The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  “So if they don’t have hope, why are they not putting a gun to their heads?” I was starting to feel despair myself.

  “God. Religion,” she states simply. “You just believe that God has written all of this for some reason. They say, ‘We have to trust in Him and that He will get us through it. We have to take comfort in that it is written. And how can we go against that?’ That’s the only way they survive psychologically.”

  Farah found herself turning towards God, especially when she was confronted by terrifying situations on Baghdad’s streets.

  “I have tendencies towards Islam and get a sense of peace from it. Because it would be really hard at times and I would catch myself asking God to bring peace within me, to make me feel peaceful. I would catch myself saying that sometimes, if I was freaked out that maybe we were being followed. I was so nervous. One of my cousins told me that if I was ever really afraid that I should ask God to put peace inside me. You say it in a particular way, it works. If it can work on a semi-believer like me, then think of how well it works on someone who has a relationship with God and the Prophet and all His prophets.”

  Farah hadn’t really thought about Islam before she started going to Iraq. It had never occurred to her; she was secular. But being around people who believed and experienced living that belief, and her family talking to her about it so much, started to change her.

  “They do it in a gentle way. They tell a story, and I am open to it. I am thankful that they have religion because if they didn’t have that now they would have nothing to live for. It is the only thing that they have. I am so glad that it has the kind of power to give them a sense of peace.”

  I interrupted her, saying angrily that it was other human beings who were creating all this horror for Iraqis. It was a human problem, and it should have a human solution. To turn to God almost seemed to be absolving humans of responsibility for the catastrophe.

  “Oh yes, they all know that. They’d say, ‘What kind of animal would do this?’ There are waves of that, but when they try to bring themselves down from that, they pray. You can have both of those feelings, but prayer is a sanctuary for sure. I don’t know if it will be enough for my aunt though . . . ”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t I tell you about the twins?”

  “No, what happened?”

  “Oh God, I can’t believe I didn’t tell you.” Farah looks at me, her eyes big with emotion.

  “A few weeks ago when I was back in New York, I got a phone call from Baghdad. My aunt said, ‘The twins are missing.’ These are my cousin Ehab’s wife’s sister’s boys. Remember, I lived with them for a few days during the war? Her name is Suhad. She has three boys, two are twins in their early twenties. Suhad’s husband went missing in 1982 under Saddam. Late one night Iraqi soldiers just came to his house. He was a Shia. He was in his dishdasha, his white nightgown, you know. The soldiers were looking for his brother, the twin’s uncle, who had a quiet reputation of being in the opposition. They said they wanted to talk to their uncle, just ask him a few questions. The twin’s father insisted on going with his brother. So they took him away, and he never came home. No one ever saw him again. The family were afraid, but they thought he’d be back. They had no idea what happened to him, nothing. They never even found his body after the war. Nothing.” She paused for a moment, deep in thought. “I slept beside Suhad during the war one night, you know in 2003. She told me that her husband still visits her in her dreams. This is twenty years later. She is still talking about him. He’s still whispering to her in her dreams. So her boys are everything to her. She told me it wasn’t just marriage, it was love.”

  The twin boys were in the Iraqi army at age twenty-one just before the invasion began. Suhad made her sons desert because, she said to Farah, “I absolutely cannot tolerate losing them.” At the time, Iraqis knew that fighting the Americans would likely mean death for a soldier. They knew that their firepower was unequal and that most Iraqi soldiers would be cannon fodder.

  Farah goes on, “She kept saying, ‘What would I do if something happened to my boys?’ ”

  She hid them in the house during the invasion and the beginning of the occupation. If the doorbell rang, their younger brother would have to go and get them and tell them to hide on the roof. They never ever left the house. For weeks, they didn’t even go out in the garden. They didn’t want the neighbours to see them because they knew that they were supposed to be in the army. Under Saddam, anyone could be an informer. But the twins survived the war; miraculously, they weren’t discovered.

  Farah continues, “So, I call Ehab’s wife, Suhad’s sister, three weeks ago, and she says her nephews, the twins, are missing. They were working as security guards at a children’s hospital. Every building has security guards now, even the children’s hospital. When I called, they had been missing for four days. I asked her, ‘Has there been a request for ransom?’ And she said, ‘We have not yet received a phone call.’ And I knew that if there was no demand for ransom then they were dead. Two days later I spoke to her again, and she said that they had found the boys. Her brothers had done a round of the hospitals, and found their bodies in one of the hospital morgues. They didn’t even recognize one of them because he was so riddled with bullets. They didn’t even know it was him. They thought they had found only one, and then they went back to check again and realized it was him. Their bodies had been dumped on the side of the road with twelve others in the same district where Jill Carroll went missing. Just dumped at the side of the road.”

  “But why?”

