Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  I met with Um Omar, a stern woman who ran the Ethar Association, an independent NGO that provided aid, housing, and education to vulnerable families. She wore a tight head scarf and gloves on her hands as a sign of modesty. Um Omar had a degree in chemistry but had been a housewife before the war. “After the invasion, there were many needs,” she said. “My sister’s husband was killed and two of my uncles were killed. My sister’s husband was killed by random American fire. One of my uncles was killed by an American tank, which drove over his car while it was driving on the wrong side of the road, so he crashed into it. My other uncle was killed by the mujahideen during the battle of Falluja while he was providing aid to Falluja. The mujahideen suspected he was a collaborator with the Americans because they saw him talking to the Americans when they stopped him at the checkpoint and let him through.” Um Omar’s husband was a former Awakening man affiliated with the Islamic Party. He had been arrested by the Americans and was in a feud with Abul Abed, and so he lived outside Amriya.

  Kuehl knew Um Omar. “If you have already talked to her, I am sure she had an unfavorable opinion of me,” he told me. “Her husband, Abu Omar, was one of Abul Abed’s lieutenants from the start. The two had a bit of a love/hate relationship, and we had to step in on a couple occasions. I had to counsel Abu Omar once for excessive use of force, and he was also arrested outside Amriya with a couple of weapons in the vehicle he was in. He was held for a couple days and then released. From the start I was convinced that Abu Omar was representing some other faction. For a while I had even considered him as an important counterweight to Abul Abed. However, he also happened to be the brother of Hajji Salman, our primary AQI target.”

  The confrontation came to a head when the Americans, acting on a tip from a rival Fursan member, found a large weapons cache behind a false wall in Abu Omar’s house, Abu Omar claimed that they were put there by his brother. After he was arrested, the Iraqi Islamic Party pressured Kuehl for his release. Community leaders, including Um Omar, asked to meet. “I knew of her through her charity work but had not met her up to now,” Kuehl said. “She was pretty impressive. She was obviously well educated and passionate about getting the release of her husband. After about two weeks he was eventually released. Part of the condition for his release was that he would no longer work for the Fursan. Through this I pretty much determined that his affiliation was with the Iraqi Islamic Party, which had been trying to take control of the movement from the start.”

  Um Omar’s main office was in Amriya, but the NGO also operated on the outskirts of Baghdad, Samarra, and Nasiriya. Most of its funds came from generous Iraqis. In Iraq a child was considered an orphan even if he or she had lost just one parent. The organization had registered 4,317 orphans. In Amriya alone it had 2,034 orphans. Before 2006 it had only 600 to 800 orphans in Amriya. “Their fathers were killed, their houses were burned,” Um Omar told me, “some of them were left without either parent.” Most of Amriya’s Sunnis were too scared to go to the Yarmuk hospital outside Amriya. “It’s a sectarian hospital,” Um Omar told me. “By sectarian, I mean this hospital has militias in it and people are afraid to go there. If you live in Amriya, you have to go to private hospitals, which are expensive for orphans, widows, and displaced families.”

  When I first met Um Omar in January 2008, she had three thousand displaced families registered with her in Amriya alone. They were supposed to receive payments from the government, but she knew of no one who had. The Ethar Association had once received help from the Red Crescent, but now that aid was going to the local Awakening group. Since Amriya’s security was improving, many Sunnis who had fled to Syria were coming back, even if some of them were not originally from Amriya. At least 50 percent of the families in Amriya could not access their monthly rations, and Um Omar knew of families who had not received any rations at all during the previous year. “We experienced the most difficult five years,” she told me. “Iraq went through wars, the Iran war, the Kuwait war, the sanctions, but it wasn’t as hard or unmerciful like the days of the occupation. The number of orphans is so high, and as much as we find some people to adopt them, we see there are more orphans coming. We have many children whose fathers were arrested, and it’s been a long time that nobody knows where they are. There are the families of detainees: the husband has been arrested for three or four years, and nobody knows where he is. The Americans are easier in providing information and allowing contact with the detainee. In the first days of the occupation the detention by the occupation forces was ugly, as you saw in Abu Ghraib, but in the last year and now it’s preferable to be in the custody of the occupation forces than the MOI [Ministry of Interior].”

