[Quote:]

The next morning, I met a friend at a nearby teahouse. As I was enjoying a glass of black tea, my friend told me about all the foreign journalists pouring into town. Then someone called out, “Which one is Ayub?” It was a man in a brown coat. He drove me to a house where two American journalists needed an interpreter to do an interview. They worked for this magazine: Elizabeth Rubin, a writer, and Lynsey Addario, a photographer. They were sitting with a local Kurdish commander waiting for someone to help them talk to him.

When the interview was finished, they asked me to be their “fixer.” The word initially puzzled me. I was two years out of the Teachers’ Institute in Sulaimaniya, trained to instruct children in the English alphabet and vocabulary. I would have taught those children that a “fixer” is a person who repairs broken machines. But in a war zone, a fixer is a journalist’s interpreter, guide, source finder and occasional lifesaver. Every major media organization in Iraq would come to have its fixers. And fixers, it turned out, were well paid. I was offered $100 a day, about 25 times what I could make as a teacher.

I was 24, and suddenly I was the eyes and ears for some of the world’s top journalists. I would spend the next three years as a fixer and watch as my country learned a painful lesson: sometimes when you try to fix something, you break it even more.