Everything just felt impossible. The unnecessary hurt, suffering, pain, confusion everywhere coupled with the sheer impossibility of even delivering the most basic of items was like a claw to the throat, a cannonball to the soul. I mean it was insane. We could not even get in soap, never mind enough tents. My INARA staff were all fielding frantic phone calls from people in the camps we worked in wanting to know where to go, what they should do. Our team was in turn calling everyone they knew with some sort of transport to help families from a truck to a donkey cart. We could not advise people where to go, there wasn’t anywhere to go. But we could at least try to get them out of a danger zone.

I felt sickened by the helplessness, the inability to even remotely come close to alleviating the misery. What made it all the more aching was the disproportionate level of gratitude even when we were not able to deliver anything. We had managed to secure 20 tents and were delivering them to the most vulnerable of families. Its a horrid calculation but boils down to: if you’re crammed in a relatives tent or concrete space (like you see in the video above) or whatever you don’t get a tent. They go to those who have ended up on the street. While we were out delivering those, a man came and asked us to see his brother, Wael, who had been injured at the start of the war and was still bedridden. They wanted to see if we could get them a tent since they were four families crammed into a tiny space. We couldn’t spare one of the ones we have. Other families were sleeping in the open, I explain, apologizing.

My heart cracked when Wael’s brother said “It’s OK, at least you made him smile.”

I wanted to scream. Scream at the injustice of it all. Scream because we do not deserve to be forgiven with such grace for failing.

But you don’t scream in Gaza, you don’t show your own sad because those around you have bigger screams, a deeper sad. One that they don’t get to “rotate out” from. One that they are not just responding to but living. One that they don’t even have the luxury of screaming or really being sad about because they somehow have to keep moving through the madness.

To this day, despite the so-called ceasefire, people in Gaza have not been afforded the ability to scream or really even begin to process their sad. They still can’t breathe, I mean like really breathe, the way that you do when you’ve gone through something horrendous but you can see the other side of it.

That August 2024 trip, shortly after meeting Wael, after seeing children in ICU unable to be removed from machines bc of missing medical equipment, after having to repeatedly apologize to people for not having any soap or all that much of anything to give them my brain was glitching to say the least.

So when I heard Mohammed call up the stairs of the Gaza guesthouse in a whisper-scream “Arwa, Arwa, come you have to help” and I ran down to see Caramella the cat pawing at a little pink thing my first thought was “you have to save it.”

He looked utterly distressed and terrified.

“Caramella killed a mama mouse and she’s pulling babies out from the couch.” He said. “What should we do?”

Caramella is Hanya’s cat. Hanya and I met in Gaza starting with my first trip there. She worked for GEM (Global Empowerment Mission) and I crashed in their guesthouse. GEM has been absolutely lovely with me and my charity INARA, and super supportive in any way they can. Hanya is hands down one of my favorite humans ever. She also lived in the guesthouse since she was forced to evacuate her apartment in Gaza early on in the war and then her family home in Rafah which is now a pile of rubble.

Now, I’m totally a cat person, but I can also say that Caramella, this fluffy squishy faced fancy breed creature is one of the nastiest cats I’ve met, unlike my three utterly ridiculously over-loving Turkish street rescues. Hanya had just had Caramella shaved so she looked utterly ridiculous with a pompom tail and paws, and i’m firmly convinced she was so mortified it made her even nastier. At least it gave us something to laugh about.

We had also evacuated the GEM guesthouse, which is how we ended up in the house with the gross couch where Caramella had just carried out her mama mouse murder and was now busily dragging out little babies. They were still all pink and squirmy, barely the size of my thumbnail. I don’t know what I was thinking, there was no way they were going to survive without their mother, and even if they had, then what?

I woke up every two hours that night to drip sugar water into their mouths using a tissue. I used a Q-tip to tickle their bellies like their mama would have licked. (I googled what to do). Hanya and I were sharing a room and she was fluctuating somewhere between “Arwa you’re disgusting and I can’t believe you’re making me sleep with rodents” grossed out and both of us totally cracking up, utterly bemused by my efforts.

In the morning I handed them over to a friend to take to an animal rescue org. That evening, when I got back from another miserable day in the field, I asked about the babies. I was told they died. I mean I don’t really think they even made it all the way there, they probably got tossed or flushed.

I remember excusing myself to go to the bathroom, just waves of this toxic suffocating tsunami of anger, infuriation, frustration. I remember wanting to punch the wall and then thinking it would be really stupid to break my hand. It was not about the mice. It was about everything else.

