Sisters in War

by Christina Asquith

  The road that brought Heather to Iraq began after she had attended Bryn Mawr College, when she went on to get her MA at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., in international relations and international economics. The then-dean of SAIS was Paul Wolfowitz, who would later become President Bush’s deputy undersecretary for defense and so-called architect of the Iraq invasion. As a student, Heather interacted with Wolfowitz only a few times, but she came of age, intellectually, as Wolfowitz and others were first making their case to get rid of Saddam. Wolfowitz, along with the future defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was actively campaigning for a coup d’état—in 1998 they penned an open letter to President Clinton calling for Saddam’s removal. Heather was still in her mid-twenties and working her way up the career ladder. At the White House, her office at the OMB oversaw $350 billion in federal spending on national security programs, and she focused on counterterrorism when few others did. In the late 1990s, Al Qaeda was a familiar term around the OMB, but little known among those who worked outside of Middle Eastern issues. Much to her and her colleagues’ frustration, they couldn’t get people in power to pay attention to terrorism. Heather became known around the office as intense, whip-smart, ambitious, and yet also very idealistic. Anti-American sentiment couldn’t be overcome from a desk in Washington, D.C., she realized. We need Arabic speakers, living in Arab countries, promoting aid programs and education. And yet few in the Pentagon or the State Department even spoke Arabic. “I want to get my hands dirty and make a difference,” she told her boss. Shortly thereafter, she stunned her office by announcing she was quitting her well-paid, well-connected job as a bureaucrat and signing up for the U.S. Army Reserve. She underwent training and then enrolled in the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, to learn Arabic. It was early 2001, and she had no idea what the future held in store for her. Some days, she feared she had thrown away her career.

  Then, one morning, she was driving to language class when she heard that four commercial airliners had been crashed into New York City, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania. Tears flowed as she listened to the mounting death toll. We saw that coming, she immediately thought, her anger and sadness mixed powerfully with guilt. We should have fought harder, worked longer, raised more hell to get terrorism on the agendas of people who mattered. She didn’t believe Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11, but hadn’t America just learned a lesson about ignoring rogue international actors such as Bin Laden? Tyranny breeds terrorism, and democracy is the antidote. If Saddam wasn’t a threat right then, he would become one soon enough and he had to be taken down. If the rest of the world wouldn’t help, America should do it anyway, she had felt. The Bush administration, obviously, agreed.

  Heather didn’t get called up for the 2001 Afghanistan mission. Finish language school, her commanding officers told her. We’re going to need Arabic-speakers.

  AFTER THEIR TOUR of the streets, and the gratifying sight of jubilant, grateful Iraqis celebrating the toppled statue of Saddam, Heather and the other soldiers returned to their new base in Saddam’s palace and relaxed. The worst was over. They spent the next several days sweeping out the ballrooms, reattaching doors blown off by the bombs, writing emails home, and setting up their cots. On her walls, Heather hung up postcards of Saddam, to remind her why she was there. One morning at four a.m., on early guard duty, she walked out onto Saddam’s veranda in night-vision goggles. Early-morning hues of pink and orange silhouetted the date palms, and the warm desert air felt like silk on her face. She was intoxicated by such exotic surroundings and filled with a sense of adventure and optimism. She knew there was hard work ahead—the details of which she hadn’t even begun to consider—and she was ready to work harder than ever to make it succeed. Yet as she stood there, surveying Saddam’s former world through the goggles’ grainy green, she was suddenly hit by the scope of what she was part of: a vicious dictator had been toppled, a country had been liberated, and the course of history had been forever changed. And she had been a part of it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHEN TALK OF a war in Iraq began, Manal Omar was on the front row at the antiwar rallies.

  “Iraqis have been through enough! We should help them, not bomb them,” she shouted from the Washington stages, to cheering crowds of thousands.

