He even selected a remarkably strong representative for women’s rights, Manal Yunis, to head the General Federation of Iraqi Women, which was the only women’s group allowed in Iraq. Iraq’s women were surprised and delighted by her policies, joking that “All men hate Manal Yunis!” She helped strengthen women’s rights after divorce, fighting for a law that granted women custody of the children, mandated alimony payments, and eliminated a rule that, under certain conditions, prevented a divorcée from remarrying for seven years. Yunis instituted day care at many of the government ministries and introduced partially paid one-year sabbaticals for new mothers. She wasn’t completely progressive, however, and one of her policies banned birth control pills, which had become popular among married women who already had several children.
Yet Iraqi women felt they were moving forward under Saddam, particularly given the way conditions for Muslim women elsewhere were deteriorating. In the late 1970s and ’80s, many neighboring Muslim countries had begun to reject Western ideas, worrying that the abandonment of Islam was causing only economic and cultural decay. The Arab world had been agitated by the Israeli army’s victories against Egypt in the 1967 and 1973 wars, and fundamentalist fervor for the destruction of Israel and the overthrow of pro-Western Arab governments was on the rise. In 1979, when neighboring Iran underwent an Islamic revolution, clerics and angry citizens toppled the U.S.-backed shah, seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, and established a strictly religious, Islamic government. (Mamina had been surprised at the vehemence of their anti-Americanism, since at that time Saddam had good relations with the United States.) When the Iranian revolution degenerated into mayhem, stories emerged about the brutal treatment of women, in Iran and other countries that gravitated to Islamic rule. Women were being beaten or stoned to death for wearing nail polish or showing a little of their hair. In such an environment, Mamina and Baba were proud that their country had chosen Western traditions over religious fanaticism.
But the good times wouldn’t last. When similar stirrings of religious fervor appeared in Iraq in the 1980s, Saddam’s efforts to brutally crush them would drag the entire nation into the gutter. He began by banning all religious groupings, including Friday-night mosque sermons, and discouraging believers from wearing the Islamic headscarf. Soon, senior Shia clerics were being assassinated, and their young followers were disappearing. Criticizing Saddam’s regime was equated with treason and punishable by torture and death. Worrying that the Shia in Iran would encourage the Iraqi Shia to rise up, Saddam launched a war with Iran in the early 1980s, and the population suffered through years of terror as low-flying Iranian fighter planes regularly dropped bombs across the neighborhoods of Baghdad. By the time the war exhausted itself in 1988, it was estimated that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men—many of whom had been kidnapped and forced into battle—had lost their lives; but Saddam spoke only of “victory.”
Disillusion set in, and in an effort to contain rising dissent, Saddam banned free media and foreign travel and began a propaganda campaign that included erecting billboards and the monstrous statues of himself across the country. His government-controlled television channels began showing only positive images of Saddam and Iraq and demonized Israel. Just three years later, in 1991, Saddam made the disastrous decision to invade oil-rich Kuwait, provoking the ire of the Americans who had been his longtime allies. The Iraqi army was driven back by U.S. forces. Saddam’s government was weak, but rather than overthrow Saddam itself, the United States encouraged hundreds of thousands of Shia in southern Iraq to rise up against him. But the American support never arrived. Although their friendship with Saddam was over, the Americans decided at the last minute that toppling him would empower neighboring Iran. Saddam brutally crushed the southern Iraqis, bulldozing tens of thousands of the dead into mass graves. To deter Saddam’s further aggression, the United Nations imposed sanctions on Iraq in 1993, forbidding all imports and exports, locking the country in isolation and driving almost all Iraqis into poverty as salaries plummeted and inflation ran wild. The supermarket shelves became bare. Fathers began to marry off their daughters younger and younger.
For a long time, as things got worse, Mamina had comforted herself that, at the very least, her daughters would grow up among strong female role models, friends and family members who were lawyers, doctors, and engineers and who enjoyed many more liberties compared to women in other Arab countries. Given the short workday, nationalized health care, and close family circles, Iraqi women had for several years been able to maintain both a family life and a full-time career—a balance, Saddam’s government pointed out, that had not been attained even by women in many Western countries. By the 1990s, though, the happy times had definitively ended, and women’s rights became a forgotten luxury as mothers struggled to fill hungry mouths.
