Iraq Fixer News Media and Newspapers War Reporting Ayub Nuri

I was born in 1979 in the northern Iraqi town of Halabja. In Kurdish, Halabja means "the wrong place," and that is how the town felt when I was growing up, because I never knew a life without war. My father worked in Halabja's electricity office, and we farmed for a few months every year. When I was 4, an Iraqi Army convoy passed by our farm. It was the summer of 1983, three years into the Iran-Iraq war, and as my family stood in the fields, a rocket was fired at the convoy from the Iranian mountains. It exploded yards from our house. Shrapnel took half my right knee. My grandmother was hit in the head. She died from her injuries a few months later. Mine healed, though never fully. Halabja always seemed to be under bombardment. Finally Iraqi airplanes attacked my town with chemical weapons, killing 5,000 civilians in just a few hours. Many were family friends and relatives. Growing up in this situation, I grew weary of war, but I also, in some way, lost my fear of it.

In 2003, when the United States threatened war against Saddam Hussein, I was thrilled. I thought a U.S.-led invasion would overthrow the dreadful man whose wars took my childhood. At the time I was in Turkey as a refugee, and I was hoping to reach Europe or America. But as the war became imminent in early March of that year, I changed my mind. I bought a bus ticket and took a 21-hour trip to my home.

It was spring, and the entire region had turned green. The mountain peaks were still covered with snow; the hillsides were colorful with wildflowers. I arrived in the city of Sulaimaniya at nightfall as a light rain washed the city. It was too late to continue my journey to Halabja, which was another hour away by car, so I checked into a hotel.

The next morning, I met a friend at a nearby teahouse. As I was enjoying a glass of black tea, my friend told me about all the foreign journalists pouring into town. Then someone called out, "Which one is Ayub?" It was a man in a brown coat. He drove me to a house where two American journalists needed an interpreter to do an interview. They worked for this magazine: Elizabeth Rubin, a writer, and Lynsey Addario, a photographer. They were sitting with a local Kurdish commander waiting for someone to help them talk to him.

When the interview was finished, they asked me to be their "fixer." The word initially puzzled me. I was two years out of the Teachers' Institute in Sulaimaniya, trained to instruct children in the English alphabet and vocabulary. I would have taught those children that a "fixer" is a person who repairs broken machines. But in a war zone, a fixer is a journalist's interpreter, guide, source finder and occasional lifesaver. Every major media organization in Iraq would come to have its fixers. And fixers, it turned out, were well paid. I was offered 0 a day, about 25 times what I could make as a teacher.

I was 24, and suddenly I was the eyes and ears for some of the world's top journalists. I would spend the next three years as a fixer and watch as my country learned a painful lesson: sometimes when you try to fix something, you break it even more.

The trigger of war was pulled on the morning of March 20, 2003. It wasn't long before fixers were dying in the line of duty, which made me and others like me think twice about our new jobs. Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed was a fixer with BBC-TV. Soon after the war started, he went to help film what was to be an American bombing mission aimed at an Iraqi Army position. A U.S. warplane mistakenly dropped a bomb on a convoy of U.S. Special Forces and Kurdish soldiers. The accident killed 18 people and injured 45, among them Kamaran. He later died.

When Baghdad fell, on April 9, 2003, journalists in the north wanted to go south. Until then I had never seen Baghdad, the capital of my country. As a child I always thought of Baghdad as a big city crowded with people and cars at night, but now the city was dark and lifeless - a sad place.

In Baghdad, too, the journalists were hiring fixers. I quickly became friends with fixers for National Public Radio, Knight Ridder, The Boston Globe, the BBC and The Times of London. To them I was a novelty because the Kurdish areas of Iraq had essentially split from the rest of the country in 1991. The fixers would quiz me about the north, and I asked them for directions and addresses in Baghdad when I needed them. I supported the war, as did many of my countrymen and pretty much all the fixers. We thought that only a powerful outside force could take on the job of ousting Saddam. The war also brought an economic boom. People began to refurbish their houses. In some streets, the sidewalks were piled with boxes containing TV sets, air-conditioners and other appliances. People thought Iraq would become a kind of 51st state. Everyone wanted to find a job with a news agency, a foreign company or the U.S. Army. Speaking English was a key for success in "the new Iraq," so English schools sprang up around Baghdad.

Ayub Nuri, who is based in New York City, is a freelance reporter and has worked as a researcher on Iraq for Human Rights Watch.