Children of War

by Deborah Ellis

  R. is an Iraqi Kurdish teenager now living in Canada.

  I am from Kurdistan, in northern Iraq. Terrible things have happened there. I was young when I left, but I still remember, and what I don’t remember, my brothers and sisters do.

  I’m the youngest in my family. We lived in a village. It was all little villages up there in the mountains. Kurds are not rich people. Most have a few goats or sheep, and they get by. My family lived in that same area for generations, going way, way back.

  My father was a soldier in the Iraqi army. He didn’t want to be, because he was a Kurd, and his loyalties were with the Kurds, but Iraq was in a war with Iran, and they needed people to fight. The soldiers came in the night and they grabbed my father and other men and said, “Now you are in the army.” He didn’t have a choice.

  I was small, but I remember. We were all crying. I remember that they let him say goodbye to us. He hugged me and said, “I’ll come back. I promise.”

  We didn’t see him again for six years. They kept him in the army all that time. No furloughs. He was a prisoner. They don’t give furloughs to prisoners!

  Things got really bad after he left. Things were bad before, the Iraqi army shooting at us when they weren’t shooting at the Iranians, and there were Kurdish militias who were fighting the Iraqis. So that was a regular part of my life.

  But it got worse when Saddam stepped up his campaign against my people. People would come flooding through our village on their way out of Iraq, and they would tell stories of gas and of terrible gun battles and dead bodies. I didn’t hear those stories myself — or if I did, I didn’t understand them — but my older brothers and sister remember, and I know there were a lot of people walking along the road, loaded down with bundles and things.

  Pretty soon we joined that long line for the walk to Iran.

  I still remember being carried by my mother, being in her arms, and seeing nothing but a long line of people ahead of us with their bundles, and a long line of people behind us. I remember how tired my mother was, and how she sweated from the burden of carrying me. Sometimes I walked beside her, holding her hand, but my legs were short and couldn’t go very fast. Plus I think she was really scared that she would lose me, you know, let go of my hand and I’d fall behind in that sea of moving people, and she’d never find me again. So she usually carried me.

  I don’t know how long we walked. Days, probably, but I don’t remember. We crossed over into Iran and ended up in a refugee camp inside the Iranian border.

  There were people we knew there, like our neighbors from our home village. We all slept in one tent. It was crowded at the camp, and noisy, and everyone getting into everyone’s business because there was no privacy.

  My sister was the one who mostly looked after me in the camp because my mother and older brothers were busy trying to find some way to bring in money or food, or were just wandering around looking for things we could use, like wood or scraps to burn. Everyone was cold, everyone was hungry. My mother sold her wedding ring, her extra clothes, anything she could to get food for us.

  I think I spent most of my time there trying to escape from my bossy sister! She kept a tight rein on me, because it’s dangerous for little kids to wander around refugee camps on their own. They could get hurt, they could get used by a bad crowd, they could pick up bad habits. My sister had a heavy burden. She was only a few years older than me, but she worried about all of us and took care of us. Mom’s health was not good. Well, you can imagine.

  We were in the refugee camp for four years. That was my life — the tents and the dirt and all the people around. I remember being scared every night, afraid of dying every single night, either from a violent death or from being hungry or cold.

  I didn’t go to school in the camp. There was no school. My brothers had gone to school when we lived in Iraq, and they have terrible memories of being treated badly there because they were Kurds. They were not allowed to speak Kurdish, only Arabic, and the teachers would beat them when they made mistakes. I don’t think they were unhappy at all about missing school while we were in Iran, because school for them was always a violent place.

  Finally we came to Canada. We were accepted here as refugees. It was easier for me than the others, because I was still young and had a young brain, so the new language flowed into it quite fast. The others had to struggle harder to learn English, but they had to struggle harder with everything. They are all doing well now, out working in good jobs or in college. But it was rough for a while. My mother still cries about the family she had to leave behind.

  We came first. Then my father joined us. He was arrested when he first got here because the government was worried that he might be a terrorist, but they let him go and now he’s with us. We’ve moved around a lot here, trying to find the right place to live where we can be happy.

  I was in school the day the planes crashed in New York, on September 11. Kids knew I was from Iraq, and they’d say things, insulting things. I still get called a terrorist. Kids will say, “Don’t get him mad or he’ll blow up your house.”

  I keep it together by reminding myself that my mother brought us all here to give us a better life. She would rather have stayed in Kurdistan. Of course, that’s her home, that was her parents’ home and their parents’ home, and back and back. But she brought us here, and I have to prove to her that it was worth it.

  I hope I can go back to Kurdistan one day without getting killed. One reason Bush gave for invading Iraq was to stop the killing of the Kurdish people, but Kurds are still being killed. The Americans want oil, and Kurdistan is where the oil is.

  If I could talk to American kids, I’d tell them to ask their parents if they believe the war is good, if what they are doing is right. It’s one thing if they really believe it, but most people just go along with things without thinking.

  When Canadian kids — the ones who have always been here and have had a good life — start complaining to me about the little things that bother them, I just think, “You have no idea.”