After Saddam’s own sons-in-law tried to defect and tell the world of his chemical-weapons programs in 1996, Saddam unleashed a brutal police state that tortured people just for criticizing the regime. His secret police, the Mukhabarat, would imprison anyone whose loyalty was in question, and it paid tens of thousands of dinars to spies in neighborhoods, offices, and university classrooms. The social fabric of society was shredded as friends betrayed friends and family members turned on one another.
Baba, too, was suffering. Saddam had nationalized the German company where Baba had worked and filled the management ranks with Ba’ath Party loyalists. Eventually, Baba was pushed out for his refusal to join the party, and he started his own lucrative construction company, but its building sites were looted during the Kuwait war, and by the time the UN sanctions started, he could no longer import materials. Eventually, he lost his business, as did so many other Iraqis. Many of Baba’s friends joined the Ba’ath Party, either for the money and power or merely to protect themselves. Some became rich, driving Mercedes and flaunting their wealth, but on principle, Baba still refused. Within just a few years, corruption and poverty destroyed a country that had once been at the forefront of the Arab world. Mohammed joined tens of thousands of other young professionals who began secretly fleeing the country, but not everyone could leave. Zia and Nunu’s generation came of age in a time that knew only dictatorship, repression, hunger, and barbarism. No one in Iraq talked about women’s rights anymore. They had no human rights.
As Mamina lay on the bed in the farmhouse in Hit, gently stroking the hair of her sleeping daughters and thinking about the arrival of the Americans, for the first time in more than fifteen years she felt hope. She wanted so badly for her girls to understand that women’s equality was not just a Western concept that the Americans would introduce. It was a proud Iraqi tradition that they must all work to restore.
A FEW NIGHTS later, during dinner, when they heard a bomb land and felt the ground vibrate, Zia grinned boldly at Uncle Jalal’s mother, thinking how her parents’ dreams were finally coming true, how Iraq would soon be restored to its glory days, the way it was in Mamina’s stories. The next day, they heard that Hit’s communication tower had been bombed. Nunu’s shortwave radio still worked, and it assured them that U.S. troops were advancing toward Baghdad, though they had been slowed by the dust storm. Everyone started talking at once. Would the Americans get rid of Saddam, or back out at the last minute? Would the Iraqi army defend the government or defect? How fiercely would Saddam fight back? The next few days passed slowly until the radio announced, to the Shia women’s surprise and delight, that the Americans had taken Baghdad International Airport.
After that, the news moved quickly. American tanks had knocked through the gates of Saddam’s Republican Palace and rolled down Abu Nawass, a major street in their family’s Baghdad neighborhood. Zia and Nunu danced around the room.
“Saddam is falling, Saddam is falling,” they sang, no longer caring who in Hit overheard them. Saddam’s information minister, Saeed al-Sahaf, came on to the state-run station to deny the presence of American troops on Iraqi soil, but the women just laughed at the ludicrous propaganda.
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br /> “The Iraqi army is controlling the situation,” he announced.
“Oh yeah?” joked Zia to the radio. “Which situation are you controlling?” The Americans were clearly winning. Saddam’s huge statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square had been torn down, the news reports were saying, and Iraqis were beating his face with their shoes.
Nunu couldn’t believe that. “How dare they do this? They will be killed!”
Zia hugged her little sister. “Not with the Americans here. Saddam’s army is afraid of them!”
Suddenly, after all these weeks of tension—all these years of fear—it was over. Saddam’s army had barely put up a fight.
Within hours, Mamina, Zia, and Nunu piled into a car full of other refugees staying at the house next door and headed home to Baghdad and Baba. Aunt Sahra and Uncle Jalal would return separately to Baghdad later. The women squeezed in together and put a stick with a white cloth out the window, to indicate they were civilians.
