Last Days in Babylon: The Exile of Iraq's Jews, the Story of My Family - Softcover

PROLOGUE

At home in London during the cold Spring of 2006 I try to summon up images of Baghdad. I want to remember people's faces and voices, the traditional tilework I admired in their homes, the particular yellow of sunlight bouncing off sandy brick, the delicious skewered meat I ate in restaurants. It's an exercise I go through regularly, as an antidote to the litany of bad news that streams from my television screen.

The news, by now, has a numbing sameness to it. There has been another bombing, and more innocent people are dead. There's footage of cars burning at the roadside. Men in bloodstained clothing help other blood-smeared men to safety. Angry crowds remonstrate with shaven-scalped American soldiers. Women in chadors wail over lost husbands and sons. The city, I reflect for the umpteenth time, is lawless, unrelenting, and I feel a surge of relief that I live where I do, far away from all the violence and turmoil.

Two years earlier I witnessed similar scenes in Baghdad for myself -- from the safety of a hired car, in the company of a hired guide, and, more often than not, by peering through darkened glass. After the bombing of the Mount Lebanon hotel, an early civilian target of the post-war violence, I was among the crowds of Western journalists who had talked their way past the police cordons to commiserate with the locals and trade theories as to why that particular hotel had been targeted. Too many Westerners stayed there, said one journalist. Too many American Jews said another. No, said a third, the car bomb was intended for the Al Jazeera offices next door.

At the time I had been sickened by all the purient onlookers' interest (of which I was part, straining as was everyone else for answers that put a rational gloss on the senseless) and by the metallic smell of death, and I'd wanted to leave. But now, with my access to such information confined to second-hand relay, I think about how the television cameras do not lie.

Firsthand, as on screen, much of Baghdad appears forsaken. It sprawls across a grid of lookalike suburbs built out of dust-colored concrete with tatty high streets that are permanently snarled with traffic and sporadically patrolled by U.S. tanks. Bomb damage is evident everywhere. Refuse and rubble litter the ground. Police checkpoints, flagged up by double rows of painted oil drums, block off numerous roads, and street fighting is rife after dark. Anywhere, at any time, something might explode.

And yet there exists another Baghdad where, even now, it remains possible to capture something of the fabled magic of the ancient city. You won't see Ali Baba thieves spring from earthenware jars brandishing giant scimitars, or stumble across walled gardens concealing tiled fountains. But you can lose yourself in a confusion of twisting streets and fill your lungs with the loamy, musty air of what feels like centuries past. In a small corner of northeastern Baghdad, known locally as the Old City, all the odds have been defied, and something wondrous of the mythic past has come through the wars intact.

I feel as if I've known this other Baghdad all my life. A Baghdad of history and cultural romance, consonant with my family's recollections of verdant palm and scented orange groves, of picnics by the Tigris, and sun-baked afternoons spent cooling one's heels indoors, sipping homemade lemonade. Its local characters are colourful, voluble, and opinionated. Its politics are as labyrinthine as its streets. Its crumbling buildings creak under the weight of stories untold. It is a Baghdad I believed no longer existed, until I had seen it for myself. And it is the Baghdad that I want to remember beyond the firewall of current carnage, and of seemingly endless and irrevocable change.

The Old City is one of the few places in Baghdad where you won't see American soldiers, since most of the streets are too narrow to support armoured convoys. Western civilians are thin on the ground, deterred by the palpable lack of policing. Yet Westerners who do venture into this vibrant mercantile hub come to experience something of the "real" Baghdad. They come for the antique charms of its twisting streets and dusty alleyways, many of them so narrow you can practically span them with outstretched arms; for the smells of masgoof, the local fish speciality, smoking in open doorways; the sweaty clangour of artisans at work beating metal and scraping leather; and to rub shoulders with upright Bedouin chiefs dressed in impeccably starched dishdashas going about their everyday business.

Often they are hunting for hidden treasures. They know that there are medieval churches in the Old City, built by Armenian and Nestorian Christians, and elaborately carved twelfth-century gates tucked away in neglected corners, between the noisy souks and bustling coffeehouses. There are also imposing stone buildings dating, mainly, from Ottoman times. Occasionally, a dark street opens up onto the banks of the River Tigris, where an unexpected burst of sunlight flashes up off the water. But mostly the narrow streets fold in on themselves, hugging their secrets.