  Ethar provided orphans with rations, blankets, and heaters for the winter—and medical care, thanks to volunteer doctors. Orphans also could attend their nursery school and subsequent education. Widows received medical care and vocational training as well as educational assistance, including university tuition. Ethar had a kitchen project where widows made pastries and sold them in local markets.

  Um Omar took me to her nursery school. Among the orphans was a boy whose mother was killed beside him in cross fire. At first he did not talk to other students and remained isolated, but the teachers succeeded in making him more social. Um Omar had books full of files and photos of children in need of medical assistance, from a two-year-old bloated from cancer to a teenager who was shot by Americans and paralyzed. One seven-year-old girl called Hadia Abdallah had lost both her parents. Her father was killed by random American gunfire and then her mother was killed when Iraqi National Guardsmen opened fire indiscriminately. When the mother was shot she dropped Hadia on the ground, and the child was paralyzed from the waist down. Of the two thousand orphans Um Omar had registered in Amriya, 60 to 70 percent had lost a parent to fire by occupation forces, she told me. The rest were killed by terrorists.

  Uday Ahmad was shot in the jaw. The boy’s jawbone was shattered, and he needed a simple operation so that he would not have to be fed through a plastic tube, but his family was afraid to visit hospitals because of the threat from Shiite militias. Another boy in her album was shot below the eye by the Americans.

  “Every day I listen to the widows and see their tears, and I can’t get them enough help,” she said. “This morning a widow came in, her donor stopped providing help. Some donors get killed or got arrested and some of them got displaced. So they stop paying the help. She was waiting until the end of the month to come here to get paid. She came crying, saying it has been a month that she is feeding her children soup only. She did not buy fruit or vegetables for a month. She said yesterday the children were crying, ‘We don’t want soup anymore,’ and her neighbor heard their cry and gave them a plate of food. This is one case out of thousands of widows.”

  Two weeks earlier she delivered school uniforms to orphans in Abu Ghraib. “A little boy came to me shivering, without a coat and shoes,” she said. “I can’t explain now how I managed to stop myself from crying, and the look in his eyes and his happiness while I was putting the new clothes on him, and he was looking at the new bag and new books.”

  I told Um Omar that I could see the children were still afraid. “How do you want them not to be afraid after they saw the terrorist militias raiding their areas, killing their fathers, killing their brothers, and destroying their houses? I know a displaced woman who told me that she saw two of her neighbors being dragged away just because they were Sunnis. She said they dragged the father and his son and killed them. How do you expect the young children to forget them easily? Obviously these kind of things have more impact on the spirit of children than they do on older people, and I don’t think that it will just go away and the wounds will heal quickly.”

  Um Omar complained that Amriya’s population had once been prosperous and very educated: a neighborhood for lawyers, doctors, and teachers. She estimated that 40 percent of those educated people had been displaced. The families who replaced them in Amriya were less educated and fr
om poorer neighborhoods.

  Since 2006 Um Omar had registered 5,520 displaced families in Amriya, and they hadn’t yet returned to their homes. “They are not willing to return because their areas became 100 percent Shiite areas, and their houses were either destroyed or burned, and their sons were killed. They can’t return anymore though they want to return home.” They would never be able to return, though Shiite families had returned to Amriya, she said.

  Um Omar admitted that there had been some security improvements, but she did not attribute it to American efforts. “It happened by the Awakening’s efforts. The tribal men’s efforts were the reason for improving the security. In the past, our areas were always raided by the militias and interior commandos, arresting many of our guys and taking them to unknown destinations. This is not security, right? We couldn’t stop the militias from doing this. I think security was improved when the Awakening guys joined the security forces.”

