Zina and her family raced over to the hotel, but there was nothing to be found. British forces conducted a cursory investigation. They went to the morgue. Zina’s mom told her to wait in the car while she went inside. She examined each face but did not find her daughter’s fiancé.
Zina hoped that someone had just kidnapped Wael for the ransom payment. Most of those people were released after a few days, unharmed. Every time she heard a car pass the house, she thought it might be him. She answered her phone calls on the first ring, desperate to hear his voice.
Unknown Iraqis began to call, peddling a service that had emerged alongside the booming kidnapping industry: in exchange for thousands of dollars, they would find him or his body. Wael’s family in Jordan gave $20,000 to a man who promised to deliver their son. The man vanished.
Two weeks after the abduction, Zina’s uncle saw Wael on the al-‘Alam television channel. The station ran a video supplied by the Abu Abbas Islamic Group, a Shi’a militia in Basrah, in which Wael and twelve other hostages stood before the camera. A member of the militia declared that these men were British spies and would all be killed if British forces did not withdraw from Basrah. But Zina had missed the broadcast, and nobody at the television station ever responded to her requests to see the clip.
After three months, the thread holding her together unraveled. She felt remorse for not having let him stay over that night. He must have known about the danger he was in and was asking her for help, but she had refused because of what her neighbors might have thought. Zina was furious with her fellow Iraqis for all the kidnapping and ransoming and killing that burned away in her country. She was mad at God, mad at Iraq. She worried that her family might now be at risk. After all, they had accepted Wael as a husband for their daughter: what did that say about them in the eyes of the men who abducted her fiancé?
Zina turned inward. She stopped answering her phone. Her social circle contracted until she spent all of her time alone in her room.
After a summer of searching for Wael, she returned to her final year at Basrah Engineering College. The Mahdi Army was now in full control of the campus, and Zina tried to make herself invisible. Though she despised them, she also feared them; her confrontational spirit had fallen silent.
Work
Zina received her degree in June 2005. As she expected, her Shi’a classmates used their connections to find jobs, but Zina’s network didn’t extend much beyond her sister, mother, and father. When she heard that the telecommunications company Asiacell had hired many of her classmates, she went down to its headquarters to ask for an interview but could not even make it past the security guard in the lobby. She waited for hours, hoping to recognize someone who might put in a good word for her, but eventually she gave up.
She went back to the café where she had met Wael and searched online for jobs. She found several openings with the Halliburton subsidiary KBR. In August she and her sister Tara walked through the Iraqi checkpoint at the outer edge of the sprawling compound of US and Western companies flanking the Basrah airport. They walked for one hundred yards until they reached the British-manned checkpoint, where a bomb dog sniffed at them for explosives. They cleared the KBR checkpoint and were hired within an hour.
The girls did not tell their father where they worked, but they kept no secrets from their mother, whose worry consumed the hours of each day until her daughters returned home safely. She sat by the window overlooking the front yard and the gate, which still bore the scars of Iranian mortars decades earlier. Through the largest opening, she could see parts of passing cars, the waists and chests of passersby.
Even though it was only a cluster of trailers in the desert, Zina loved the compound. Everything about it felt good to her: the cool air-conditioned rooms, the new computers, even the smell. Once she cleared the final checkpoint each morning, she sensed that she had stepped into a different country. Zina was assigned to the quality control office, where she worked closely with engineers who were fixing oil refineries throughout Iraq.
But after six months, the excitement of working at KBR faded and the logistics of entering the compound became increasingly perilous. Zina began wearing a hijab and a loose-fitting abaya over her clothes to placate the militants who idled in a pickup truck outside the checkpoint. She came to feel that her work was only helping people in Texas get richer, which didn’t seem to warrant the risks. The pros and cons were thrown into a bleaker contrast when two other young women working in the compound were assassinated. Zina and her sister decided to quit.
There was a problem, though. Even if she managed to find an opening in an Iraqi company, Zina knew that her work history would come up in the very first interview. Unless she took the risk of revealing her prior American employer, her work with KBR had locked her within the constellation of American contractors and agencies.
Tara had a friend who worked in Baghdad for the American company Titan, one of the largest contractors employing Iraqis as interpreters for the US military. If they were hired into Titan’s pool of interpreters, they would live inside a military base, relieving them of the danger of clearing checkpoints each day. The sisters drove to the capital, where they sat in a row of school desks with twenty other young Iraqis applying for work. When the Titan recruiter posted the results at the end of the examination, Tara ranked first and Zina second. They were hired immediately, pending a background check.
They returned to Basrah to pack and to spend time with their parents. After a couple weeks, their clearance arrived along with a pair of plane tickets to Baghdad. They would be assigned to Camp Taji, a US military base twenty miles north of the capital.
At the airport, Zina and Tara stood on the other side of the security checkpoint, cheeks streaked with tears. Their mother walked a few steps, and then stopped and turned back to look at them. She couldn’t bring herself to leave. A security guard at the airport came over and said, “Hey, auntie, are you okay? Why are you crying?” but she didn’t answer. She took a few more steps and looked back at her sobbing daughters, and then left.
