April 4, 2003
Couple flees Baghdad after 18-hour ordeal By LEAH ETLING With white crosses taped to the top of their vehicle, Jonathan and Leah Wilson-Hartgrove drove into Baghdad last week to spread a Christian message of peace and love to everyday Iraqis in the midst of war. After four days, Iraqi police asked them to leave, suspicious the group they were with were spies. They raced to Jordan in a scary 18-hour ordeal as fighter jets roared overhead, and they made an unexpected hospital stop. It was an abrupt end to an amazing journey that took the 22-year-old couple, the daughter and son-in-law of Santa Barbarans Jonathan and Marti Wilson, into the heart of Iraq. Now back home in Philadelphia, they have no regrets about the trip. "We think part of what it means to be Christian and to follow Jesus is to be willing to suffer with people before we would be complicit in making them suffer," Mr. Wilson-Hartgrove said. "I'm really glad we went. I'm glad we got to be with the Iraqi people." The day before the war broke out in Iraq, the couple went to Jordan as part of a Christian peace group, hoping to give solace to the people in Baghdad. They arrived there March 25. Last Friday, the group walked a few blocks from their hotel in a residential area to see a communications center that had been bombed the night before. "When we got over there, there was a hotel just across the street that had also been hit. The owner wanted to show us the damage," Mr. Wilson-Hartgrove said. They saw stained-glass windows blown out by the blast. "He showed us the bedroom where he had been sleeping in the hotel and showed us he had urinated on himself when it went off, he was so scared." As they left the hotel, a policeman noticed one member of their group using a video camera to record the damage. Mr. Wilson-Hartgrove had also taken some pictures. The cameras alarmed the police. "The Iraqi government is very concerned about pictures taken outside. They could be used to target other sites," Mr. Wilson-Hartgrove said. They were arrested and spent four hours at the police station. "They gave us water and breakfast and chatted with us. We sang some songs, and one of the guys picked up a ruler off his desk and acted like he was conducting us," Mr. Wilson-Hartgrove said. Eventually a liaison from the foreign ministry office picked them up. "He told us he was going to have to ask us to leave." On the way back to Jordan, one of three vehicles traveling with their party hit a piece of shrapnel and crashed in a ditch. The three people inside were injured and had to be taken to a hospital in the nearby town of Rutba. "There were fighter jets overhead when we were in and around Rutba," Mr. Wilson-Hartgrove said. "Our Iraqi drivers were very nervous. They were driving as fast as they could go to get us through there." The drivers didn't want to turn back when they realized the third car was missing, but the team insisted, Ms. Wilson-Hartgrove wrote to her parents. They caught up with their friends at the hospital, where a doctor stitched up a head wound suffered by one group member, and they piled into the two remaining cars for the rest of the trip. More than 14 hours later, the injured pastor from Seattle was delivered to a hospital in Jordan. Mr. Wilson-Hartgrove said the pastor is still in Amman, Jordan, but is expected to make a full recovery. Before they left Baghdad, the couple witnessed a city already under siege and bracing for invasion. But there were also signs of everyday life. "You could almost any time of day hear the rumble of bombs in the distance, but there were also kids playing soccer in the street and there was a guy we saw plowing his field on the outskirts of town," Mr. Wilson-Hartgrove said. But people were preparing to defend themselves. "We saw people preparing for a street fight. They were piling sandbags in front of their doors and on the corners of streets. We talked to the front desk people at our hotel and the guys behind the desk said: 'We're preparing to defend our hotel. We're going to shoot out the windows at the soldiers when they get here.'Ê" Some Iraqis asked the Wilson-Hartgroves why the war was happening. "They said if this is liberation, we don't want it," Mr. Wilson-Hartgrove said. "There were clearly people there who would rather have a better government (than Saddam Hussein's regime), but nobody there thinks that having a better government is worth losing their homes and their children." |
Are you affected by the possible war
with Iraq? |