Little could anyone have known that that first summer of the war would end up later being referred to as “the good times”, little could anyone have known that Israel would totally shut Gaza’s borders for months, deliberately starve the population, all the while bombing them to smithereens.

Even mice had a different connotation back then. Sure gross and no one really wants to see one, but now? Have you seen the video of the kid with the skin infection and the mouse in the background? Have you read the stories of children showing up at medical facilities, their tiny fingers chewed by rats? More than 80% of makeshift shelter sites in Gaza are infested with rodents.

Today’s headline is that Israel has rejected Trump’s Gaza plan, the one that Hamas accepted.

And people in Gaza still can’t scream, can’t cry, can’t breathe. And yet they still exhibit such grace.

“C4, like the explosive?”

“Yes, they thought it was cheese. They found it along with some bottles of water and Pepsi.”

It’s towards the end of Nov 2024 and I’m in Gaza City. The IDF had recently withdrawn from the area this family lived in. The family had briefly returned.

Survival requires this type of foraging, the doctor explained.

“Starvation can do anything.” the doctor said.

This family had divided up the C4 and put it in some bread. They came into the ICU vomiting and convulsing. Most of them recovered, but one 13 year old girl was still connected to a mechanical ventilator.

At the time, in Gaza City there was a shortage of everything except for flour. On the way to the hospital, my charity INARA’s physical therapist, Mohammed, had pulled up a picture of a steaming roasted chicken lying on a bed of rice. It had been months since he’d had a proper meal, nevermind a chicken.

“I dream of chicken” he had joked. “Sometimes I just look at this picture and pretend I’m eating it.”

The pediatrics ward for malnutrition is packed. Children whose wounds aren’t healing because their bodies don’t have the nutrients they need. Babies who are too weak to cry.

Leave a comment

Back then the Gaza Strip was split by what was called the Netzarim corridor. Crossing for aid organizations required permission from COGAT (the Israeli unit that is meant so faciliate coordination), but we were only allowed to move personnel, not products through it.

Most of the population had been forcibly displaced further south, crammed into the central part of Gaza. One of Israels tactics to obstruct aid was to prevent its movement within the Gaza Strip itself. There are countless examples of this, but I’ll explain using the example of flour, specific to that point in time. In south and central Gaza there was a massive flour shortage. (Note: when I say shortage is does not mean that there were ever the needed levels. Its like shortage on top of shortage.)

There were even a couple instances where people were crushed to death at bakeries. We, the humanitarians, were screaming about the flour shortage. Israel was like no, the humanitarians are lying there is flour and broadcast images of flour moving into Gaza.

It’s true, flour was moving into Gaza. But what Israel did not talk about, and what governments and much of the mainstream media did not bother to look into was this inconvenient part of the story: Israel was allowing flour to move into the NORTHERN part of Gaza. We, aid organizations, were not permitted by Israel to move that flour through Netzarim to central and south Gaza where the majority of the population was and where the shortage of flour existed.

Conversely we were not allowed to move hygiene kits, food and so on from south/central to the north. This resulted in the flour shortage in south/central and the shortage of everything else in Gaza City/the north.

It was one of the evil genius ways that Israel used a half-truths and turned that into an accepted truth for the rest of the world, especially it’s supporters, aka the United States and Europe. And Israel could happily call humanitarians liars and everyone else just gobbled up that story.

I remember back then thinking to myself “Israel doesn’t need to bomb Gaza. It can just keep up the status quo and everyone will die.”

Fast forward to present day. Fast forward through Israel deliberately shutting off all aid entry in 2025, the abomination called the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” that was a horrendous real life Squid Games only the players were starving Palestinians forced to make a death run towards food as Israeli soldiers fired on them, through the famine the UN declared, the farce of President Trump’s “Board of Peace” and the ceasefire deal that isn’t being implemented by any stretch of the imagination. The US/Israel say that Hamas is refusing to disarm, Hamas says it cannot even consider that as long as Israel continues to bomb and push its “yellow line” further into Gaza. Reminder: Netanyahu recently said that “70% is just the start”.

(Read this for an update on those negotiations.)

I despise the question of “are things better than they were?”, often responding “better than what? the baseline has moved into the depths of a nightmare none of us can understand.

On that Nov 2024 trip of mine to Gaza City I met a little boy named Osama in the same hospital. He moved his mouth to speak but no sound came out. Osama was playing marbles in the street with other kids when the Israeli strike happened. His parents cannot grasp this reality of theirs. He was just playing marbles outside they say over and over again. Marbles.

