Children of War

by Deborah Ellis

  We had money when we first came to Jordan, but now it’s mostly gone. My father is not allowed to work here, and if he’s caught doing a job, he’ll be sent back to Iraq, where maybe he will be killed. Sometimes our grandparents send us money from Iraq, and my mother works as a cook. In Iraq, my mother had a degree from a business college. Here she prepares Iraqi dishes for people who have more money than we do, who pay her to cook for weddings or special days.

  Her best dish — the one I like best — is koba. It’s a rice dish with meat. It’s very good.

  My brother and I are both in school this year. I’m at the top of my class. My best subject is Arabic. My teachers are all good to me, even though they are Jordanian and I am Iraqi. They don’t care about that. They just care that I am a good student and try my best.

  I think I would like to be a teacher when I grow up, so that I can be kind to children who have had a hard time. My classmates are friendly, too. There are other Iraqi kids in my class, but there’s no difference between us and the Jordanians.

  My brother wants to be a painter when he grows up. He wrestles with me a lot because he has all this energy he has to get rid of. He’s usually good company, but if he gets to be too much trouble, I just give him a swat. He backs off then. He knows who’s boss.

  My father did a very good job when he worked with the Americans. They even gave him a certificate saying what a good job he did. It was signed by Mr. Kevin Barry, the instructor at the Baghdad Academy. So they know my father is a good man. We’ve applied to be allowed to move to the United States. Having that certificate should help us get in.

  I’d rather go home, though. My friends are there, and the rest of my family is there. Also, the Americans scare me. They bombed my country, and they made things go very bad. George Bush is scary because he doesn’t know about how wonderful the Iraqi people are. I always get scared when I see him on TV, because I am afraid that what he will say will mean more bad news for my country. American children should make their parents elect a kinder president.

  Haneen, 10

  Two million refugees have left Iraq. Most are in neighboring Jordan and Syria – poor countries that have had little choice but to accommodate the mass influx of refugees.

  Meanwhile, countries like Great Britain, Australia, the United States and Canada have shown little willingess to host the millions of Iraqis who sit in limbo in Jordan and Syria and inside Iraq, unable to go back to their old homes and unable to make new lives for themselves.

  Haneen and her family are from Baghdad. Their lives have been in upheaval since before the invasion in 2003, and they left Iraq for good in 2007. They are now living in Canada.

  We have been in Canada for three months. We were in Iraq until 2007, then we went to Jordan, then we came here. When we lived in Iraq, we lived in Baghdad.

  Our mother and father thought we should leave because of all the shooting and bombing. We lived near a police station, and there was shooting around there a lot. One time, the shooting went on and on and it was almost like the sound of rain falling hard.

  There was a car blown up in the road by our house, too. It made a very loud noise, and then there was screaming and shouting and sirens. There were always things like that happening.

  We left Baghdad before the invasion because my parents thought we’d be safer in Anah, a city in Al Anbar Province. My grandparents had a house there, so we went there, but it wasn’t safer. We saw US troops everywhere, in helicopters and in tanks.

  Anah is a small city in the desert, with farms around it. There was a lot of bombing. I remember one night when the bombing was going on. We were all together — my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and cousins. My parents were angry because they thought we would be safe, and everybody was crying except for my little sister and one of my younger cousins. They were laughing, not because they thought it was funny, but because they were so scared. They had lost control of themselves.

  We heard all these explosions and everything shook. Glass broke out of the windows. I thought we would all die. But the night passed, and in the morning when it was quiet, we went outside.

  All the houses around our house were bombed. But the bombs missed us. Our house was the only one still standing.

  I don’t remember how long we stayed in Anah, but after a while we went back to Baghdad. Both my mother and father are pharmacists, and they had work to do. We didn’t go back to school right away. I forget how long.

  It was hard for us because there was no water and no electricity. We saw lots of US soldiers, but we didn’t talk to them. We were too scared. A tank came really close to us one day. We saw tanks and soldiers and helicopters all the time. One of the good things about Canada is that there aren’t helicopters flying around all the time. I hate that sound.

  We did go back to school after a while, but we couldn’t go every day. Sometimes there were a lot of shootings or soldiers around, and then we stayed home. On those days Mom would keep us busy playing games and doing things around the house so we wouldn’t sit and worry. When the electricity came on we could watch TV, but it never stayed on for long and we never knew when we’d have it.

  Then we went to Jordan, and we could go to school there. We learned some English, and played sports and did art. Then we came here.

  The war happened because Iraq has oil. And there is a high building somewhere in America that was blown up. They thought Iraq blew it up, so that’s why they blew up places in Iraq.

  Maybe I’ll go back to Iraq some day, if the war ends. Until then, I’ll stay in Canada. We like everything in Canada, especially that there is no bombing. I miss things about Iraq, like my toys and my relatives, but Canada is much easier.

  When I grow up, I’m going to be a dentist. My middle sister is going to be a surgeon, and my little sister is going to be a teacher. My parents expect us to work hard, but they want us to have fun, too.