  Forty percent of Amriya’s homes were abandoned, their owners expelled. More than five thousand Sunni families from elsewhere in Iraq had moved in, mostly to Shiite homes. Of those who had fled to Syria, about one-fifth returned in late 2007 when their money ran out. The Ministry of Migration, officially responsible for displaced Iraqis, did nothing for them. The Ministry of Health, dominated by sectarian Shiites, neglected Amriya or sent expired medicines to its clinics. Like elsewhere in Iraq, the government-run ration system, upon which nearly all Iraqis relied for their survival, did not reach the Sunnis of Amriya often, and when it did most items were lacking. Children were suffering from calcium shortages as a result.

  Seventeen-year-old Ahmad Maath was a student who helped support his family by leaving Amriya and collecting people’s rations and fuel for them. Amriya’s citizens were afraid of the INP who guarded the fuel station. “They are with the militias,” he said. “They say, ‘Fuck you, Sunnis, you are pimps’—you know, such silly things. But what can we do? We tolerate that because we want to feed our families.” He and his friends would bring the tanks at night and wait until the morning to collect the government-supplied kerosene. One day Ahmad saw the Mahdi Army surround the station and take ten thousand liters of kerosene and one hundred and fifty cooking gas cylinders without paying. They said they needed it to cook for the Muharram ceremonies.

  I had heard of corpses being dropped at garbage dumps, where dogs would feed on them. Twelve-year-old Abudi, my friend Hussein’s son, had seen many corpses in one of the main squares. “I saw people executed by Al Qaeda,” Abudi told me. “I saw a woman here being executed. I felt scared from them. I feel afraid from both, the Americans and Al Qaeda. They attacked my father, a car rushed and shot my father. I felt sad. My father got injured and he was bleeding, but he is okay now. The Americans killed a child in Amriya because he was playing with a toy gun.”

  I visited Abudi’s elementary school in Amriya. It was overcrowded because of the many displaced children. Its population had grown from 400 to about 769 students. Each class contained fifty-five students, with three to four students to a desk. One boy lost his father in Amriya when a bomb landed on their house. There were children displaced from Jihad, Shuhada, Furat, Shula, Turath, Amil, Hurriya. The teacher asked them if they wanted to go back home. “We can’t,” a child said. “We are threatened by gangs.” Sabrin was a small girl whose father was murdered in a drive-by shooting in the Muhamin neighborhood of Amriya. Abdurahman was a sixth-grade boy from New Baghdad. The Mahdi Army had threatened his family and kidnapped and killed his brother. His family’s house in New Baghdad was occupied; now they were renting a home in Amriya. To help support his family Abdurahman worked in restaurants and sold black-market gasoline on the streets. When Al Qaeda still controlled Amriya, one of his brothers was arrested by the Americans because a mujahid came to his shop to change the oil in his car, and his brother was accused by the Americans of working with them. One boy’s father was killed by the Mahdi Army in the Jihad district.

  “When the children first came here they found themselves in a different environment than the one they used to live in,” the school principal told me. “The way they behave and the way they are is all different. Gradually, they started to adapt to here. Of course, they were very afraid as a result of what they had seen in their areas. Some of them wake up at night. When they hear gunfire they just keep screaming. When a Hummer passes by they scream, even when they are inside the class. They are hurt from the inside. But you know they are children, so they occupy their time with playing and other stuff.”

  The school guard, who had not been paid in months, told me neither the Americans nor the Iraqi army brought security to Amriya. “Let us be realistic,” he said, “our brothers from the Thuwar secured us. They are better than the army and the Americans. The Americans don’t do anything when you go complain about something. They just put it down on a paper, while the Awakening, when you go complain to them, they do something. They go to those who did wrong and punish them. They are our sons, from the same area and we know them well, while the Americans and the army are not.”