The nurse pumps an ambu bag, allowing Osama to squeak out a couple sentences. He says he’s hot but actually he doesn’t know if he is or not, he cant feel anything. There is shrapnel high up in his spine, he’s paralyzed.

He says he wants to go home, he wants to ride his bike. And he says “I want to travel”. He means outside of the Gaza Strip, for medical treatment, but already back then the list was thousands long.

Today that list is closer to 16,500 people who need medical evacuation despite the “partial re-opening” of the Rafah crossing. The so-called “ceasefire deal” that was meant to see a regular flow of medical evacuations and Palestinians being permitted to return to Gaza, but its more like a drop trying to squeeze itself out of a tap. In fact at this rate of medical evacuations, it will take years for all those who need urgent treatment to actually get out, ie they will die or be permanently disabled. Responsibility for that does not just lie with Israel. Countries are not coming forward and offering to take cases.

Add to that the litany of “games” that Israel plays to obstruct the access of aid, ranging from new regulations that mean that many of the largest aid organizations cannot bring their own items in, the rejection of items like baby incubators, reconstruction materials, medicine and so on. Sound familiar? Sound like I could be writing about 2024 or any timeframe over the last nearly three years now?

To go even further, aid organizations face funding shortages and soaring prices that are forcing humanitarian partners to, as is stated in the UN’s report from early June, to scale down or suspend certain critical services. Back in May the World Central Kitchen cut its hot meal distributions in Gaza by half, stating “This decision is driven entirely by financial pressure. It does not reflect any reduction in need on the ground”

I’m often asked what scares me the most when it comes to Gaza. There is a lot. But the shortest answer is “That the current conditions become the accepted norm. That much in the way many lamented Palestine and specifically the open air prison of Gaza pre-Oct 7th but did little to try to change that, the level of suffering now will turn into something that we just lament before going on to drink our lattes and sit in our air conditioning.”

Prologue: I last left Gaza in Dec 2024. I tried to re-enter in Feb/Mar 2025 and was denied four times in a row. I am still denied entry & going through the process of trying to appeal that through Israeli courts. It is moving like molasses. My charity INARA’s Gaza team does incredible work, I am in constant awe of them, not just in terms of the way that they selflessly serve their own people, but the way that they have held onto their dignity and humanity through it all.

If you want a funny but not funny back story of the absurd, read this earlier Substack piece of mine “Israeli soldiers swabbed my breast implants for explosives”

For the “but Hamas” or the “but Hamas was/is stealing the aid” gang, here is some more reading:

A piece I wrote for the Atlantic Council “I can barely stand or make it through the day’: First-hand views of Gaza’s starvation”

Sky news was the first “mainstream” media outlet to investigate the gangs that the Isreali government armed that were in reality responsible for the majority of the looting. This was not really picked up and/or properly looked into by other outlets.

Just days earlier we had found Steven’s diary in the smoke blackened bedroom of the consulate. We did not skirt any security perimeter or sneak into the consulate. There was no security. It was open season for anyone who wanted to wander around. Plenty of looters had already been through. The diary had a hard black cover, camouflaging it from the looters. It was mostly work notes. Its last words written in what looked to be frantic barely legible writing were “never ending security threats …”

Watch: Our first report from Benghazi

Long story short it kind of blew apart the State Department narrative that Stevens wasn’t aware of the security threats since he’s constantly talking about them in the pages and writing about his growing concerns for Libya. This would later set off a whole investigation into how far up the chain did his concerns go, what happened to his requests for additional security measures and was a big part of the Hillary Clinton Benghazi fiasco into security lapses.

The State Department took CNN to town over our reporting on the contents of the diary. Vogue ended up doing a whole piece on it.

Read: Vogue article

It was not a decision that CNN took lightly. We first had to verify that the diary was in fact his by cross checking some of the dates in it with publicly known meetings and travel. I transcribed it. CNN notified the State Department that we had his diary and they asked us to hand it over to the Italians. By the way, the Italians then promptly gave Italian journalists access to its contents.

The details which we reported were very specific ONLY to his concerns about security and about how he feared that he was on a hit list. The decision was made that this was newsworthy, especially since it was a clear contradiction of the State Department’s narrative.

But back to this doctor. Remember it’s just days after the attack. Benghazi is on edge. Security is super dodgy. The CIA was both onsite at the embassy and operating out of an annex nearby. That night the annex was also attacked. It was a very badly kept secret.

