Naked in Iran? Can We Learn Anything From the Late NPR Reporter Anne Garrels?

For those who remember the Iraq war, Iran seems like deja vu all over again.

After enduring the “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq in 2003, the late NPR reporter Anne Garrels chronicled her experiences in the best-selling book, Naked in Baghdad and many of her observations seem relevant today.

In a speech at Northwestern University in 2008, she addressed the Abu Ghraib scandal, the dubious government contractor Blackwater, government censorship and the pros and cons of reporters embedding with active military operations.

Casually dressed in a leotard, flowered skirt, ballet flats and bare legs, Garrels also discussed the effect of escalating violence and kidnappings on reporting, everyday life in Iraq and the experience of being a female war reporter.

The surge said Garrels—an announced escalation of the Iraq war—allowed “young American captains” to help bridge the gaps between Sunni and Shiite communities [competing Iraqi ethnic/religious factions] but the Iraqi government did not use the opportunity to work on reconciliation or security for Sunnis in places where Shiite police and militia still dominated. And “the government still relies on the US to deliver services and security,” she said.

Due to “Shiite political dynamics” most of the southern part of Iraq remained unreportable said Garrels and embedding with a military unit such as Special Forces is not always the answer. While embedded reporting in Iraq had been valuable said Garrels—the military maintains openness and treats women embeds no differently than men—it is no substitute for individual journalism. “What kind of reporting can you do standing next to armed guards?” she asked.

Moreover, there was the issue of censorship. Reporters in Iraq respected the military’s rules about not photographing identifiable soldiers who are dead or wounded said Garrels—“we don’t want their relatives first hearing about it on the news either”—but sometimes the censorship could appear capricious. She recalled a New York Times story in which an embedded reporter detailed how his unit was pinned down by gunfire as soldiers tried to evacuate the body of a sergeant who had been shot in the head. “The military found the article ‘distasteful’ and the Times was disembedded,” said Garrels, adding that Times reporter John Burns even went to see then General David Petraeus, in control at the time, over the incident.

While Garrels said she was amazed at how unprepared the US was for the Iraq war, relying on information from “30-year exiles” and “power grabbers,” she also worried about the implications of removing troops “precipitously,” she said. “It will be a mess. A lot of Iraqis I know are probably going to be killed.”

Garrels’ own house manager, an Armenian Christian in his fifties, was a victim of sectarian violence a year ago, she said, when he was kidnapped by assailants, some in police cars, beaten, raped and underwent a heart attack. While the kidnappers released him, presumably for money, US policies initially prevented the man and his family from emigrating to the US she said.

Garrels had her own experience with sexual assault in Iraq which led to the name Naked in Baghdad and which she shared at the end of her prepared remarks. She woke up, she said, to find a man from her own Iraqi house staff “on top of” her in her bed, though she was able to prevent an assault. Trying to spare the assailant reprisals, she told his family—who were also staff—that he was “sleeping on the job”—a fabrication which ended up failing because they begged for another chance for him

When Garrels told the truth to the assailant’s brother-in-law, she was exposed, first-hand, to the attitude behind honor killings when it comes to women in a traditional culture and treated as a disgraced victim.

“Not once have you asked me if I am okay,” Garrels said she castigated the brother-in-law. “You can’t even look me in the eye anymore!” The brother-in-law didn’t even believe she wasn’t attacked, said Garrels. “In Iraq my husband would divorce me and I’d be locked in the house for the rest of my life,” she noted.

Garrels was also outspoken during a question and answer period. Asked about the Abu Ghraib scandal in which US troops were recorded abusing Iraqi prisoners, she said, “It will take us years to recover as a country. You’re forced to explain things that are hard to answer.”

And asked about “resentment against mercenaries” Garrels described witnessing Blackwater guards (the contractor, Blackwater, was later renamed Xe) killing civilians at a roadblock long before the shooting of 17 civilians in 2007. “There was no investigation,” she added.

Anne Garrels (1951 – 2022) was a US journalist who worked for National Public Radio during the Iraq war and authored of Naked in Baghdad.

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