by Zahra Hankir
I didn’t want to pray, go to the mosque, learn Arabic, or wear a headscarf. I wanted to wear makeup, go to parties, and look like everyone else. But my unibrow, brown skin, and afternoon curfew made that difficult. At primary school, I and other people of color were used to racial slurs such as “Paki.” I spent the bulk of my teens hiding my life at home from my friends. I had two distinct identities that I couldn’t quite reconcile: at home I was an Iraqi Muslim, while at school I was a northern Brit.
The first time I returned to Iraq—at the age of seventeen, fourteen years after we’d fled—came as a shock. My mother cried again, this time from happiness. She was reunited with female family members, who ululated; she embraced my uncle who had been held in Iran, and they both cried. She said incarceration had changed the way he looked: he was now frail and old. Iraq, meanwhile, remained stuck in time, fraying at its dilapidated edges following years of war. I finally met girls my age who looked like me, but I still felt like a foreigner. My Arabic was broken, my reference points weren’t the same as theirs, and my outlook was different. My mother had started to float the idea of marriage; during the trip, she arranged a visit to the family home of an Iraqi doctor who lived in Hull in the hopes that I’d be tempted by their affluent and relatively liberal lifestyle. One uncle told me he looked forward to my next visit to the country—when I’d be wearing a headscarf.
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In March 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. A million antiwar demonstrators in the United Kingdom marched against the conflict. Unlike for the other Iraq wars, politicians, UN officials, and ordinary people came together to oppose the invasion. There was even an antiwar protest in Hull, a city that wasn’t exactly known for its international political activism.
It had been twelve years since the Gulf War. The country appearing on every news channel and covering the front of every newspaper was the country I was from: I knew it, I’d visited it, I’d resented it. In that context, at eighteen, I started to watch the news by choice. For the first time, I listened closely to my parents’ heated discussions with their friends. The same dread I felt as a child watching the news flashes had returned, but it wasn’t because the developments saddened my parents—this time they saddened me, too. I read everything I could about Iraq, its history and its culture, and then I’d watch the bombs drop on television with the rest of the country.
This immersion in politics turned out not to be a phase, as my parents had hoped. Shortly after beginning my undergraduate studies at Leeds University, I discovered the campus was a hub for political debates, activism, and journalism. My chemistry degree took a backseat: I wrote for the student paper, took part in campus elections, and was a member of the student union. By the time I completed my degree, I’d decided to change direction and quit chemistry for journalism. Much to my parents’ disappointment, and with the help of a scholarship, I moved to London to begin a graduate degree in broadcast journalism.
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Growing up in Hull, I wasn’t able to fully grasp what it meant to be Iraqi. I hadn’t suffered in the way Iraqis who remained in the country had, so while I was outraged by that suffering, I still felt disconnected from it.
It wasn’t until I joined Vice News Tonight on HBO in September 2016 that I traveled to Iraq to report from the ground for the first time. Before joining Vice News Tonight, I had worked for Al Jazeera International and Sky News, where I had dealt extensively with politics in the Middle East, in particular the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Iraqi and Middle Eastern politics had naturally become a journalistic passion, although I was producing reports from the UK. I felt I had a unique understanding of part of the region’s culture and was eager to get on the field. Iraqi forces were about to begin a military offensive against the Islamic State in Iraq, so I pushed my new managers at Vice News Tonight to let me report on the imminent humanitarian crisis.
In October of that year, a few of my coworkers and I traveled to Qayyarah, an Iraqi town roughly thirty-five miles from Mosul, to report on the aftermath of the battle against ISIS. The violent militant group had been pushed out about two months earlier, but not before they’d set the area’s oil fields alight. Big black clouds of smoke had been billowing over the town for months, creating a thick film of soot that blanketed the area like black snow; we wanted to investigate the impact the pollution was having on residents, especially children, who still lived there. I had felt that my basic grasp of Arabic and my Iraqi identity would help us deliver an authentic story.
At first, many of the male residents we encountered in Qayyarah were eager to share their experiences, but the women were cautious to speak—unless it was just with me. (Some Iraqis would guess my background right away from my name, while others would think I was a foreigner until they heard my local dialect. They would then ask me about my family, my tribe, and where in Iraq I was from.)
One mother who lived dangerously close to the blazing fires told me she could not clean the black soot off her children, no matter how hard she tried, and that they were vomiting and coughing because of the thick fumes that they were inhaling. “I’m only speaking to you because you’re my daughter,” she said. Every morning the woman would wake up at the break of dawn to clean her humble home, but by midday, the black soot would engulf the curtains, chairs, and floors yet again. The sheep, cows, and chickens also turned to black from the soot, contaminating the main source of food in the town; water, too, had reportedly been polluted.