I take my seat across from the doctor, ready to start the interview. He is shaking and sweating buckets. He then jumps up and bolts out of the room, running through the lobby screaming that we are CIA trying to kill him. Our security consultant (yes we had those, no they were not armed) and Libyan producer chase after him. I am chasing after them thinking “the last thing we need is everyone at this hotel thinking we are CIA”. The doctor runs through cars in the parking lot and hides behind one. I scream at our security guy to stop chasing he man who is scared of the CIA since, like many security types, he looks like he walked out of the pages of the CIA fact book.

Hilarious yes. But also speaks volumes.

Once our Libyan producer got him to calm down, reassured him that we were in fact journalists, the doctor confessed that he thought that we had some sort of a spray that would shoot out of the camera lens and kill him once the camera switched on. He was convinced we were an American team of assassins. As for why we would want to kill him? Stevens was rescued from the flames of the consulate by Libyans who had rushed to the scene once the gunfire died down. He was pulled out of the building alive, but barely. By the time he arrived to the hospital and the doctor’s care he was already dead. The doctor was terrified that the Americans would blame him for Steven’s death and assassinate him as revenge.

Prologue: We would on that trip interview Libyan guards at the compound, Libyan security forces and others whose testimonies to us continued to poke holes in the State Department narrative.

In the week after Steven’s death protestors took to the streets of Benghazi to demonstrate against the attack and declare their love and appreciation for all that Chris Stevens had done for their country. They wanted the world to know that they did not condone the attack.

We returned to Benghazi later and did an in-depth investigation into the attack, which included an interview with Ahmed Abu Khatallah, a key suspect, who was wanted by the US. The interview was audio only and took place in a hotel lobby. Suffice to say both the State Department and the CIA were super pissed that CNN interviewed a guy they were looking for.

Watch: Our interview with Abu Khatallah

Sarmad and I won the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for our coverage, along with the rest of the CNN team.

Sarmad, may he rest in peace, died suddenly of natural causes two years later. He was one of the most talented cameramen I’ve ever worked with. His images were utterly ethereal. He was also one of the funniest people you’ll ever meet.

Ahmed Abu Khatallah was captured in June of 2014 and brought to the US for trial. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison. In 2024 he was sentenced to another 28 years.

Journalism can be damn depressing, aggravating, infuriating, a whole hot mess of really just nasty emotions, especially if like me you spend most of your time in the bowels of the aftermath of grotesque human behavior – ie war. It’s probably why so many of us have a pretty well-honed dark cynical sense of humor (at least we like to think we do).

I do have to say though it is among those who have lost everything that I’ve seen the most generosity, kindness, and compassion. A person with nothing will give you their last cup of coffee. A person with more wealth than they know what to do with won’t even donate a dollar even though you’ve made them cry.

By 2018 I decided that I wanted something at home to make me laugh. A human was a total non-starter. A dog was out of the question, I travel too much. I decided to get rescue kittens, and if you know Istanbul you know that it’s the city of cats. Of course, me being me, I don’t know how to do anything in moderation.

I trot off to the shelter, a kitten climbs the cage and meows at me so I’m like ok that’s my kitten. Then I feel guilty and take his sister and brother. From no cats to three cats. I very quickly learned that I don’t like responsability, I don’t like anything “pulling” me, I don’t like missing something. But it was too late. I fell in love with those furry creatures. They all had diarrhea and would track little poo paw prints all over my place. I walked around with disinfectant spray and a wad of paper towels. It was gross. My Lord of the Rings collection ended up in the trash. (They do have an Instagram page Poo Paws Adventures )

Bear with me, I’m getting to the part about my mama.

At the time I lived in a fifth-floor walkup with a spectacular view over the Galata tower and the mouth of the Golden Horn that spills into the Bosphorus. I had a balcony that I put wire meshing on so that the kittens didn’t fall. When they got older they would sit at the edge of the wire mesh and meow down to all of Istanbul’s street cats galivanting freely around the rooftops.

I had a horrible realization that I had created kitty Gaza. You can see the world out there but you can’t go. And so we moved into my current place, a house with a garden and the cats became indoor/outdoor. Early on when I was letting them out, Burrito didn’t come home. I lost it. I was walking the streets nonstop looking for him, putting up posters (it really doesn’t help to be looking for a tabby in Istanbul, they are everywhere).

I was obsessed, where was he, where was he sleeping, what was he eating. And in that moment I understood why my mama would drive me crazy asking me those questions. I don’t know if it’s just an Arab thing or not but right after “hi mami” it’s “Arwa are you sleeping, are you eating?”

I called my mama sobbing “I’m so sorry I never understood, I didn’t get it, I’m so sorry for all the worry I caused you. Walla (I swear) I’m so sorry.”