As the car pulled away, Mamina thanked Jalal’s family for housing them, but goodbyes were forced, as the family’s opinions had turned ugly. “Those who welcome foreigners onto Iraqi soil are dirty, shameless kafirs,” Jalal’s mother spit out, using a derogatory term for non-Muslims. Never would they support the occupation of their country by a Western, Christian army—to them this was clearly forbidden in the Quran.
“Saddam will be back,” Jalal’s sister muttered.
“We pray to God that never happens,” Mamina replied loudly, surprising even herself with her directness and marveling at her defiant tone, which she had not heard in twenty years.
A FEW HOURS later, the scene in Baghdad was beyond anything the sisters could have imagined. Cars jammed the roads back into the capital, despite the plumes of ink-black smoke dissolving above it into the cloudless horizon. Shell casings and shattered glass littered the streets. Though they had seen war before, this was much bigger. An entire nation was in revolt, a government in shambles and its dictator overthrown. A state of silent shock settled over the car, punctured by gasps, as the enormity of events sunk in. Suddenly Zia didn’t know if she felt more happy, nervous, or terrified. Although smoldering, Baghdad was still standing, and while physical devastation was widespread, there was little sign of bloodshed. Zia, Nunu, and Mamina squeezed one another’s hands quietly in the car, each hoping nothing had happened to their home.
Far more shocking still than the destruction, however, was the joyous mob scene in downtown Baghdad, so different from the somber faces they had left behind in Hit. Just as the radio had said, Iraqis were banging murals of Saddam with their shoes and climbing atop his statues to beat them. Nunu marveled again at the scene, unable to believe her eyes. Only two weeks earlier, those men would have been tortured by electrical shocks or had members of their family killed for such behavior. Yet now people were cursing Saddam openly, and it was the Ba’athists who hid in their houses. The streets teetered with wild, carefree energy. Men with AK-47s leaned out car windows, shooting celebratory gunfire into the air. Drivers blew their horns musically and groups of men jumped up and down, playing instruments and cheering. Iraqis shouted to the American soldiers parked in their Humvees: “Yes, yes, Bush! Down, down, Saddam!” Zia knew exactly what they were all thinking: The nightmare is over.
Their car was caught in a long line of slow-moving traffic, which they soon realized was caused by a military checkpoint. Seeing U.S. soldiers standing on the familiar streets where she and her siblings had learned to ride bicycles made Nunu feel like she had stepped onto a movie set. The Americans were tall and rich-looking, with well-made uniforms and expensive gear attached to their broad chests. To the sisters, they looked like celebrities in their black sunglasses and helmets.
One approached their car with his finger on his rifle’s trigger, and Zia’s heart pounded. She and Nunu were the only passengers who spoke English.
“Do you have any weapons in the car?” the soldier asked gruffly. His helmet said HARRIS.
“We are civilians,” Zia said. “We have no arms,” she added nervously.
They held each other’s gaze for what felt like forever. At last, he smiled at Zia and stretched out his hand, but Mamina interrupted in her limited English. “Thank you, thank you,” she said, holding back her daughter’s hand. “God bless you. Bush good.” As the car moved on, the soldier’s gaze followed the sisters, and Nunu waved prettily. “They are so flirtatious!” Zia gasped, not unhappily.
WHEN THEY FINALLY arrived at their street, Baba was standing outside with their neighbor Abu Hassan, his wife and son, and many others. They looked exhausted, their cheeks unshaven and their clothes wrinkled, but they were all, thankfully, alive. Baba threw up his hands in celebration when he saw them come around the corner. Everyone was laughing, full of giddy joy as they kissed in greeting. All the neighbors were pointing to a nearby residence, where a high-ranking member of Saddam’s government had lived. Someone had scrawled graffiti on his front wall: Let the Ba’ath Party Fall.
Despite the wear of the last several weeks, Baba’s face looked flushed and youthful, as though the twenty-five years of Saddam had been suddenly erased. “The Americans have done it,” he said, clapping his hands and grinning at his daughters. “They stood up to Saddam. They were the only ones willing to do that.” Zia couldn’t remember the last time her family had been so happy.