  Michael, 12

  The Christian community in Iraq is two thousand years old, and it was about one million strong at the start of the current war.

  The chaos that took the place of government after the fall of Saddam brought forward leaders who equated attacks on Christians with attacks on the foreign occupiers, forcing many Christians to flee to Jordan, Syria or wherever they could. Churches have been burned, and Christians have been kidnapped as part of a larger struggle to control areas of the country.

  Michael’s family belongs to one of the ancient Christian sects of Iraq. They were forced to flee their home and now live in Zarqa, a city northeast of Amman. Rents are reportedly cheaper in Zarqa than in much of Amman, which is why many Iraqis without means have chosen to settle there. With a population of 700,000, it’s the second-largest city in Jordan, and home to a large Palestinian refugee camp.

  Michael lives with his mother and younger brother in a few small, tidy rooms, carefully decorated with the few mementos they were able to bring with them from Iraq, and with religious pictures given to them by people in their local church.

  I live in Zarqa with my mother and two younger brothers. We came to Jordan two years ago. My father is dead.

  My father used to work as a reservations manager in the Sheraton Hotel in Baghdad. I don’t think the hotel is there any more. I think it got bombed. I don’t know for sure, but I think somebody told me it did.

  We are Christian. There have always been Christians in Iraq. We’re not like foreigners there. We are a part of Iraq. At the hotel, my father kept a picture of the Virgin Mary on his desk to remind him to think of holy things during his work day. For years he did this, no problem. His manager was also a Christian, and it was fine. Then the Christian manager was fired and a Muslim manager took his place. This new one didn’t like the Virgin Mary. He told my father to get rid of the picture. My father didn’t want to. I don’t know if he was fired or if he quit, but anyway, he wa
s out of a job.

  He didn’t like to be out of work because he was used to working, and he had to take care of all of us. He couldn’t find another job. He became sadder and sadder and sicker and sicker. His stomach hurt and he couldn’t eat. The doctor said it was stress, but finally they tested him somehow and said it was cancer. But, like I said, it was too late.

  Our home was in Baghdad. We had a very nice house. We weren’t there for the bombing, though. We went to Mosul, where my mother thought we would be safer. The planes started attacking two hours after we left, so we just got out in time. Lots of people left if they could, so that George Bush couldn’t kill them.

  The trip was very hard for my mother. She talks about how hard it was. My father was very sick and he had a tube in his arm attached to a bag that had medicine in it. And my grandmother was with us, but she was sick, too, mostly paralyzed. I am the oldest, but still, I was young, maybe eight, and my two younger brothers had chicken pox. It was a very bad trip.

  Mosul wasn’t safe, either. There was always gunfire, every night. There were car bombs, too, and a car makes a lot of noise when it explodes.

  We spent a lot of time in a church. Maybe we lived there. We were there a lot, anyway, with many other families. At night we would sleep on the floor or on benches, or try to sleep because there were guns all night. Sometimes I’d be so tired I’d forget to be afraid of the guns and just fall asleep anyway.

  Our father was getting sicker and sicker, so after a month or so we went to Jordan, but he died in 2004.

  My mother said he should be buried in Iraq, because that is our home, and she didn’t want his body to be forever in foreign soil. And he was already dead, so George Bush couldn’t kill him again. That’s when we made the trip with him, wrapped up in sheets in the back of the truck.

  We buried him in a graveyard, and then we went back to our house.

  There was nothing much left of it. Bombs had hit it. We couldn’t even find it at first because bombs had hit the whole neighborhood. Everything was gone. Our house, my friend’s house, the house of the people next door and down the street.

  Why did they do this? This was my house! This was my street! It wasn’t hurting anyone! It was just being a house. The place where I once slept was now rocks and dust and chunks of roof and walls. My things were all broken.

  Still, it was ours, so we tried to start living there again, cleaning up the dust and trying to clear up just one room where we could do all our living in. But there was no school, no water, no electricity. Whenever my mother went to the shop, she had to wear hijab because otherwise people would know she was Christian and give her a bad time.

  Our lives didn’t last like this for long. Very soon, a stranger left a note at our house saying, “Get out or we will kill you.” I don’t know who left the note. I don’t know who wanted us dead.

  We left Iraq and came again to Jordan. Now we live in Zarqa, and we are trying to make our lives here. But everything feels so broken. I miss my father, and I miss my home.

  My brothers and I go to school here. I’m the only Iraqi kid in my class. The other students are okay, they’re friendly. My best subject is science. We’re studying genetics now, and the properties of gas and liquid. It’s very interesting. Earlier today we went on a class trip to a park in Amman, with lots of trees and fun things to do.

  We don’t play much with the neighborhood boys. They’re all Jordanian, and they tell us that they don’t like Iraqis. My mother worries too much when we leave her sight, like she’s afraid we will disappear. So we mostly stay inside, but that means we fight a lot. Especially, I fight with the brother right next to me in age. I used to like him a lot but now he’s always plowing into me and throwing things at me.