For hours, we watched children carelessly playing football under the plumes of smoke and hanging around the burning wells. Doctors we spoke to had told us they were concerned about the long-term effects the fumes would have on the children; the United Nations had said that millions may have been exposed to the soot and gases from the smoke. At the time, the local hospital had closed. The clinic we visited was bare, the beds and equipment were stained black, and the doctors told us they didn’t have enough medicine to treat the residents. Person after person complained of difficulty breathing and coughing until they became sick. They’d stopped going to the clinic to seek medical help because they were tired of being sent away without treatment.
Health problems weren’t the only concerns the town’s residents faced. One mother told me that when her sons played together, they would pretend to shoot one another. She was exasperated: how could they have any hope at all when ISIS glorified violence and hung dead bodies in the street to taunt the town? What were the children to make of such atrocities? Young men approached me and asked if I wanted to see barbaric ISIS videos they had been sent. Most of the children hadn’t been to school for years.
Buraq, a little girl who must have been about eight, caught my attention. She was sharp and cheeky, asking to have her photo taken with the other children. I didn’t quite catch her name, having never heard it before, so I asked her how to spell it. She froze and smiled nervously at me, but stayed silent. A boy who stood next to her laughed at me as he said Buraq hadn’t been to school for three years, so she couldn’t read or write. I was surprised by my own ignorance.
I was born in a village near the south of Iraq. Chasing chickens in the backyard of a relative’s house with my brother and cousins remains one of the strongest memories I have of the few years I lived there. Buraq and her friends reminded me of that time, before we fled the country, and of the young cousins I’d met when I’d returned briefly at seventeen. Like them, Buraq spoke with an air of authority, wise beyond her years, mimicking the language and hand gestures of adults. They loved to play and tease one another, but war, crippling sanctions, and the threat of violence had simultaneously accelerated and stunted their childhood.
I had been spared Buraq’s experiences of conflict. Instead, as a child, I had watched catastrophic events unfold from the safety of my living room in Hull. It was a curious feeling: merging archived memories of the news stories I’d witnessed as a child with hea
rtbreaking real-life testimonies in Iraq. While my Iraqi background helped me navigate the story, it also made me realize how far removed I had been.
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By October 2017, a year following my initial reporting trip, ISIS had all but completely been defeated in Iraq. Hawija, however, remained under the group’s control. All routes in and out of the town had been blocked by the Iraqi army in an attempt to stop ISIS from seizing weapons and supplies. Two male colleagues from Vice News Tonight and I returned to the country to report from the front lines of the battle, where we conducted a number of interviews with federal police officers.
We had planned to make our way back to the Qayyarah airbase at sundown, but Captain Hussein Majid—who was in charge of a group of men defending one of the Hawija city front lines and who had been tasked with looking after us—cautioned that it was too dangerous for us to travel so far so late in the day. He suggested that we accompany him and a soldier to a nearby safe house that belonged to one of the soldier’s relatives instead. The mud-brick house sat in front of a large yard that was scattered with cages holding chickens and ducks. An elderly man lived there with members of his immediate and extended family. The women of the household had moved to the second house, which was located just behind the one we were staying in, for the night.
After we washed up and changed our clothes, we were led to a room that had been filled with mattresses for the men to sleep on. I was to sleep in a separate room. Moments later, the elderly man walked in with the soldier, bringing with him fresh bread and plates of food. We said thank you, apologized for the inconvenience, and joined them to eat what they’d prepared: duck stew, fried potato, and egg. After dinner, we moved out onto the porch, where a number of other men joined us, including the host’s son, who looked more like a boy than a man. I joked that he was too young to be smoking, and his father chuckled and told us that he was seventeen, married, and expecting a child. (This surprised my colleagues more than it did me—one of my aunts had gotten married at the age of fifteen, and it isn’t uncommon for Iraqi women in more traditional households to marry in their late teens.)
The son brought us a tray of chai. Our host drew a victorious breath after taking a sip, exclaiming, “Ah, how we missed this tea!”
Without thinking, I asked why he’d gone so long without tea.
“Because of ISIS,” he replied, explaining that after the security forces had blocked the routes in and out of the area, tea prices had spiked.
It hadn’t fully dawned on me that the area, which was situated several miles from Hawija city, had been under the control of ISIS until just days earlier.
We talked for hours with the men about life under ISIS. Family and friends would periodically disappear, the children of the town had been out of school for months, livelihoods were put on hold, and food prices soared. They had been living on meager quantities of bread and rice for a year, and yet there they were, hosting a group of strangers—British and Irish journalists they had never met before. They had gone above and beyond, slaughtering a duck for us, letting us drink their precious tea, and allowing us to shower and sleep in their home.
Hospitality is an important social custom in Iraq and its neighboring countries. As such, generosity can be a competitive sport among members of the Iraqi community in Hull. Adults loudly and aggressively argue over who has the privilege of paying the bill at restaurants. At dinner parties, there’s often enough food and drink to feed three times the number of people in attendance. When a family friend heard that my mother was experiencing complications during the birth of my younger brother, she snuck into our house by climbing through a back window that had been left ajar, cleaned the entire home, and cooked a meal for the family before leaving the same way.