“Yee Arwa, after all these years why now? What happened”

“Mami Burrito is lost!” I wailed.

She hung up on me.

I cried and cried. Not for me, not for Burrito but for the well of understanding and of understanding how little I actually understand about the pain of the loss of a child.

Leave a comment

Share

Prologue: I found Burrito the next day, day 4 of his misadventure. Idiot somehow got into a locked up abandoned house a block away and appeared howling his head off at a window I had walked past probably a dozen times calling for him. Who knows how he got in here, the owner was shocked when I tracked him down and said “my cat is in your house.”

If I had known how much I would love those little morons with their stupid faces and paws I would not have gotten them.

For those of you worried about them being alone: They have a cat door that opens on their microchips. There is no litter box in the house, they go outside. Their feeder is automatic. They have a self-cleaning water fountain with 5 liters in it. They get checked on regularly. When I’m gone for long stretches I get someone to stay with them, they don’t need anything done, just a human to cuddle with. I know ridiculous, they are cats. My neighborhood grannies snitch on them to me all the time. “Arwa we saw your cats eating the street cat food.”

On any given day one of our CNN Iraqi staff would arrive to the bureau with a story of someone they knew who was killed. There was one about a relative whose head was cut off and a dog’s head sown on in its place.

For years the American military and diplomats had berated the press for reporting “bad news” (aka the relentless bombings, slaughter, pain and loss) and tried to feed the public a diet of “things are going great” (i.e a school was painted). That is, until things got so bad the Bush administration had to face reality. A troop surge was coming.

The battle to recapture Haifa Street started off with the forces moving forward hugging the buildings, signaling through hand gestures. The unit we’re with starts clearing an apartment building, aka smashing down doors, guns pointed.

There are these tiny purple sequined flip flops outside of one apartment door, lined up next to other larger children’s shoes and adult ones. Breakfast is half-eaten on the table in the kitchen. It’s a story that can only be told in what’s left behind. They left in a hurry. They had kids, one was a little girl that loved sparkly things.

A couple hours in and it’s all in full swing. The platoon we’re with is pinned down on a rooftop by gunmen on a higher building. The roof was encircled by a low wall that we were all lined up against. The bullets were pinging in the middle, so if you didn’t move towards the center, you were OK.

I had been calling in phoners (when you report on the phone) all morning for CNN. it was big breaking news. You could see the smoke rising, the Apache choppers swooping and firing, and hear the gunfire from the CNN Baghdad bureau. The network had that shot up and my voice from the thick of it.

At one point I call in for my next report and the International Desk tells me that they are under instructions from Baghdad Bureau Chief, Cal Perry, not to put me on air until I call my mother. Oh yes.

Mama had obviously caught the breaking news or maybe as often happened someone called to tell her to turn on the TV and that her daughter was doing something crazy again. Either way, the conversation between my mama and Cal had gone something like this:

“Get my daughter out of there.”

“Mrs. Damon, I can’t. She’s in a firefight. And even if I could she probably wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Get my daughter out of there because you do not want to be talking to me to tell me that she’s injured or dead.”

Arab Mama lioness coupled with guilt trip. Works every time. He was totally freaked out. I mean fair enough, no one ever wants to make that call or really think about it.

I threw my own tantrum and got back on air.

While that was the first time, it would not be the only time that my mama has called my managers or bosses to demand that they extract me or disclose my whereabouts. Her response when I try to tell her that it’s not appropriate, that I’m an adult and it’s a major network, is always something along the lines of “C-N-N, Fiiii-N-N, YOU THINK BECAUSE YOU ARE ON TV WITH CNN YOU ARE SOMETHING NOW? I BIRTHED YOU! YOU CAME FROM MY LOINS! I HAVE A RIGHT TO CALL ANYONE AT ANYTIME TO KNOW WHERE MY DAUGHTER IS!”

For those of you who don’t know, my mama is Syrian, I grew up bilingual. So, if you are at all familiar with Arabic, translate that to yourself, it’s way funnier. Suffice to say my mama was legendary when I was at CNN. The people at the desk used to play hot potato with the phone whenever she called.

POSTSCRIPT:

I tried to find that same apartment building, ask about the little girl with the purple sequined flip flops. I never found her. I carry those stories with me, the stories that I can’t properly tell, the stories of the owners of the little shoes that litter battlefields.

Share "That time when ... " by Arwa Damon

Leave a comment

This was mostly a success story, of how the Zakouma national park in Chad, under the management of African Parks, managed to get poaching under control although the potential threat from poachers was getting more sophisticated. We saw baby elephants, and I died from cuteness.