CHAPTER TWO
WHEN THE NEWS came that Baghdad International Airport had fallen, the soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 354th Civil Affairs Brigade cheered wildly. Shortly thereafter, the unit packed their duffel bags and began traveling in convoy up the supply route that snaked from Umm Qasr, near Kuwait, toward Baghdad. On the stifling, slow drive through southern Iraq, Lieutenant A. Heather Coyne couldn’t resist taking a few photos of herself to email back to her friends in Washington, D.C., who knew her as Heather, an examiner in the White House’s Office of Management and Budget; a wonky bureaucrat with a desk covered in policy papers, who wore a sensible gray suit and had a degree in Arabic from the Defense Language Institute. Her decision, at almost thirty years old, to quit her job and join the army had thrown her off her career path—and her coworkers, all vying up the White House ladder, were shocked she’d give it all up. But this is what it’s all about, she told them. While she was scared and nervous about poison gas attacks, her fear faded as the WMD attacks never materialized. She felt alive and excited to be liberating the Iraqis, and to be center stage in this world event. Her D.C. friends would certainly never recognize her now, sweating under forty pounds of gear and a bulletproof vest, and with the chin strap of the Kevlar helmet digging into her smiling cheeks. The gear was cumbersome, but she didn’t mind; it gave her a certain authority, which she knew she needed as a relatively recent recruit and as one of the few women in her unit.
When, after two weeks of travel, they finally arrived in Baghdad, the mood coming down the chain of command was victorious. There had been no WMD attacks, and practically no resistance at all from the Iraqi army; the only disturbing news was about rampant looting of national institutions such as universities, the library, and the museum. When she had asked her commanding officers why the U.S. soldiers weren’t doing more to halt the looting, they pointed out that the troops were still taking fire, and that they didn’t have the personnel to guard the museum, which housed artifacts that dated back ten thousand years, through the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian periods. She argued with commanders about it, but they seemed nonchalant. Their fears had been of a chemical weapons attack, fierce fighting, and millions of Iraqi refugees—none of which was happening. Back in Washington, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was dismissing the looting as “cathartic” for Iraqis who had suffered under Saddam’s repression. If the worst thing to happen was looting of toasters and sneakers—or even pre-Islamic artifacts—well, they reasoned, this was war and bad stuff happened. She felt uncomfortable about this answer, but was in no position as a lowly lieutenant to challenge it.
Her commander�
��s sense of victory was confirmed when, on Heather’s first tour of Baghdad, the locals kissed the soldiers’ cheeks and played trumpet and drums in the dirt roads. Heather felt vindicated, given that so many of her friends and family back home had believed that the Iraqis didn’t want war. She recalled their stunned reaction upon learning that she, an avid Democrat who was vehemently anti-Bush, would participate in what many saw as a Republican war for oil. But she never thought of it as “joining Bush’s war.” Iraqis suffered horribly under Saddam’s police state, and she saw this war as the chance to release an oppressed people and free subjugated women, just as in Afghanistan. Looking triumphantly around her now, she was confident that events had proven her right.
IN ONE WAY or another, Heather had been thinking about the plight of Iraq for much of her adult life. The country had first come across her radar in high school, when Saddam Hussein was accused of gassing to death thousands and thousands of Kurds, including women and children, in the Iraqi town of Halabja. The eldest daughter of two science professors, young Heather Coyne was raised in the San Francisco Bay area, which proudly considered itself the most liberal city in America. Outraged, she and her teacher had talked about how the world had, essentially, stood by and done nothing. She came to believe that the United States had a moral obligation to intervene in the world to stop injustice. Heather’s rebel streak drew back to her mother, Lelia, who had fought her way into the PhD program at Cal Tech in the 1960s and had been one of the first women to graduate, and to her grandmother, a civil-rights activist in Kansas who had marched for African American rights; and her great-grandmother had been a suffragette. Heather adopted that passion, as well as their belief that the system could be changed—although they never imagined Heather would try to make a difference by becoming a soldier.
Sisters in War Page 2