  “No reason. There is no reason to any of it anymore. I was devastated, I was in shock for a week. Now Suhad has only one son. I know how crazy she is for her twins. So I thought she was just going to commit suicide. There is no way she can survive this. Apparently, she was in the kitchen and she grabbed a knife and tried to stab herself. I think it was out of pure grief after the funeral,” she says. “Her younger son grabbed a pistol and threatened to kill himself, too. I know it sounds unbelievable, but he probably knew no one would let him do it. They just couldn’t handle it. Then her son said, ‘We have to stick together because we are all each other have right now, so you have to stick around and I have to stick around. Because we’re all we have.’ ”

  AFTERMATH OF A CAR BOMB

  PHOTO CREDIT: FARAH NOSH

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Smell of a

  Car Bomb

  I heard a man named Abu Sabah say: “They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud. Then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them.” I heard him say that pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires and that most people thought it too dangerous to send their children to school. —Eliot Weinberger, “What I Heard about Iraq,” London Review of Books, February 3, 2005

  After weeks of not being able to reach Karim on the computer, I buy a cheap calling card and phone him on his mobile to thank him for the necklace. I get through right away, amazingly. He always laughs when I am surprised to reach him. It is curfew, and he is at home for the evening. When I thank him for the necklace, he says it is nothing, and that his daughter has the same necklace that she wears every day as well. Sure enough, when Farah sends me the photographs she has taken, there it is, the same necklace on his teenage daughter, Reeta.

  He has just returned home from buying food in the market with his wife. The streets were already empty at 8:00 p.m. because it is so dangerous to be out at night. I ask him what he thinks is going on in Iraq now. He tells me that there are many countries that have an interest in Iraq: Iran, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and of course the United States. He thinks they are all jostling for a position in the future of the country. But it is the Iraqi people who pay on a daily basis while not gaining any share of the wealth. At the moment, his biggest fear is car bombs.

  “Imagine how many cars are around you every day, then imagine that each one could be the one that kills you. You
can see how terrifying this kind of insecurity and violence is for us,” he says. “Every morning when we leave the house, we pray only one prayer, that we are allowed to return safely to our homes, especially the children going to school. My son has to travel across Baghdad to get to his school. The journey is much more dangerous than before.”

  I tell him that Farah felt his neighbourhood was more peaceful than other Baghdad areas.

  “Yes, our neighbourhood is safer than other neighbourhoods, but still we are always afraid. There is a checkpoint on the main road that goes into our neighbourhood that is often attacked. We have heard many bombs explode there. My office is in central Baghdad, but I only go there once a week. My secretary is too afraid to come to work anymore. Many car bombs have exploded there because it’s a commercial street; we had three or four bombs in one month. A week ago at 10:00 a.m., just as I was arriving at my office, a bomb exploded right in front of me, a hundred metres away. We are living in a movie.” He laughs at the irony. “Luckily, it was a small bomb. No one was hurt. My wife was with me. Of course, she was very afraid.”

  I ask him whether it was the first bomb he’s personally seen detonate.

  “Oh no, I myself have witnessed at least five car bombs explode. Imagine how many there must be if I alone have seen five?”

  “Yes, Farah told me what happened to your car a couple of months ago.”

  “She told you about that? Yes. When I came out of my office, I saw that my car was parked right beside the car with the bomb. There were no other cars on the street, just my little car. The police were all waving guns at me and shouting for me to move the car quickly, if I wanted to keep it. Can you imagine how much my hand was shaking as I unlocked my car and got inside to drive it away? Then the police defused the bomb. They have learned how to do this from the Americans.”

  Karim’s anger is rising again as his voice gets louder.

  “Nobody can imagine what it is like here,” he says. “Everywhere in Baghdad is unsafe. Last night we heard gunfire all night long. And today we saw the aftermath of many explosions, small bombs, car bombs, suicide bombs . . . we are experts now on all types of bombs.” He laughs again.

  He and his wife can recognize the various types of explosions by the kind of clouds of dust in the air, the sounds that the explosions give off, even the smells that they exude. As he tells me this, I imagine the explosions that cleaved the limbs from the men in Farah’s photographs.

  “You know Farah was in Baghdad to photograph victims of the war, innocent people, I’ve seen the photographs, and she is trying to get them published . . . so people here will know what is really going on there,” I tell him.

  Karim is cynical.

  “Well, it won’t make a difference,” he says. “Nothing is going to change here, people will look at them in Europe and America for a moment and then forget about it. I tell you no one can do anything for us now.”

  I change the subject because I know that a couple of years ago Karim was more optimistic about letting the world know what was really happening in Iraq. Now he has seen the fruits of three years of the world’s indifference and inactivity. Instead, I ask him why he’s stopped going to work.

  “It is safer for me not to be in my office right now,” he explains. “The people that are being attacked work for commercial companies that help the Americans on the bases and for their other projects. I wouldn’t work for those companies . . . it’s far too dangerous. No one can protect me, I would have to protect myself. There are many militias working for every different interested party, and I have no way of protecting myself.”

  I tell Karim that the main thing most North Americans ask me is why there is a civil war in Iraq. They want to know why the Sunnis and the Shia hate each other and are starting to fight and kill each other. I ask Karim what he would answer to people here.