Her family wasn’t rich, but Zina could have stayed at home and lived off their dad’s salary. She could have become a schoolteacher like her cousin, but she wanted a job where she could be herself. She didn’t want to rely on some well-placed cousin for promotions. The only place she thought she could excel through hard work alone was with the Americans.
That was how she felt on optimistic days, at least. During darker days, she knew that she was trying to escape her hometown and Wael’s disappearance. She felt like an outcast, miserable and yet unable to adapt her personality or opinions enough to fit in with her fellow Basrawis. With the Americans, she hoped to be more accepted and better understood.
* * *
Pod 23 was a run-down compound surrounded by barbed wire in a corner of Camp Taji, a military base constructed by Saddam Hussein. There was only one way in and out of the Pod, through a checkpoint manned by American soldiers. Like the other interpreters sent to live there, Zina and Tara were not permitted to leave its suffocating confines without an American escort, and yet there was no cafeteria in the Pod. The only food was on the other side of barbed wire.
Inside the Pod, there were a few rows of trailers for housing—six interpreters in each, sharing one bathroom—a larger trailer with showers and toilets, and a dilapidated one-story building that served as a common area for the interpreters, who were called “terps” by the soldiers. When Zina and Tara were deposited in their trailer the first night, they found bed frames with no mattresses. They were embarrassed to have to ask for them. Their experience with the Americans in KBR had been much more professional; they’d had their own desks and computers. They tried not to cry the first night in their strange new home.
Each morning, the Iraqi interpreters of Camp Taji would kill time in the common area until an army unit dropped by the Pod on its way out of the base. The room had sagging, stained couches, old magazines, and a TV. Some watched the television; others
sat on a cot in the shade of the large tree outside, smoking.
A unit would announce that it needed one or two or three interpreters, and the sergeant in charge of the Pod would come into the common area and select Iraqis for the mission. As she stood there, waiting to be picked, Zina felt subhuman, on display like a slab of meat for sale at the butcher shop, the pride of her recently received university diploma deflated. This was the first time she had ever lived away from home, and it wasn’t starting well.
On her very first mission, Zina rode with a convoy into town to attend a meeting of the provincial council, where tribal leaders, Iraqi government officials, and high-ranking military officers discussed municipal affairs. The captain sat in the back row of the room, leaned over to Zina, and said, “Okay, tell me what’s going on.” She listened to the conversation, which was loaded with the acronyms and technical terms of local governance, and had no idea what was happening. She didn’t know what some of the words were in Arabic, much less in English. She started to cry and looked over at the captain, who did little to mask his frustration with her. She went back to Pod 23 and between sobs wondered if she was good enough for the job. The other Iraqis consoled her, telling her she’d get better, and taught her the most commonly used phrases of the provincial council.
* * *
In time Zina and Tara found their stride and became the most sought-after interpreters in the Pod. Tara rode in different convoys on different missions, but the sisters spent evenings together. Whenever possible, they called their worried mom in Basrah. They were assigned to the civil affairs team, which led small-scale reconstruction projects throughout the province. The area receiving the most attention, Tarmiyah, was also the most violent.
Zina began to work with the major of the civil affairs team, an indefatigable leader who devoted meticulous attention to the projects under his command. He assigned Zina a desk in his office and placed a small mountain of forms in front of her. Each sheet was a complaint submitted by an Iraqi requesting reimbursement for damages incurred during military operations. After soldiers kicked in the door of a suspected insurgent, a request for $500 was submitted, parts and labor included. When a firefight on the edge of a farm resulted in a dead cow, a request for $5,000 appeared. Zina translated the forms and appended a summary opinion on each. When the major griped about the difficulty of tracking all of the disbursements, she spent days constructing an Excel worksheet that reflected each tiny change in his substantial budget. He was so ecstatic that he ran over and hugged her.
Zina and the major went everywhere together. His Humvee was easily identified by the 001 stenciled in black over the front doors. In the beginning, she wore sunglasses and a handkerchief over her mouth to disguise her identity but eventually stopped bothering. She was proud of the work they were doing, trusted the major, and didn’t want to hide.
Several weeks into her assignment, an Iraqi called the major’s cell phone and asked to speak with Zina. He didn’t give his name but said that he had met Zina and the major during one of their many trips into Tarmiyah. There was something about her that he trusted. He told her that insurgents had laid five IEDs along the road emerging from Camp Taji. When the explosive ordnance disposal team was dispatched, it found five bombs. Zina called the informant, who told her that he would speak only to her from that point forward.
She nurtured the relationship with the man, who she believed was motivated partly by conscience and partly by self-interest: the informant needed surgery that Iraqi doctors were ill equipped to perform, and he wanted to know if the army might help him in exchange for his tips. The major told Zina to say yes, even though they both knew that the army was not likely to help. The intelligence continued to trickle in, and the major told her that her work was saving lives, both American and Iraqi.
The job was exciting, despite the risks, and Zina had figured out how to excel at it. Whenever she stood between an Iraqi and the major, she changed her posture to a slight slouch, making her appear less feminine; she wanted the men to forget that she was a woman so that they could focus on the discussion at hand.
