Captain Nawa Salah Ahmed was not thinking of Hollywood when he signed up for the bomb-disposal unit in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk. It was 2004, and the young policeman was burnt out. He had enlisted in the force when the American military invaded his homeland, taking a job in the local criminal-investigations unit. And as a lawless chaos had come crashing down upon the country, business, so to speak, was booming. Cases flooded in—Ahmed dealt daily with thefts, murders, and worse. But the pressure, he says, was unrelenting.
So a year into his police career, he applied for and secured a transfer—one that gave him personal ease, but thrust his family in a roiling dread. He joined the Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit, universally referred to by its English acronym, E.O.D.—and known to Americans as “the Hurt Locker guys.”
As his family protested his transfer, he reassured them by saying his new job was actually safer than his old one, in which he was harangued by criminals and terrorists, made a target for revenge. “Bombs,” he would say, “don’t have tongues.”
Ahmed and his colleagues watched the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker as they have seen countless Hollywood films since the U.S. invasion—on pirated DVDs bought in the bazaar at roughly a dollar apiece. The illicit discs have sustained Iraq’s appetite for mainstream Western films, long after the last cinema theaters were shuttered by threats from puritanical militias. Iraqi interest in The Hurt Locker peaked at the time of its Oscar success in early 2010, and though the story of American bomb-disposal experts was set in their country, few Iraqis identified with the film. Many complained at the way the soldiers of an occupying army had been portrayed as heroes, struggling to contain the conflict. Where were the trigger-happy foreign troops, firing recklessly at civilians, they asked?
Not all the criticism was political. Some Iraqi connoisseurs of the blockbuster felt the film had failed as entertainment. Not enough stunts, special effects, or sexy ladies, they said.
Kirkuk’s E.O.D. officers, like Ahmed, saw the film through unique filters—they contrasted it with their own experience of bomb disposal in Iraq. They could also compare what they saw on screen with what they had seen of their American counterparts. “It was a cartoon,” says Adnan Salah Rashid, a three-star captain with the bomb squad, as he recalls Jeremy Renner’s protagonist. He chuckles at a scene in which Renner unearths a roadside bomb—one rigged with artillery shells—and single-handedly drags it to safety. “Only civilians could fall for that. No way would a professional guy do those things in real life,” he says.
Ahmed also felt the film had exaggerated the bravery of the American E.O.D. officers. The ones he knew were slow and thorough, compared with the characters in the film and, indeed, with the Iraqis. “We’re always in a hurry; we want to finish the job and go home early. It’s an Iraqi habit. We’ll wrap up in one hour what the Americans do in three.”
Unlike the American military, the bomb-disposal officers in Kirkuk’s police force work close to their homes, in a male-dominant society. Most are married and stay in extended families that depend on their wages. After every shift, the officers return to the people who would suffer most if they were killed at work. Their families remind them of their primary responsibility.
“We don’t want our children to grow up fatherless. We don’t want our wives to be shamed by our deaths,” says Rashid. He believes the Iraqis’ proximity to their families has given them a sharper instinct for self-preservation compared with the Americans.
Ahmed’s narrowest escape from death came in 2005. A bomb had been left inside a black plastic bag outside a motor workshop. He had to position himself dangerously close to the device in order to get a clear shot. When he opened fire, the bomb exploded. “The air threw me back,” he says. “It was just like a movie.” Though he was not badly injured, the incident marked him: “I have a problem with black plastic bags,” he says. “I get worried whenever I see one. I keep wondering: Could it be a bomb?”
The next year, in September 2006, one of Ahmed’s colleagues was killed when a device left inside a plastic bag detonated as he was handling it. Ahmed says he tries to block out the fear while working with explosives. “What happens if the device goes off? Will I be killed or disabled? I believe in God; I try to focus.”
For Ahmed and Rashid, the need for that kind of unwavering focus seems strangely divorced from—or, marked by an indifference to—the broader conflict. The men regard themselves as technicians, tasked with making bombs safe, and in their tunnel vision, people and politics are relegated to the periphery; the terrorists and insurgents who make the bombs are not important to the task. The men say they have little interest in the identity or motives of the men who create the weapons, preferring to leave such questions for the intelligence unit. Between themselves, the E.O.D. men identify their adversaries arbitrarily, by neighborhood or by a bombmaker’s “signature.” An insurgent cell that operates from the town of Hawija will be christened the Hawija group, for example; another group may be named after the brand of mobile phone that it favors as a detonator.
Bombings have been the hallmark of the Iraqi insurgency, and Iraq’s bomb-disposal men are symbols of America’s struggle against it. Kirkuk’s band of local technicians was created as a cost-effective answer to an enemy that spoke through explosions, and they combine techniques taught by the Americans with esoteric methods traded among the Iraqis. “Our training from the Americans was helpful,” says Ahmed, “but what they taught was very different to what awaited us in the real world. I learnt from them maybe 30 percent of what I needed to know.”
While the Americans in The Hurt Locker relied on a sophisticated array of equipment and protection—the suits with magazine pouches and drop-leg holsters; the state-of-the-art detection devices—the Kirkuk bomb squad’s weapon of choice is the Dragunov sniper rifle. It was designed in Soviet Russia and has a distinctive D-shaped stock, made of wood. After securing the area around a suspected bomb, the officers will open fire with the Dragunov. With any luck, the damage from the rounds will reveal what type of device they are dealing with. If the detonator is exposed, they may continue firing to dislodge or destroy it. Prior success as a sniper is a good predictor of success in this unit.
As the American military has scaled back its presence—eyeing an end-of-2011 exit from the country—local forces have inherited equipment from U.S. E.O.D. squads. The Kirkuk squad has been bequeathed a full-body bomb suit, though it is regarded as too cumbersome by the Iraqis, and so is sparingly used. Its wearer walks among nimbler colleagues like a green giant struggling through a swamp. The E.O.D. officers have also inherited a bomb-disposal robot, resembling nothing so much as a toy tank, with a swiveling mechanical arm that is operated by remote control. Costing more than $50,000 each, the robots are some of the costliest items owned by the Kirkuk squad, more expensive than most of its pickup trucks. (Those secondhand Dragunov rifles, by contrast, can be picked up in a local bazaar for less than $1,000.) In northern Iraq’s ethnically mixed security force, Kurdish and Arab officers use nicknames for the robot that are drawn from their own languages. The Kurds call the machine “Kaka Hama,” while the Arabs call it “Hammudi.” Both are diminutives for the same name, Mohammed, popular with both communities. But stern officers take questions about the robot with an indulgent smile—they don’t discuss its performance against bombs any more than football coaches discuss the team mascot’s contribution to victory.
And among the human participants, the technicians have chosen one of the simplest—and most sympathetic—roles in Iraq’s messy drama. They do not kick down doors, man checkpoints, examine alibis, or extract confessions. Instead, the conflict and its confusing parade of victims and villains are recast as a contest between a man and a destructive technology. *The Hurt Locker’*s dramatization, in that way, facilitates a close sympathy for the American soldiers, whatever your opinion of the invasion of Iraq. Who cares what banner a man fights under when he is risking his life to save civilians? Among Ahmed and his Iraqi E.O.D. colleagues, the work seems doubly virtuous—in a volatile city that is itself endlessly compared to a ticking bomb, they are cast as Kirkuk’s saviors.
A man from the investigations unit smiles as Ahmed and Rashid praise their profession. He speaks only once.
“Everyone learns from his mistakes, except for the E.O.D. officer,” he says. “His mistakes kill him.”
