I got Blog Block.
Or more precisely, I have never NOT had Blog Block.
Self-analysis is pretty hard to do when there are so few catalysts in your life. Perhaps the end of my old life, my roaring twenties, happened with a whimper rather than a bang. I had planned a bang. Having seen two 3-4 year relationships crumble; having almost completed my PhD; having become terminally bored with life, I had decided to throw caution to the winds and risk a messy end against the backdrop of what promised to be an interesting war in Iraq.
"I'm going to Iraq to get killed."
The plan was simple. I would finish my PhD, submit it, and then go to Iraq as a freelance journalist. During the early summer of 2002, I began to prepare. First I visited the Kurds of Washington; notably Farhad Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), and then Qubad Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). I'd known Farhad for a while - not to any great depth, just as a freelance passing through DC. Always friendly, he provided an interesting spot for a young journo to get out of the oppressive midday heat, into the ice-cold AC. I even learned some things that allowed me to write articles on the Kurds and northern Iraq. Farhad has an amazing history; as a young exile in the US, he was there when his grandfather - the legendary Kurdish warband leader, old man Barzani - died. I remember him telling me that the Kurds didn't need revenge for the Baathist government's attacks - they needed the truth about what had happened to their relatives. Farhad had lost pretty much everyone to Saddam's troops. Holding the tears in his eyes, he told me: "I don't need to know who killed them, I just need to know where and when and why." That was perhaps the only time that our talks were not constantly interrupted by his comically loud, flashing cell phone. Now the congenial Farhad would act as my anchor-man with the London side of KDP - a fella called Dilshad Miran as memory serves.
Then there was the PUK, and here my connection got strange. The smaller, more idealistic, less tribal of the two main Kurdish factions, I would often visit them while moving through DC. Only later did I realise that their young spokesman - Qubad Talabani, grandson of PUK leader Jalal Talabani - had grown up only a short distance from me in South London - another man of destiny from Croydon. Exiled from Iraq, he grew up in Wallington, an innocuous suburb near Croydon, and home to one of the biggest council estates in Europe. I soon learned that the PUK big-wigs had all camped out in Croydon during the darker Saddam years in the 1980s - the Kurdistan Regional Government Prime Minister Barham Salih was a bit of a geezer, it turned out when I met him, and I suddenly understood the stories about Bavel Talabani - Qubad's brother and the PUK liaison with western intelligence services - being a right raver on the London pill-popping scene.
The plan was to use the airline run by former Iranian president Ayatollah Ali Rafsanjani - Medes Air - to fly from Dusseldorf to Orumiyeh in NW Iran. From there I'd bus down to the Piranshahir crossing into Kurdish northern Iraq, where the PUK would adopt me, run me around Sulaymaniyah, take me to have a look (through binoculars) at the evil Ansar al-Islam enclave near Halabjah. Then they were going to hand me off to the KDP, who would run me around the western bits of Kurdish controlled Iraq - Irbil, Salahadin, Dohuk, and so on. I'd traced out the Iraqi lines, got rough ideas of their divisional sectors, worked out where key airbases were, wargamed US/Turkish offensive moves and Iraqi preemptions and countermoves.
The idea was to be there when the war kicked off, and to lose my Kurdish handlers as soon as they started making life boring for me. Gambling on the fact that internet cafes were going to stay up in Irbil - quite likely - I had started making enquiries about dissemination of new reports - i.e., who to send breaking news reports to in the news agencies and UK newspapers. International organisations with a presence in northern Iraq offered another channel, as did the very real possibility of working cell phone connections in wartime. Maybe I coulld even piggyback off other journos' Thuraya satellite phones. Money would be a problem - I had more than enough of it, but keeping it in a safe format was hard. Cards and travellers cheques seemed pretty useless; wads of cash invited robbery. Once across the border, I wasn't going to risk going back into Iran or Turkey to access safe deposit boxes. That would have been covered in my advanced planning, including money stashes across Iraq (Sulaymaniyah, Irbil) in the case of robbery or kidnap. The logistics would sort themselves out with careful planning, I assured myself.
Predicting the right time to go looked like a problem. My instinct was to go early, while access was assured. Then I could brush up on my minimal Arabic and even more minimal Kurdish, make contacts, get the lay of the land, and plan my breakout from the KDP and PUK minders when the right time came. When I was planning this in early June, there seemed little prospect of war before November, and I planned to be in by about then. We now know that I would have waited quite a while. I would have freelanced while there - on a range of subjects, not just northern Iraq - you can write just as good an article about Algerian security from northern Iraq as from London. You're just as detached.
Then Maria came on the scene, and things changed. I clung to the dream of Iraq for a while, saying that I would do the dangerous thing safely, rather than the dangerous thing dangerously - that it would be my last hurrah, before The Beginning of my new life with her.
Well, let's just say she convinced me to choose life. My Iraq war became a daydream that I can only live through the experiences of others. War tourism is a strange calling, even when given the veneer of a profession by war correspondants. Ultimately, the closest parallel to what might have happened to me was the case of Paul Moran, a freelance cameraman working for the Australian Broadcasting Corp., killed in a 23 March suicide-bomb attack in Sulaymaniyah, probably by Ansar al-Islam. At a checkpoint, a grendade was throw through the window of the car he was sitting in. Or there was the BBC translator Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed, killed 6 April in northern Iraq after a US aircraft attacked a convoy of Kurdish soldiers traveling near the city of Mosul. US friends had tried to tell me that I could be the next Daniel Pearle, that I'd stick out like a sore thumb - they were good friends, and they did scare me.
It sometimes feels strange to be someone with a vested interest in life once again. I had worked, travelled, and studied; the fourth great path in life - family - seemed closed to me. Now it's open again. In my relationship, I found joie de vie under the only stone I had never turned over. The littlest things now bring pleasure once more. There is hope; hope for my generation and for one to follow. Wanting a mate and a family is not just the most natural thing in the world; it's perhaps the only natural thing in the world. I no longer search for a point to exist. I just exist.