More importantly, it was a big deal because the elephant population had been so traumatized by all the poachers hunting them down, they had not had babies for five years.

One day, we’re puttering around with the park director, Rian Labuschagne and one of the rangers and we see two guys on horseback who are not supposed to be there. Now the park did have a mounted patrol, we’d gone out with them.

This was not them. All I was thinking was “poachers!” along with “why can’t we just have a chill shoot”.

We chase after them in a 4x4, but these horses are flying. They are going to fast we can’t catch up and they disappear into the brush. Then we find a camel (stay with me it’s going to make sense). Ahhhh, maybe they aren’t poachers, maybe they are from the local community, looking for their lost camel. Regardless, they are still not supposed to come into the park on their own, they are supposed to notify and then come blah blah. So Rian leaves the ranger with the camel and the radio so he can communicate with park HQ.

We decide to drive around and see if we can find these intruders. Suddenly we spot one and the 4x4 takes off again. Before you know it, we’re in muck that just gets deeper. The horse is stuck; the rider jumps off and runs away. Rian tries to chase him, but this tall white man has no chance of catching up with the lithe and nimble local.

So, there we are. We have a stuck vehicle we unsuccessfully try to dig out. No radio because it’s with the ranger with the camel. We do, however, have a horse. Me and my big mouth pipe up with “I know how to ride, I’ll just ride back to HQ and get help.”

Now, mind you, unlike the patrol horses, this horse does not have a saddle. And it’s really skinny. And the bridle is just a rope. I mean I’m a really good rider, I once was floating the idea of going pro. I’ve ridden bareback loads of times before, no dramas. I’m hoisted on the back of this poor creature, I give it a gentle cluck and tap with my legs and it just bolts. And I mean bolts. Remember when I said the 4x4 couldn’t catch up? Yeah.

I’m doing everything I know to slow it down. Pulling on the reins is useless. I try to turn it (if you ride a horse into a circle it will slow down), the horse trips and suddenly I’m hanging off its neck, I can see the ground and the stones whizzing past and I’m having to make that split second calculation of “do I let go and risk getting hurt but there’s no one around or do I try to find superhuman strength and scramble back up.” I went with option two, eventually ride it into a bunch of bushes and phew we’re back to a manageable walk.

I head back to where I left the crew who were walking in my general direction totally freaking out that they were going to find me in a heap. I hop down and realize my ass really hurts. It’s getting dark, lions are out, we can hear them roar and we’re basically walking along with their dinner. Not good.

Eventually we make it back and my ass is killing me. I try to use a mirror to see what’s going on. Can’t tell. In the shower I put my hand between my butt cheeks, and it comes out bloody and pussy. Someone must look for me. I have two choices, producer Brent Swails or cameraman Ben Adams. They were having beers when I rocked up.

“Guys someone has to look in my ass.”

“What?”

“It’s all bloody and pussy in there and I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Brent it’s you.” There is no way Adam was doing that and well, Brent at the time was junior to the both of us. The curse of youth.

Ah Brentie. Brent was one of the best producers at the network based out of CNN’s Johannesburg bureau. I did all my Africa stuff with him, we were super close, and really good friends, the kind that just look at each other and burst into giggles.

Still, I mean you never want to end up face down on a bed with a colleague having to spread your butt cheeks to see what’s going on. I couldn’t stop laughing. Brent was mortified and legit traumatized. It was disgusting. My butt cheeks must have cracked open over the skinny horse’s spine during our mad gallop and my even crazier attempt to stay on. I had massive oozing bloody blisters all up in there close to my butt hole. Poor Brent had to clean and bandage them for me twice a day. Me being me, I was telling everyone the story and one of the pilots said I should use Vaseline. Brent got spared, I could handle that on my own. But let me tell you, it sucks to be running around in that heat, sweating buckets and then have that sweat mix in with Vaseline and run down your legs. And I couldn’t sit down properly. I was miserable.

Postscript: I find this whole story utterly hilarious. Brent doesn’t understand why I tell everyone because its so mortifying. There is a male horse in Zakouma named Arwa. Brent got nicknamed Butt Boy by his manager.

Here is some of the coverage we did.

Chad elephant poaching article

Chad elephant poaching video report

Leave a comment

Coming next: That time when my mama blocked my live coverage from a firefight

The battle for Samarra in October 2004 was my first real embedded offensive. Prior to that I had covered the fighting between the US military and the Shi’a militant group, the Mehdi Militia, in Kufa but we were staying on a base, going on quick operations, and often the fighting came to us since the base was regularly attacked. I had also done other smaller missions with the Americans; going out on whatever menu the US had to offer ranging from patrols in markets to under cover of darkness HVT (high value target) capture missions.