  Amid a sea of Caucasian college students, many of whom had only just found Iraq on the map, Manal stood out: a veiled woman in her late twenties, who laced her powerful speeches with Muslim slang, like political hip-hop. Manal was an outspoken and active member of the international aid world who had lived in Baghdad and still had family in the Palestinian territories. As an aid worker and an observant Muslim herself, she cared deeply about the plight of Iraqis under Saddam’s reign, particularly Iraqi women, but she felt strongly that an invasion was unequivocally the wrong answer. She and other U.S. women’s rights activists opposed the war on the grounds that war was, quite simply, always bad for women. The violence and insecurity of an invasion and military occupation would devastate the lives of the average citizens the Bush administration purportedly wanted to save. On the heels of a supposed victory in Afghanistan, the administration had pointed to the liberation of women there from the Taliban. But Manal suspected the situation on the ground in Iraq would be more complicated. With a decade of experience in aid work in the Arab world, she knew the first casualties of war were the most essential ingredients to women’s freedom—security and stability. Without these things, women couldn’t even leave the house. There was no way it could ever turn out well, and no way the Iraqis were going to welcome an American army, she felt sure.

  Almost all women’s aid groups agreed. In recent years, women’s rights had risen in precedence inside the U.S. administration, with Colin Powell declaring in 2002, “It is the firm policy of the Bush administration that the worldwide advancement of women’s issues is not only in keeping with the deeply held values of the American people, it is strongly in our national interest as well.” Encouraged by this policy but worried by the impending invasion, on March 7, 2003, eight prominent U.S. women’s organizations signed a letter to the White House requesting a meeting to discuss their concerns that “Violence often simply begets violence.… For Iraqi women, the war carries the danger that their nation will degenerate into an even more militarized or extremist Iraq that dramatically could restrict women’s rights.” The letter was signed by the National Council for Women, the National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority, and the Ms. Foundation for Women. Their request for a meeting was denied and their concerns were dismissed as politically motivated, anti-Bush rhetoric.

  As it turned out, this was because the Bush administration was hearing much more welcome news from another quarter: specifically, from a group called Women for a Free Iraq, which included a number of professional Iraqi expat women whose families had been living in exile in the United States and Europe in fear of Saddam. Most hailed from prominent Shia families who had been pushed out of power by the Ba’athists, and recently groups of these expats had been receiving tens of millions of dollars from the U.S. Congress in support of their efforts, including a publicity campaign that fed anti-Saddam stories into U.S. magazines and newspapers. Women for a Free Iraq had also teamed up with a Republican women’s organization, the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), which had been started in the 1990s by Lynne Cheney as an alternative to other women’s groups, which Cheney saw as deeply left-wing and highly critical of the United States.

  The groups’ position was welcomed inside a presidential administration making a case for war, particularly as images of Afghan women lining up to vote and rushing back into schools helped shore up support for the invasion of Afghanistan on the basis of strengthening women’s rights. Some of the pro-war activists from Women for a Free Iraq were invited to meet with President Bush, and one would be given a seat near the first lady at the State of the Union address as a way of reminding Americans that this war was no
t only about WMDs. These conservative women argued that Iraqi women had suffered horribly under Saddam, at least in recent years, and they promised that the war would start a feminist wave that would ripple across the Middle East. In Kuwait, women still couldn’t vote. In Saudi Arabia, they couldn’t drive or travel without a male companion. In Jordan, women could be murdered for having premarital contact with a man. All this needed to change, and liberating Iraq, they argued, was the first step.

  Manal, for her part, didn’t buy it. She had fought for Muslim women’s rights, and she knew firsthand how unbearable life was in Iraq. She had been there in 1997 and ’98 while working for the United Nations, and seen the poverty, corruption, and fear. But did people really imagine that women’s rights and democracy would simply flourish in the wake of Saddam’s removal? No one had a crystal ball, but Manal knew that distrust of the United States was strong across the Arab world, even after 9/11. Iraq sat between Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Jordan, and these countries would not simply throw open their doors for the pro-Israel Bush administration’s military bases. The destruction caused by the bombings could leave hundreds of thousands dead. Worse still, she could tell from the speeches by top White House officials that they understood little about Middle Easterners. The American troops would not be greeted as liberators, Manal thought. This was going to be a mess.

