were thus not very trustworthy — entirely within the scope of potential threats for kidnapping or other risk. A uniformed and overt military unit would not even be challenged by IPs at checkpoints, rolling through with superior firepower; the overt/heavy contractors in 5 big black armored GMCs full of guys with rifles would also tend to ignore the IPs; unfortunately, lone vehicles like ours couldn’t.
Our security force of Kurdish guards were loyal and pro American, but weren’t particularly well trained or disciplined — games like pointing their Makarov pistols at each other in different vehicles, celebratory gunfire from the roof, etc. were pretty common, and to me, terrifying, although I wasn’t in the “command structure” there, so I just tried to not be directly in line with the muzzles. As well, the Kurds and Arabs “did not get along” (i.e. would mutually genocide given the chance), and this combination of lack of discipline and animosity almost got me killed.
As we drove through this IP checkpoint, our guards said something to the IPs manning the checkpoint. I’m not sure exactly what it was, but it was antagonistic; I assume some kind of non-specific threat or general expression of hatred. Our guards clearly assumed they’d never see these guys again, at least not for a while, so it wouldn’t matter.
As it happens, the road ahead was blocked, and we had to turn around and go through the same checkpoint again about 5 minutes later in the reverse direction. And, apparently, what the guards had said was sufficiently antagonistic that we got stopped. The IPs tried to get everyone to exit the vehicle, as per standard protocol for either searching or murdering, but we were unwilling to do so. I’d discussed with the other American in the vehicle that under no circumstances would we (ourselves) exit the vehicle; we would go down fighting from the vehicle if given no other choice, but there would be no kidnapping. I believe our guards were taken from the vehicle to have their IDs run, but that didn’t help; things continued to escalate. Incidentally, there was a mounted machine gun on a truck (probably a PKM?) pointed at us in the checkpoint; if it had just been the dismounts with rifles we likely would have run the checkpoint (particularly in a more capable vehicle), but stopping was probably the best course of action. Neither I nor the other American spoke much Arabic (him far more than me, but only 20-30 words; me 4 words). We showed our ID cards to the IPs through the windows, but expressed our unwillingness to exit the vehicle. Our guards continued to escalate the situation angrily, verbally fighting with the IPs (although I believe their weapons were either retained in the vehicle, or were in possession of the IPs).
It got pretty bad from there. “I’ll take the guys on the right, you take the guys on the left” (which was pretty fucking optimistic with a 13rd 9mm pistol vs…5-6 guys with rifle, and a machine gun?). At this point, the engineer sitting facing us said he would try to defuse the situation, and he got out of the vehicle, spoke in a very conciliatory way to the IPs, apologized to the IPs for the behavior of the guards, expressed that we were Americans and there to help a locally important person with some IT issue, etc. This took him 5-10 minutes, at great risk to himself, but he was ultimately successful. Our guards returned to the vehicle (with their weapons again, although probably they stayed in the car), and we drove off. It turns out the engineer (in addition to being a competent IT guy/satellite installer) was the son of a translator at the British Embassy from long ago, spoke 5+ languages fluently, etc. And was probably smarter than anyone else in the car that day.