Dexter Filkins
The New York Times
If you look at the whole arc of this thing, it used to be easy in the beginning, but it was never easy. I remember, literally the first day, driving into Safwan, which is the first town on the border when you cross over. It’s where they signed the surrender in 1991. And I went in there thinking that this is probably going to be something like what I saw in Afghanistan, which was cheering crowds and people throwing their turbans off, and everybody happy to see the American forces. And that wasn’t the case at all. To me, it looked like we’d pried the doors off a mental institution, and there were a bunch of people standing around with their jaws hanging open. Some people were absolutely horrified, people were crying, some people were cheering, some people were — you could tell how afraid they were. Some people, you could sense that there was emotion that they didn’t want to express, so they didn’t. There was a lot of uncertainty.

But it was pretty scary, too. I remember that moment when I arrived in Safwan: the great concern of many of the people there — they were all Shiites — was that there were secret police all over the place, and as soon as the Americans left, the secret police were going to come in and arrest everybody and kill them. So everyone was totally horrified and really afraid to talk to us, and it was really, really dangerous because there were Iraqi Army people all over the place, and there were guys taking their uniforms off, there were tanks up the road and stuff going off, and it was really, really crazy, and it wasn’t anything like Afghanistan. I...

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