  AS SOON AS the invasion began, however, it seemed as though Manal and the other activists had been wrong. CNN beamed images of Iraqis celebrating and greeting the troops with flowers. Excitement overflowed as many realized that Saddam was on the run, and the Americans were establishing a clean slate: a new government, a new economic model, and a new constitution. Suddenly the invasion looked, indeed, more like a liberation. Women for a Free Iraq brimmed with confidence that they stood on the threshold of the greatest opportunity for women ever. With the Americans’ help, Iraqi women’s rights could be enshrined into the new constitution, and a quota of women in government could be mandatory by law. Parallels were drawn with revolutionary America: had American women had a role in the formation of the first government, in the writing of the U.S. Constitution, perhaps it wouldn’t have taken them 150 years to earn the right just to vote—and 200 years to start getting elected in earnest to Congress. (Even in 2003, fewer than 15 percent of members of Congress were women.) Iraq could do better.

  Manal cared deeply about the fate of Iraqi and Muslim women, and, watching the unexpected success of the invasion, she suddenly realized that, in a time of promise, she had been cynically sitting on the sidelines. At the moment, Manal was working as an analyst for the World Bank in Washington, D.C., focusing on the Middle East, but that wasn’t her calling. High-energy, daring, and unafraid of being pushy, Manal thrived on the front lines of the action. In April, Manal was contacted about applying for a job in Iraq with a small D.C.-based women’s rights organization called Women for Women International. The director was Iraqi, a woman named Zainab Salbi, who had fled Saddam’s regime in her early twenties. She hated Saddam, but, like Manal and others, she had been against war because she knew the dangers an invasion could create for women. Now that it had happened, she was eager to have a staff on the ground to help those women who needed them most. Manal knew the Afghanistan director for Women for Women from high school and had volunteered for Women for Women in Kabul for several weeks. She had been impressed by the organization’s ear-to-the-ground style of aid work. The group’s method was to train women to be self-sufficient, mostly by starting their own businesses: beauty parlors in Afghanistan, fruit-pulp production in Colombia, and peanut-oil marketing in Nigeria. But despite Women for Women’s good reputation, many of Manal’s aid-worker friends tried to shame her into not accepting the job. They were feeling embarrassed by the reports of happy, grateful Iraqis who were greeting the soldiers with open arms. “You’ll just be helping Bush’s war,” they said, arguing for her political loyalty. Hell no, she thought. This is about women’s lives, not political football, and someone has to help them. So she quit her job with the World Bank, accepting the 50 percent cut in salary, and headed to Jordan to meet Zainab.

  DURING THE FOURTEEN-HOUR drive into Iraq from Amman, her iPod at hand, Manal tried not to be freaked out. What if there was a chemical weapons attack, she wondered, or the U.S. soldiers shot at her SUV? Her loving parents would never forgive her for volunteering for such a dangerous assignment. Saddam’s Iraq had been one of the safest countries in the world, as long as you kept your mouth shut about the regime. The rules for survival were unknown now. Who knew what to expect? Zainab, sitting up front, was as perky as a firecracker, chatting the entire time about all the ways Iraq had changed since she had last lived there ten years earlier. Zainab had already made a trip into Baghdad in May 2003, shortly after the invasion, rented an office in the Hay al-Jamaa neighborhood, and hired some local staff. Now, in July, she was returning with Manal to help her officially open the office. Then she would return to the United States.

  Aid groups were often criticized for descending on third-world countries with a Western “we know best” attitude, which Women for Women counteracted with a rule that each country’s office have only one foreign staff member—the rest had to be from the community. In Iraq, Manal was that foreign staff member. The other dozen were all Iraqi.