I had witnessed many moments of Iraqi hospitality over the years, but none of them compared with those I experienced with the family in that safe house. The simple act of drinking tea and sharing stories with these strangers who had suffered so much under ISIS was one of my most memorable reporting experiences.
The morning after that dinner, we made our way to another village on the outskirts of Hawija that had been liberated mere days before our arrival. We visited the home of a family who told us more gruesome details about life under ISIS, and how their day-to-day existence had drastically changed following the Iraqi military offensive. The house next door had belonged to an ISIS fighter, and his family had fled days before the insurgency. Due to that proximity, the family, who were constantly watched by their neighbors, lived in perpetual fear of being reported for breaking strict Islamic rules. One male member of the family had been kidnapped by ISIS and tortured for months after they discovered he’d once served as a soldier. Those who crossed ISIS and its stringent laws were executed in a nearby area.
One of the women we spoke to was wearing a purple abaya. The color was so bold that I complimented her on it. She said that after ISIS had seized control of the village she was allowed to wear only dark colors. “Today is Eid,” she exclaimed. “We’re celebrating!” Her excitement was palpable. Her two-year-old daughter, Amani, burst into tears upon meeting me: the only world she knew was one in which ISIS fighters were in control, and she probably wasn’t sure what to make of me—an unveiled woman wearing a black T-shirt and combats. Our fixer, who was handling our logistics, calmed her down by giving her a small chocolate bar, which she devoured with a quizzical look on her face. This was, her mother said, the first time she’d ever tasted chocolate.
We interviewed the family members just outside the guest house. In the backdrop were clouds of smoke hovering over Hawija from the ongoing military offensive. After the interview, they brought chairs to the yard and we drank tea together. The local journalist and I translated for the other crew members, who had acquired a taste for chai. As we left, we apologized for taking up so much of their time. They told us that it had been so long since they’d had guests that our company was a relief.
We made our way to the nearby spot where ISIS routinely executed locals, accompanied by one of the men we’d just interviewed. The shift in settings was jarring. After a five-minute drive, we passed a former ISIS checkpoint that was covered in pro-ISIS graffiti. The man from the interview told us that the last execution he had witnessed was of two young Shi’a boys whose religious views contradicted those of ISIS. They were forced to kneel in the public space before being decapitated. Their heads were placed on their chests and their corpses left in the square; locals were told that they, too, would be executed if they chose to move the bodies. After the execution, ISIS fighters kicked the heads around like they were footballs.
Meeting this family, the people we had stayed with the night before, Buraq, and many others was humbling. My strict upbringing, identity crisis, and experiences with racism had made me feel like a victim. But here, my privilege was striking, and the sense of shame I felt as a result was overwhelming. These were proud people—abundant in generosity. I couldn’t shake the feeling of immense guilt that it was down to pure luck that I lived in England, and that these families had lived under the control of a death cult.
The following day, we returned to the front lines of the battle in Hawija, accompanied by two federal police officers. Upon arriving at a village in the district, a convoy of army vehicles slowed us down. We were forced to stop as dozens of villagers surrounded the vehicles, cheering and chanting. Moments earlier, they had been liberated from ISIS. Many men were holding razor blades, shaving off one another’s beards. One jubilant man had two lit cigarettes in his mouth: he excitedly told us that he would have been punished days earlier, as smoking was forbidden under ISIS rule.
As we moved farther north, we reached the Hashd, a mostly Shi’a paramilitary umbrella group, some of whose militias are supported by Iran. The Hashd was pushing farther into the few areas of Hawija that were still controlled by ISIS, alongside the federal police. Many of these men were from the south o
f Iraq. When they learned that I was also born in the south, some were perplexed, asking why I would want to go to a war zone. I laughed awkwardly, not so sure myself. Nevertheless, they brought anyone they could find from the same region to me, saying they’d found “another member of my family” and demanding that we take pictures together.
Two days later, Hawija was declared fully liberated.
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While reporting from Iraq, I often messaged my father, sending him photos and asking for help with niche politics and translations. After initially opposing my career in journalism, he’d accepted that he was never going to change my mind. Now he was even engaging with it, never fazed or impressed—Iraq was nothing new to him, after all. But he was interested, and happy that journalism had at least allowed me to understand the place we were born a little bit better.
And I, for the first time, wanted to know more about the details of his life. I was learning that his culture, the one he had imposed upon me, was a key part of his identity and his experiences. My parents’ anger and frustration with how I lived my life were products of their own identity crises.
The next time I visited my father in Hull, I showed him pictures of the soldiers and locals we had met, recounting the stories they’d told us. My father had served in the army for two years in Iraq—conscription was compulsory for all men under Saddam Hussein’s regime. As I told him stories of the soldiers, he shared memories of the bases he’d covered and the places he’d visited. He’d lived under the Saddam regime and through the start of the Iran-Iraq War, and worried for his family during the Gulf War and 2003 invasion. Some of his friends had been killed, family members threatened, and relatives locked up in foreign prisons.