A couple months into the job, during a site visit to one of the major’s problematic projects in Mushahada—one of Tarmiyah’s rougher neighborhoods—she translated the major’s unhappiness with the quality of work. The Iraqi contractor angrily turned to her and called her a traitor and other slurs. Zina remained silent, choosing not to interpret his words, but the major sensed the tension.
“What did he say, Zina?”
“Nothing. What else would you like me to translate?”
“I want you to tell me what he said.”
Zina reluctantly voiced the offensive words in English, at which point the major grabbed the Iraqi by the throat and shoved him against a nearby wall. She felt happy that her boss was standing up for her, but she knew that his response had been an escalation and could easily come back to harm him or the reputation of the civil affairs team.
Bombs
One day two IEDs went off, one after another, narrowly missing her convoy.
Another day, as the civil affairs team was returning from handing out reimbursements to the residents of Tarmiyah, Tara was riding in the same convoy, a vehicle ahead of her sister. Zina was sitting behind the major in the rear right seat of the Humvee. As the convoy proceeded through sparsely populated farmland, the radio went dead. The driver, busy shaking the handset, took his foot off the accelerator just as a massive bomb erupted beneath the engine.
Zina was drilled back against her seat by the blast. The gunner, standing up through the opening of the Humvee’s turret, was injured and medevaced to Germany but survived. Tara whirled around at the sound of the explosion but couldn’t see if her little sister was okay.
Had the bomb exploded a second later, they wouldn’t have survived, but Zina and the major were fine. They scrambled out of the smoldering Humvee and raced from the area. An investigation later determined that insurgents had spent days loading a drainage pipe running beneath the road with 1,400 pounds of explosives.
Tarmiyah erupted in the weeks that followed. While Zina sat with the major during a meeting in a small conference room downtown, a sniper’s bullet pierced the window and thudded into a nearby wall. Not long after that, another bullet whizzed past her and grazed the major’s arm.
She asked a straightforward question: “If they keep attacking us, why are we going there?”
He gave the reply of a believer: that no matter how many insurgents operated in Tarmiyah, there was at least one kid that would benefit from a repaired school or extended segment of water pipe.
* * *
On October 17, 2006, Zina’s convoy eased to a halt in front of the building where the provincial council met. Before Zina and the major had even dismounted from their Humvee, an Iraqi sniper hidden in a nearby building shot a soldier in the mouth. While he was being loaded into a medevac chopper, the major called off the meeting with the council and ordered a return to base.
The convoy turned onto a road where a captain had been killed by an IED the night before. As the convoy slowly passed, Zina noticed the dark sinkhole of the crater left by the blast.
Zina sat in the third Humvee. She saw the first IED flash, missing the lead vehicle. She saw the next bomb explode directly beneath the second vehicle, blasting open its doors. Two men leaped from their right side of the Humvee, which coasted forward until it collided with a transformer pole. The men were on fire, flames leaping from their shoulders and heads.
A firefight broke out as insurgents closed in, hoping to kill any survivors. White smoke billowed from the second Humvee. Zina remembered a recent tip from the informant: militants had stolen a large amount of chlorine from the nearby water treatment plant. She sat in the backseat of her Humvee, screaming at the soldier in the turret who unloaded gunfire upon the encroaching insurgents, begging him not to leave her alone. Even if she survived the attack, she worried that the chlorine gas would burn her lungs away.
* * *
Eva was a young Iraqi Christian from a poor family. She was gorgeous, with shiny black locks. She had taken a job as an interpreter out of financial desperation, hoping to support her family. The Christian community in Iraq had been devastated, sinking from a prewar population of 1.5 million in 2003 to several hundred thousand within years. Eva had become close friends with Zina and Tara. The three would stay up late together back at the Pod, talking about their families. On the afternoon of the sixteenth, before the attack, the sisters had brought Eva a care package from the major’s family, filled with notepads and pencils and school supplies for her younger siblings. Later that night, Eva came over and said she couldn’t fall asleep, so the sisters gave her issues of Oprah magazine to take back to her room.
Eva, twenty-two when the chlorine bomb went off, died instantly.
Another interpreter, a handsome young Iraqi nicknamed Snake, burned to death. The major tried to extract the gunner from the turret of the second Humvee, but his body was scalding. After the firefight, Zina opened her door and walked toward the wreckage. The major told her not to look, so she turned away, but not before seeing one of the gunner’s arms burning on the hood of the Humvee.
As she rode back to Camp Taji, the pendulum of each second swung like a wrecking ball. The vehicle, the road, the air—it could all explode in an instant. She looked out the small window of the Humvee’s door and saw a bomb behind everything, inside everything, and said, “This is the end!”
Flight
She could no longer go on any missions. Nobody told her she had to leave, but when she stayed behind in Pod 23 while the others went out each day, she felt useless. Eva’s few belongings and the major’s care package still lay in her room in the adjacent trailer.
To Be a Friend Is Fatal Page 22