  He wets the bed every night, too. He didn’t used to, and he’s ten, too old to be doing that. My mother gets him up a lot during the night to go to the bathroom, which wakes me up, so none of us gets much sleep. I try not to tease him about it, because I know he can’t help it, but sometimes I do, and that makes me ashamed of myself.

  My mother even stopped taking us both to church because she’s afraid we’ll start fighting in the middle of the service. She takes us one at a time now. I promised myself I won’t fight any more, then I do it. Like I said, it makes me ashamed. Our fighting just adds to my mother’s unhappiness, so I must find a way to stop it. I see her sitting and staring and looking very unhappy. She used to make fatyr, meat pies, to sell for some money, but the oven broke so she can’t do that any more. She forgets all kinds of things, and just sits and stares.

  We’ve been accepted by the UNHCR, and we were supposed to go to Australia, but Australia changed its mind and doesn’t want us. So here we sit.

  I have nothing in common with American children, except if there is maybe an American child whose father has died, whose house is destroyed, and who is forced to live in a foreign country that doesn’t want them. Then he and I would have something to talk about.

  I think it would make the world better if people had to fix the things they broke. Like, if someone bombs your house, they couldn’t go away and do things they wanted to do until they built you a new house and fixed what they broke.

  Sara, 15

  In 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, sanctions were imposed on Iraq by countries around the world. Food, medicine and other goods were prevented from going into Iraq, and the country’s economy and its people suffered from being unable to engage in full trade with the rest of the world. Because water-treatment plants had been damaged during the First Gulf War, half the Iraqi population did not have access to clean drinking water. Inflation skyrocketed, the education system collapsed and, as Hadani Ditmars wrote in Dancing in the No-Fly Zone: A Woman’s Journey Through Iraq, “almost overnight, the lives of most Iraqi citizens went from comfortable to desperate.” The sanctions continued until 2003, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, according to UNICEF.

  Sara is old enough to remember those years under sanctions. She lives in the Hashimi district of Amman, near the older downtown. There is a shiny new shopping mall nearby. Behind the wide, bright streets of the commercial area are houses full of small apartments that house many Iraqis, including Sara, her two sisters, her mother and a cousin.

  I have two sisters. Their names are Heinine, who is fourteen, and Sabine, who is eleven. Our cousin Nahan is also with us. She is the same age as me.

  We live now in a small apartment in Jordan. It’s very bare, with just mats along the walls, no good furniture. We burn incense a lot because it covers up the smell of damp and worse things. None of us like it here. We are in the Hashimi section of Amman, where a lot of Iraqis live, but we don’t spend time with them. It’s hard to know who to trust. A lot of people left Iraq for a lot of reasons. Just because we are all here now in Jordan doesn’t mean we all like each other.

  Our father died seven years ago from sickness. It was harder to get good health care in Iraq in the time of sanctions. I don’t know if he would still be alive or not if there were no sanctions. It’s something I don’t like to think about.

  Although we lost his salary when he died, my mother had a good job. Our lives would have been much worse if our mother didn’t have a job. She was an accountant in the educational system.

  She was also a member of the Ba’ath Party and worked with the Iraqi Women’s Union, a non-governmental organization that helped make women’s lives easier day-to-day and also encouraged women to participate in the political life of Iraq. It was a very old organization, around for many years.

  After the fall of Saddam, militia groups targeted former Ba’ath party members, killing a lot of them. We would hear about the killings, and we worried that our mother might be targeted.

  Eventually she did get a death threat, and that’s when we left. We were living in our grandparents’ house at the time. We gathered together what we could in a hurry, then left quickly and quietly.

  For a while, our mother worked here as a housecleaner in the neighb
orhood, but now she is sick and tired all the time. I’m not really sure how we are surviving now. I think she borrowed money from someone.

  We sold some jewelry and dishes, but a lot of Iraqis are trying to sell things in order to live, so we didn’t get a good price for them.

  Our mother is thinking that if she can get a sewing machine, she can do some tailoring and bring in some money that way. It would be good to see her busy. I think she would be happier if she had something to do that she liked. She’d have less time then to worry about me.

  My sisters and I are back in school this year, because Jordan now lets Iraqi children attend for free. My teachers are good, very kind and patient with us. We lost our school year last year because we couldn’t afford to pay the fees, so we are behind and have to work hard to catch up.

  School feels safe. We can learn, and we have friends and can laugh and have fun. During the war we saw dead bodies in the streets, explosions, terrible things. It helps to be able to laugh and have a bit of a regular life. Both Heinine and I want to be doctors. Sabine hasn’t decided yet.

  My mother and grandmother want us to wear hijab. They’re afraid for us because we have no father or older brother to protect us. They say, “You are young girls, walking around the streets with your heads uncovered. What if you are attacked by some bad Jordanian men? We cannot go to the police. They will send us back to Iraq!” They talk and worry, and sometimes I just get tired of all their worry. This is the one time I have in my life to be young. I don’t want to spend it hiding and worried and afraid.

  We all miss our homeland. We had friends there, and lives that could have been wonderful.

  I think if American girls my age could meet me, they’d like me. If they were friendly, we could go look in the shops and talk about clothes and music. Then they could tell their parents to stop being afraid of Iraqis.