  “Oh yes, there is a civil war in Iraq, but it is very complicated.” He sighs. “It’s not just one part of the population against another, as it was in Lebanon, for example. Families are intermarried, Shia and Sunni, but then outsiders are coming and telling the Sunnis to move out of one neighbourhood and into another, and then telling the Shias the same. The people are becoming divided, but it is hard to divide families completely. It is so difficult because most people have some uncles that are Shia and some that are Sunni. Are they going to kill their own uncles? But there are death squads operating and people have to obey them because they are terrified for their lives. These differences were never as important in the past.”

  Karim tells me that many Iraqis think that the Iranians are involved as well.

  “We know that Iranian militias have killed over two hundred pilots from the Iraqi army,” he says. “I have many friends in the Iraqi army, and they have been targeted. Of course we all remember the Iran–Iraq War, so they don’t like us. And you see Iranians have the same appearance as us, so we can only tell they are different by language, but some of them speak Arabic. No one can recognize them in the streets and tell they are Iranian. It’s easy for them to be here without anyone knowing.”

  “What about the Americans? What are they doing now?” I ask him.

  “The Americans are only protecting themselves,” he says bitterly. “There is no government in Iraq, only in name. Nobody can do anything without the American ambassador giving his approval. They have to take his advice. And they want what is best for them only, we know that now. We know they are building the biggest US embassy in the world here, it will be over a hundred acres. Why do they need this?”

  I tell him that every time the US or the UK are criticized for the war, officials cite free elections and a democratic representative government as proof of the correctness of the invasion.

  “So what do you think of your elected democratic government?” I ask him.

  He sneers, “Iraqis think democracy is a very bad word. There is no law here. Under Saddam, he would make a law and the next day it would be enforced and everyone would obey it. Here, our government is powerless to do anything. If you go to the police station with a problem, they say they are powerless. No one can help Iraqis. No one can help the people.” He then echoes what Farah said: “The situation is hopeless now. If there is hope it is for ten years from now. But for now, we have nothing.”

  “Do you think the Americans will stay in Iraq?” I ask.

  He scoffs at my question. “Of course the Americans will stay. They have many bases here; they are working for their interests. For them it seems it is good for them to be here. Who knows why? No one can guess what their policy is, but it is a big plan for the whole Middle East. It has just begun with Iraq. I tell you, Iraq is just the beginning.”

  “So you don’t think anything is better since the fall of Saddam?”

  He says I could ask any Iraqi and they would say the same thing: “Nothing has changed for the better. It is the same as living under Saddam. Then, every day we had a problem, and it is the same now. We have no water, no electricity, today it was on for only two hours. Now it is summer, it is around 40 degrees. We have no fans or air conditioners. We have to sleep on the roof as we always have, even with all the war raging around us. Today we found a bullet in our bed on the roof. It fell down in the night. Every day we hear gunfire in the streets. Today we heard huge fighting with the Americans. We can recognize the sounds of the different American equipment now.”

  Karim’s children ae used to the war. It has become habitual for them to witness car bombs and hear explosions, and every day they see dead bodies on television and people being killed. His daughter is now a teenager, and his son is almost twelve. They are growing up in the midst of this war, trying to study, go to school. His daughter dreams of becoming an engineer. She used to think about becoming a doctor, but now she doesn’t think that is such a good job.

  Karim doesn’t think Christians are being singled out. “Not especially targeted, now that everyone is killing each other. Every house has guns. The government sent a policeman to guard o
ur church, but what can the police do if a car pulls up with a bomb inside? And suicide bombers? They want to die, so how can we stop them? And remember that in 2002, a few months before the war, Saddam released thousands of prisoners from his prisons, including Abu Ghraib, as a present to the people of Iraq for giving him one hundred percent support in the elections. Political prisoners were set free as well as real hardened criminals who now terrorize the streets, robbing and killing innocent people. All these criminals are now free to do whatever they want.”

  “Why is there so much killing in Iraq?” I ask, exasperated.

  “Hot weather, hot blooded, hot tempers,” he jokes again.

  I realize it is a stupid question. It is war.

  Then he continues, “All we hope every day is for our house and family to be protected. Even gas is being limited! The price of fuel has gone up. It used to be twenty Iraqi dinars a litre, which is about one cent. And now it is 250 Iraqi dinars, which is ten or twenty cents. To fill our tank used to be one dollar, now it is seven to ten dollars. There is no fuel at the gas station, you have to queue for three to six hours for it. So we have to buy it from the black market. The government has no money . . . where is all Iraq’s money going? No one knows.”

  He reminds me that nothing has been reconstructed. The streets are still rubble. No one has moved one brick to rebuild the city. American tanks destroy the streets. They drive anywhere they like, in any direction, and they don’t care.

  “They will kill you if you are walking or driving in the street and you are in their way,” he says. “They will drive over your car or shoot you. You might not believe it but it is true! Today there were three American vehicles in the street when we came home from picking up my daughter from her friend’s house. Instantly, we stopped and moved to the side; otherwise, we would risk being killed.”