  Manal liked that Women for Women was small, since it kept her close to those she was trying to help. In the multibillion-dollar aid world of Washington, D.C., Women for Women International was tiny, with only $13 million in individual donations and grants each year. Most of these came from American women who paid twenty-seven dollars a month to “sponsor a sister,” which amounted to a personal letter-writing campaign to boost women’s self-esteem and offer encouragement. Each year they had about 23,000 women “sponsors,” mostly from California, Texas, and New York, who exchanged more than 40,000 letters with women from third-world countries.

  Part of Manal’s mission was to set up the letter-writing program in Iraq. She and her staff had spent the first few weeks traveling from Basra to Mosul, looking for women suitable for their program and identifying areas of need. The mixed effect of the war was clear across the country. Baghdad had been devastated by the looting, and much of its infrastructure was leveled. Yet in southern Iraq, the Shia heartland that spanned almost half the landmass of Iraq, Iraqis were happy because Saddam was halas, finished.

  For three decades, Saddam had brutally oppressed these southerners. During various uprisings, more than 100,000 Shia had been executed, Manal had heard, although no one knew the real figure. When Manal arrived in June, widows were hunting for the graves of their missing husbands and sons. They found only remains, buried in mass graves just miles from their homes. The sad scene had brought tears to Manal’s eyes. Bent over dusty piles of bones, skulls, and fragments of clothing, widows in black abayas would pound the ground and reach their hands to the sky, tears rolling down their cheeks. Saddam’s repression was worse here than anywhere else in Iraq, and many Shia women kissed Manal and told her to “Thank Mr. George Bush.” These images made her genuinely reconsider her antiwar position. The sense of liberation was intoxicating. When she thought of those women, she felt an obligation to put politics aside and help the Iraqi women to succeed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CELEBRATIONS ROCKED ZIA and Nunu’s neighborhood for weeks, but during that time the mood veered violently between joy and anarchy. Trumpets, horns, and gunfire could be heard until dawn, releasing decades of pain and anger. Buildings were set afire, bullets flew everywhere, and storefront windows were smashed. As Baba had predicted, as soon as the government was overthrown, mobs of young men from the neighboring Shia slums had flocked into the commercial district to take advantage of the chaos: looting stores, breaking into unoccupied homes, and combing greedily through the wreckage of Saddam’s family’s palaces. The looters flaunted their crimes openly, as though each act of destruction hammered home the dissolution of Saddam’s repressive state.

  Thousands flock
ed to the mosques, where fiery sermons heightened anti-Saddam passions. A wave of emotion swelled across Iraq, with those repressed by Saddam determined to erase any remnants of his rule. After the statues had been disfigured and the murals chipped down, a bloody thirst for revenge took over. Saddam had escaped, as far as anyone knew, but many from his ruling Ba’ath Party and his inner circle remained. They were stopped in their cars, pulled from their houses, hunted down, and executed. Soon, bullet-riddled bodies were an all-too-common sight, with former government officials crumpled on the streets or slumped over in their BMWs. The ubiquitous looters followed, driving away their cars and picking through the closets in their houses. Poor families and squatters moved into the empty bedrooms, the taste of justice making up for the absence of even a single working lightbulb.

  The drive to destroy anything connected to Saddam’s state mixed with the greed and opportunism of those who had lived in poverty for years. After the big-ticket items had been stolen—arms caches, jewelry from the palaces, Saddam’s Arabian horses from the Al-Jadriya equestrian club—looters returned to steal hospital machinery, priceless museum artifacts, school desks, copper from electrical grids, and piping at power plants. For weeks and weeks, no one stopped the looting. The Iraqi police and army were terrified of being seen as defending Saddam’s government. They hid in their houses. The U.S. soldiers stood by and watched.

  As days and then weeks went by, Zia’s happiness turned to concern. “Why aren’t the American soldiers doing anything?” she asked Baba, but he had no answer. Women unaccompanied on the streets were being kidnapped and raped, Mamina had heard. She, Zia, and Nunu felt as if they had no choice but to stay inside the house, though the cramped two-bedroom apartment afforded little privacy. Confined there, they began to worry that the much-longed-for liberation had morphed irretrievably into sheer anarchy.