  Um Omar took me to visit the family of Saad Juma, who had been displaced from the Amil district by Shiite militias more than a year earlier. I found them in the burned-out house of a Shiite family that had fled with only their clothes. When Saad and his family moved in, the house was torched and dirty, full of tires and other flammable items that had been used to burn it. The Shiite militias had expelled all the Sunni families from the area using loudspeakers on police cars to warn them. They cursed Sunnis and said they would kill anyone they saw on the street. “I remember one of our neighbors who lived nearby was killed there,” Saad said. “They killed him immediately. Another one was killed with his two little children in his garden. The militias called him by his name and shot him with two, three shots in the head, and they left the house after that.”

  Saad insisted that before the war, relations between Sunnis and Shiites in his area had been good. “We were like one family. Those militias came from outside, not from our area. Maybe from Shula or from other areas. They might come from the other side of the city.” Um Omar added that “the militias knew who the families were, and they knew the area well. They must be helped by the others in this area.” Saad agreed, adding that the local Sadrist office was near their area.

  Saad owned his previous house and had shared it with ten other relatives. He was a construction worker before he was displaced, but now he relied on the Ethar Association for food and aid. “The government is busy with itself,” he said. “It doesn’t care about people. It only cares about itself.” I asked him if he wanted to go back home. “Is there anyone who doesn’t wish to return to his home?” he asked me. But he didn’t think it was safe enough.

  Abasya Aziz was from the Sunni Mashhadani tribe. She and her family were expelled from the house in Hurriya they had lived in for thirty-five years. For two days Shiite militiamen shot at their house and called on them to leave. The men left to find a new house, but the women stayed another four days until one was found. “We were very scared alone,” she said. “I was scared to take all the furniture at once. So every day I take some of the furniture, and I also had to leave some furniture there.” Their new house had no electricity, so she had to show me around with a flashlight. The landlord originally wanted rent to be 350,000 dinars but because they were poor he reduced it to less than 250,000. “I wish to return [to Hurriya] and live a stable life,” Abasya Aziz said. “That’s what we are looking for. Now we can’t go back there because it is not safe. Also, I am afraid for my other sons. I can’t go back. It has been one year, and it’s still not safe there.”

  On the outskirts of Amriya, on a muddy field, I found a Sunni family in a makeshift brick home. I spoke to twenty-two-year-old Haidar, who lived there with eleven other family members. He told me that they were expelled from Amil by the Mahdi Army in 2006. His eighty-three-year-old grandfather had owned their house in Amil. Now Mahdi Army men were living in it. Haidar was on crutches, his le
gs amputated after a car bomb exploded too close to him when he was working as a mechanic in Bayaa. “Honestly, I don’t wish what happened to us even on my enemy,” Haidar told me. “We were displaced from our area. We left our house without any reason. It was a big house with two floors. We don’t have issues with anybody. We left our house and came here to live in this dirty house while they came and lived in our house. We suffered lots of damages. Before I used to go with my brother and sell gas to earn a little money. Now I can’t anymore.”

  I returned often to Amriya and saw a lot of Um Omar. Of the 104 students in her school, ten received free education, fourteen were orphans, thirteen had fathers in detention, and most of the rest had been displaced within the past year. “It is a very bad life,” Ms. Rasha, one of the teachers, told me about her students. “Our students, especially last year, we told them to study and focus on their school, especially the ones in the last year of the high school. They say, ‘What is the benefit? Let’s say we got into a good university, can we go study in that university?’” The students couldn’t go to university because of security problems and bombs, she told me, but also sectarianism. “Most of our students are named Omar. They say, ‘My name is Omar. When the teacher reads my name on the exam papers, they will mark it as failed and throw it away.’ Last year they canceled the results of the final high school examinations. Specifically they canceled the results of the students of Amriya, they didn’t mark their exam papers. The students made a second attempt on the exams and even a third attempt, but they’ve never received their results back.”