  S.W., 19

  The journey to safety can be a long and dangerous one. Getting the required papers and being in the right place at the right time are often as much a matter of luck as design. S.W. and her family applied for a visa seven years before they were finally allowed to come to Canada, where her uncle was living and working at two jobs to help support them while they waited for permission to immigrate.

  I am old enough that I remember all the changes in my country. Certainly I remember life under Saddam. He was our leader, and I thought he would protect us. Everyone knew the Americans were coming, but Saddam said we would win the war. Saddam was our government, and we should support our government, like the Americans support their government. We wanted to believe that our government would not let another country come in and take us over.

  Even up to the last moments of the war, I was one thousand percent sure that Saddam would do something to save us from the Americans. But it didn’t happen.

  I am from Baghdad, but we didn’t stay in Baghdad during the invasion. My brother has allergies, and one of the things Saddam did was to dig big holes and fill them with oil and set them on fire. The smoke from the burning oil was supposed to confuse the Americans in their fighter planes. I could see the fires from my bedroom window. The air became very hard to breathe, and for my brother it was impossible. So we went to stay with my father’s second uncle in Baqubah. We were there for three months and missed the bombing of Baghdad.

  My father went back to check on our house almost every day, to make sure it hadn’t been bombed or looted. There were people who would go around to homes when no one was there and steal everything.

  But just because we didn’t see much of the bombing doesn’t mean we weren’t scared. Staying at my uncle’s house was a woman who was pregnant, and she was so scared all the time we thought she would lose the baby.

  After three months we went back to Baghdad. It was a city for dead people. Everything was black, it seemed. There was only the army out on the streets. People stayed in their houses.

  Sometimes we had to talk to the A
merican soldiers so we could continue going down the street. I remember one of them who was very polite. We saw him a few times. He said, “Good morning,” and “thank you.” My mother said if we were nice to them, they would be nice to us. It was safer for us if we were polite.

  Even then, with all the Americans in our streets, I thought Saddam was going to do something to let us win the war. But he was quiet for a long time. We didn’t know where he was.

  I wasn’t surprised when he was arrested by the Americans, but I don’t think they should have hanged him. Saddam killed a lot of people, and now he’s resting in peace. If they had put him in jail for the rest of his life, at least he would have gotten a taste of what he had done to others. A lot of Iraqis don’t like that he’s resting in peace.

  I don’t hate him. I don’t love him. I have no feelings for him. I’d rather not think about him. Most Arabs can’t talk about their governments because their governments don’t like other opinions. This is not because of Islam. Islam says there should be lots of opinions. It doesn’t say governments should kill their own people.

  We went back to our house in Baghdad. It had not been bombed, so we could live there. It was a big house with a beautiful garden, but I just stayed in my room, watching the cars go by on the highway from my bedroom window. It was too dangerous to walk in the streets because you could get killed. I felt like all the plans I had for my future were gone.

  We had already applied to Canada because my mother has family here, so we thought we would go to Jordan and wait for the visa. We thought it would come soon. We went into Jordan on a three-month visa and stayed for one year. Every three months we’d have to go to Syria for a day and get another three-month visa for Jordan.

  Even though my family said we were safe in Jordan, I was still scared all the time. It didn’t help that I couldn’t go to school. We couldn’t afford it, and Jordan could kick us out at any time. So I had too many days with nothing to do but be scared and worried.

  We left Iraq for Jordan on October 23, 2004, and we left Jordan for Iraq on October 23, 2005. Our money had run out.

  We stayed in Iraq for six months. I couldn’t go back to school because we got there in the middle of the school year and they wouldn’t let me enroll.

  We got a message that we’d missed our immigration interview so our visa application to Canada was denied. But we never got the message telling us to come to an interview. All those years of hoping to come to Canada, and the hope was gone in a moment.

  But we had to keep trying. There was no life for us in Iraq. My mother, little brother and I packed a small bag, enough for three days, and went to Syria to try to get another appointment. My father stayed behind to watch our house. My older brother stayed with him. He had studied at home and had exams to write.

  We ended up staying in Syria for three months, but we almost didn’t get there.

  To cross the border, first you go to the Iraqi border control. They stamped my mother’s passport and the driver’s passport, but they wouldn’t stamp mine. “She should have a man traveling with her,” they said. “She is a young girl. She should stay in Iraq, not travel to Syria without a man to protect her.”

  Mom felt that we had to get to Syria. It was our last chance to get into Canada. She didn’t want to take us back to Baghdad. And she couldn’t leave me at the border. There’s nothing at the border! Just desert! So, what to do?

  The driver found a police officer and gave him some money. The police officer went to the border guard, passed the money along, and my passport got stamped.

  I was so angry by now. I thought, just hurry and give me my passport so I never have to see your face again.

  Then we got to the Syrian border, and the manager there was even worse. He insulted my father for allowing me to travel without a man. He told us to go back to Iraq. He was very mean. If I saw him today, I would kick him.