I was a perma-lance (what freelancers that were regularly hired by a network were called) producer for CNN back then, crammed into the back of an APC (Armored Personnel Carrier) with correspondent Jane Arraf, cameraman Neil Hallsworth, and anywhere between 8-12 American soldiers. We were parked outside of Samarra, part of the military’s “hurry up and wait” which essentially is like getting woken up by someone barking “CNN LET’S GO” and then waiting for hours for something to start.

Practically speaking it’s getting all the military’s various units into position under cover of darkness and waiting for daybreak. Either way, I really had to pee. I mean REALLY had to pee. Each time the troops cracked the back of the APC to try to let me out, RPG’s (rocket propelled grenades) would fly in. The males could piss out of the back by just barely cracking it open, ie RPG safe. Me, not so much. Neil comes up with the ingenious idea of cutting the top off a one-liter water bottle for me to pee into. And so yes, smushed between two soldiers, I drop my pants, squirm around, and do my business. It was pitch black in there, and only later did I remember that all the soldiers had night vision goggles, but frankly in circumstances like that who cares.

(Note to readers: The vast majority of my stories have an element of a desperate need for a toilet or a female related disaster. That’s just the reality of it.)

President George W. Bush had declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq 17 months earlier, and the Americans were in total denial that their Iraq project was unravelling and victory was a total farce. In fact it was such a farce that the press pretty much had to cover anything happening outside of Baghdad by being embedded. Far from ideal, but it was the only way to get around the country and cover what was happening, and for me since I am an Arabic speaker, it provided the opportunity to speak to people. Even in Baghdad by then it was super risky, though little did we know that it would get much much worse.

When it came to Samarra, Sunni insurgents had taken over the city, the areas around it had turned into no-go zones for the US military and the fledgling Iraqi security forces, ie they got attacked or blown up. The US had disbanded Saddam Hussein’s army upon taking over Iraq and in one fell swoop created loads of pissed off unemployed men, ie the insurgency. Over time their ranks would grow and elements of them would become more extreme.

This fledgling army, which the Americans started from scratch was nicknamed by us in the press as the “flip flop” soldiers, for no reason other than they were so poorly equipped most did not have proper boots, so were literally in flip flops. They had practically zero fighting experience, and the training exercises we covered were a joke. (Note: all this would change over years as the ISF gained real on the ground experience fighting for the next two decades).

As such, at the time, there would be the obligatory Iraqis attached to the Americans because the US really wanted to promote “joint operations”. I think that the US unit I was with had two of them.

I remember the sun rising casting its pink-orange glow over a sleeping city, or at least one that appeared to be sleeping. I remember wondering if Samarra’s civilians had any idea what was to come. I remember the first gunshots, cracking in the distance, echoing through the silence of Samarra’s streets and the crescendo as it grew into a full-fledged battle. I remember how the soldiers we were with would lay down suppressive fire; basically shooting down alleyways and streets so that the rest of the troops could cross.

I was so tired that each time we would pause I’d fall asleep, couldn’t have been for more than a few seconds at a time, redefining and later in my career perfecting my ability to sleep anywhere for any amount of time. At one point I totally passed out only to open my eyes and see that I was sleeping next to a small pile of fly covered rotting meat. It was not a high point.

And then there is that one memory, the one that always emerges whenever I’m asked about war, the one that clenched and twisted my guts.

The guns had settled, the Americans had declared victory, and we were driving to the morgue where Samarra’s civilians were permitted to identify and collect the bodies of the dead. I looked out through the filth covered thick bullet proof glass of the backseat of the Humvee. A woman was stumbling through a field of dirt, her steps so thick, it was as if she did not want to reach where she was going. I remember her falling to her knees, her black head covering falling off, dark chestnut hair tumbling out.

And then she wailed. “WHHHYYYYYYYYYY”

Or at least that’s what it sounded like. It was a sound so primal, so visceral, so deep, that as a write I can still feel that now familiar tentacle of another’s pain grip my own throat. It was a sound I did not know then a human could emit.