At midday, when the sun is blisteringly hot, these streets are thronged with people, dodging the wooden carts of goods pushed by small, barefoot boys and the donkeys laden with burlap bags, and lifting their robes to avoid being splattered by the filthy water that trickles down the middle of the street. The Western visitors mingle in, revelling in the place's very survival, for while the rest of Baghdad seems to have been have been sucked into the prevailing chaos, in the Old City the rhythm of life carries on just as it has always done, undisturbed either by the occupation or the fierce resistance to it.

I, too, had come to the Old City in search of the past, my family's past, coloured by fond memories I'd been spoon-fed down the years. And the enduring mystery was this: why were my relatives still so eager to relive it all?

The date was March 2004, ten months after President George W. Bush announced the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq. Despite the presidential assurances, war was still raging across the country, as the Americans continued to root out Baathist sympathizers, largely comprised of the most hardened core of Saddam Hussein's supporters who'd lost their influence with his removal. For their part, the Baathists, along with other less readily identifiable resistance forces, continued to fight back, and with brutal consequences. Baghdad was extremely dangerous, especially for Westerners whose value as collateral or PR was just beginning to be recognised. Nick Berg, the Jewish-American contractor whose videotaped beheading shocked the world, was executed only weeks after I left. His death, in retrospect, marked the end of one kind of war and the beginning of another, more intractable kind.

In spite of planning my trip meticulously I was frankly terrified of going into the country. Determined to be as inconspicuous as possible, I'd arranged to be driven through the night from Amman along the notoriously dangerous desert highway, which passes directly through the towns of Ramadi and Fallujah. Already the towns were hotbeds of insurgent fury, and home to bandits who stalked the desert road in speeding Toyotas. For hours I kept a sleepless vigil. Then, as daylight broke, I spied the chilling evidence of the bandits' handiwork, as we zipped past the blackened carcasses of one burnt out vehicle after another.

In the main, I saw Baghdad only by blazing sunlight when everything looked yellow and the hot dusty air clogged my throat. By night, I observed a self-imposed curfew, resigning myself to listening to the sporadic gunfire that crackled and snapped across the city skies from the relative safety of my concrete-reinforced and security-patrolled hotel complex. There was even the occasional thudding mortar, sometimes rather too close for comfort and a sure indication that one of the hotels where Westerners stayed, or one of the restaurants they frequented, had been targeted, if not always reliably hit.

Even by day my movements were restricted, except when I was accompanied by my guide Mahmoud, an irrepressibly tender hearted and cheery Shiite who had worked as a schoolteacher for many years, but who, after the war, had taken up the more lucrative job of chaperoning foreigners around Baghdad. "Mahmoud Shaker, driver and interpreter," it said on his business card in neat English script, above his address and phone number.

Mahmoud was short and plump, with smooth skin the colour of milky coffee, a trim black moustache, large doe eyes, and an unfailing sense of sartorial pride. Whatever the time of day and however scorching the heat, he would arrive at my hotel turned out in carefully pressed shirts and trousers and polished black loafers teamed with pale silky socks. Even when I roasted in far lighter (and much scruffier) clothing, Mahmoud wore a light tweed jacket and always remained the picture of composure. He was the father of three teenage girls, all of whom covered their hair with black cloth hijabs. His wife, who insisted every morning on preparing me a breakfast of sweet tea, oven-hot bread and clotted cream, was a Sunni Muslim from the town of Hit, in the Anbar region the West was now calling, as code for trouble spot, "The Sunni Triangle". Mahmoud liked to boast of his connections in Baghdad and he promised that although our tour of the Old City would be full of surprises, come what may, he would make sure I was safe. He even hired an armed bodyguard to discretely tail us.

Mahmoud had taken a particular interest in planning our tour ever since I'd informed him that my grandmother was born and raised within the folds of the ancient city centre. She was an Iraqi Christian, I told him, knowing that a splendid Armenian church lay within the Old City, where it once served a small but vibrant local community. I confess that even as I fed this not-so-small lie to my guide, who would later become my friend, I could feel a prick of guilt beginning to bore itself into the back of my head. Later it grew into a persistent ha...