  The whole thing made me very sad. The Syrians used to like us, because Saddam gave them oil, and he gave them electricity even when we didn’t have any electricity in Baghdad. The Syrians blame us for not fighting hard enough to keep Saddam in power.

  We managed to get our immigration file opened again, gave them lots of ways to contact us for an interview, went back to Iraq to sell all our things, then went back again to Syria.

  All this time, we were living on money from my uncle in Canada. He is not a rich man. He was working two jobs, one to support his family, and one to support my family. He opened up a bank account for us in Canada, which meant that we could get credit cards, and we lived on those credit cards and whatever money my uncle could send. By the time we came to Canada, we owed the banks $60,000.

  So we sold our things, found good people to look after our house — which belongs to my mother’s family, not to us — and went back to Syria for another three months.

  Finally, we got a call to go for the immigration interview. We got word to our father, who was still in Iraq, and he headed to Syria. His car was stopped along the highway by a gang of men with guns. He had bags of our stuff in the car with him. They stole all that, and they wanted money. He didn’t have any. They got his cellphone and pretended to call my mother and say, “Give us money or we will kill your husband.”

  They put him in a hole in the ground, and put a machine gun to his head. It must have been a hole they’d used for killing before, because there were other body parts and heads down there.

  “We’re going to kill you,” they kept on saying. Finally, my dad shouted, “Shut the hell up! I don’t have any money. My wife doesn’t have any money. So go ahead and kill me.” Then he said, “But after you kill me, take this bundle of papers to my wife in Syria, if you want to do something good in your life to make up for all the bad.”

  He didn’t act scared, so they thought he was crazy. They stole his passport, but they gave him ten thousand Iraqi dinars — around five American dollars — and let him get in the car and drive back to Baghdad.

  He got back to Baghdad after dark, spent the night at a police checkpoint because he couldn’t travel after curfew, then the next day went to see about getting a new passport. That was a whole other long story, but he got it, got to Syria, we had our interview, and the day after we got the visa, we got on a plane and came to Canada.

  I like being in Canada. Here, I feel good. Here, no one cares what you do. You can do what you want without being watched by your government or the police or people who are your enemy. Sure, sometimes here people are rude, like they are at times to my mother because she wears hijab, but mostly people are kind and let you live your life.

  And I really need to live my life now. I saw things in the last five years that most people don’t see even if they live to be ninety. I was put into grade nine when I came here, because I missed so much school and didn’t know English, but I’m going into grade twelve in the fall. I’d like to go to college and be an eye doctor. I love so many things — art, music, dancing, guitar, designing, computers and photography.

  I want to press a delete button on the last five years of my life, and erase all those unhappy memories.

  There should not be any war. If George W. Bush had a problem with Saddam Hussein, they should have both been given a gun, told to take ten steps, then turn and shoot. They could have just killed each other instead of killing and hurting so many other people.

  Huthaifa, 19, and Yeman, 13

  Although Saddam Hussein was executed on December 30, 2006, Iraq is still torn by ongoing violence, as religious groups and others fight for power. One violent incident can spark a retaliation, and on it goes.

  In June 2007, a revered Shia shrine was blown up in Samarra, north of Baghdad, resulting in harsher curfews, retaliation killings of Sunni Muslims, and a new influx of American troops.

  Huthaifa and Yeman are brothers who lived in the Ala Dhamiya section of Baghdad — a mostly Sunni area where frequent attacks have taken place since the Samarra bombing. They came to Jordan on July 1, 2006, after a close friend of their
father was abducted and killed.

  HUTHAIFA – We left Baghdad just four days after I finished high school. I got a chance to join a college here in Jordan for one year, at Amman University. I was studying in the biomedical engineering department. I studied for only two semesters. Then I had to leave because my family couldn’t afford the tuition. Now I have no studying, and no job. It’s kind of expensive to live here in Jordan.

  I’ve applied to take several courses here that are offered by NGOs, for capacity-building, photography, media. Also, I play music. I’ve been playing guitar for five years now. My brother also plays. I’m teaching myself electric guitar. I play mostly progressive rock. Back in Baghdad I had friends who were also into music, and we would get together and play. We weren’t a group. We just used to jam together.

  YEMAN – I am in grade eight, in a private school here, Terra Sancta College. I was just finishing grade six when we left Baghdad.

  People were very scared and nervous before the invasion. The American government kept saying scary things, and we were afraid of what they would do.

  HUTHAIFA – There was some talk that America would use atomic weapons in Iraq. They used them against Japan, so we knew they weren’t afraid to drop them on people. There was talk that they might do to Baghdad the same thing they did to Hiroshima.

  Before the war, people were used to their lives. Because of sanctions, most people did not have a lot of extra money. They were used to not traveling abroad or doing very adventurous things, just staying in their areas.

  Our father had a small video cassette shop, to rent and sell videos, mostly American movies, and music as well. We just went on with our daily lives. We would watch movies from my father’s shop. My favorite was Spawn. My brother’s was Batman.