Postscript: We didn’t see any civilians until we got to the morgue after two days of fighting. We never got that woman’s name, but someone told me it was her brother who had been killed. The whole scene at the morgue was layers of sad and angry. The rhetoric of war whitewashes pain, all that is lost. The Americans constantly and consistently declared victory, be it in Samarra, later in Falluja, and later in all of Iraq. By Americans I don’t mean those who were on the ground, on the day to day missions, they quickly saw through it all. They lived the reality. But by the time the reports went up through each level of the chain of command “its a disaster” eventually turned into “things are going great”. The top military and government/diplomatic officials just wanted to be able to quickly scream “we won”. Their failures and inability to understand the dynamics of Iraq either deliberately or through willful ignorance, would a decade later be a major factor in the rise of ISIS.

Share "That time when ... " by Arwa Damon

Leave a comment

Coming next: That time when I got butt blisters trying to be a hero

The young female IDF soldier looks rather sheepish as she waves her hands over my chest and asks “Silicon?”

I startle.

“Yes, they look great, don’t they?” I respond in a slightly joking, slightly sarcastic tone. “I didn’t know you could see this in the scanner.”

The female soldier signals at me to wait. I don’t think she speaks English.

It’s December 2024 and I am exiting Gaza, having just spent a month there with my charity INARA.

My bladder is about to explode since the convoy took four hours to get to the crossing. Nothing is permitted to move through Israel’s so called “red zone” without permission. The red zone areas are areas under IDF control where a mouse farting will have a bomb land on its head. They are not demarcated.

Any movement through these areas requires coordination with the IDF. Once that comes through, the vehicles move to a “holding point” that is designated by Israel and waits for the “green light” to proceed forward through a pre-designated route. It’s still all rather nerve wracking as there have been a bunch of times where the IDF fired on vehicles whose movements were approved. Remember the triple tap on the World Central Kitchen convoy in Apr 2024 that killed seven of their staff? That’s the one that made the biggest splash in the news, but there have been loads of others.

That morning those of us rotating out met at the usual spot to catch the convoy. The road there, like all in Gaza dilapidated and potholed, lined with the rubble and wreckage of where life used to be. It had rained; my eye catches a little girl with no shoes on standing in the mud. Just as we’re about to reach the “holding point” we pass a man on a bicycle, his son on the back. He waves with the brightest smile. I smile and wave back, but I’m breaking inside. I’m breaking over it all, and I’m breaking over this man who still has the grace to smile at us even though we’ve failed them.

(Video from my last trip out of Gaza. December 2024)

It’s all rather surreal, but then again everything about Gaza is. Dystopian. Apocalyptic. Catastrophic. How do you describe something that is beyond the limits of existing words? This is my fourth trip into Gaza since Oct 7^th and there is no “getting used to it”. The mind continues to be unable to process what the eyes see.

We were stopped at the holding point for hours. I was cursing the three coffees I had chugged earlier. At one point a tank fired into a building a few dozen yards to our left and then when we finally moved, I saw a quadcopter drop a bomb on something out of the corner of my eye as we sped down the road.

When we finally arrive to the Karam Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom as you’ll hear it referred to more often) crossing, we ask the soldiers if us women can go through first. There are loads of men in our group and only a handful of us females, and we all need to pee. Plus, coincidentally we’re all middle aged and menopausal and well, bladder control isn’t what it used to be.

But no. The men are to go through first.

By the time I’m pulled aside after the body scanner (the ones where you put your arms up), I’m doing the cross your legs over each other please don’t let me piss my pants dance. I’m in a small concrete bunker with a fisheye camera and I’m sure that the soldiers watching me through it are having a field day.

The female comes back with a wand, waves it over my chest and signals again at me to wait.

She returns again and this time swabs my chest. You know when at security they will swab your hands and electronics with that piece of paper? Yeah, she swabs my breasts with that. She actually looks rather embarrassed.

“You know if I was smuggling some sort of explosive out of Gaza in my boobs I would have gone for a double D and not a B cup.” I crack sarcastically, but its wasted. She has no idea what I’m saying or she has a really good poker face. I beeline for the toilet.

Postscript:

When I tried to return to Gaza a few months later, in Feb and March I was denied entry by Israel. I am still denied entry & going through the process of trying to appeal that. My charity INARA is still working inside with our incredibly dedicated team.

Follow INARA on instagram

Learn more about INARA's work in Gaza

Here is one of the interviews I did from Gaza for CNN during that last Nov/Dec trip:

Amanpour CNN Interview

For additional clarification: Journalists are not and have not been permitted entry into Gaza to report independently. I left CNN in 2022 and since then have been focused on my charity INARA, other projects and all sorts of bits and pieces. Also to add, I do not take a salary from INARA.

Share "That time when ... " by Arwa Damon

Leave a comment

Coming next: That time when I really heard the sound of pain for the first time.