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Sisters in War

Page 23

by Christina Asquith


  At home, Baba thundered through the house. “The British were better. They would have destroyed Falluja,” he said, echoing the sentiment of his circle of friends. Inside IMN, emotions ran high. The broadcasts were undeniably pro-American, but opinion was divided in the newsroom, as many Iraqi staff were publicly condemning the military aggression in Falluja, and some Americans agreed with them. On the other side were Zia and a handful of Iraqis saying the Fallujans deserved it for giving refuge to Ba’athists and foreign fighters who were attacking Americans and Shias. Meetings were tense, and friendships between Iraqis and Americans suddenly felt freighted with questions of loyalties and nationality.

  Zia’s male colleagues said the Americans were running and hiding like rats. “Look how the Americans are weak,” they said.

  “But just the other day you were accusing the Americans of brutality,” she replied, annoyed.

  They shook their heads. “The Americans ran from Falluja because they were scared,” they insisted. “This is good. Next, we will force the Americans out of Iraq.”

  “And then what? Don’t be an idiot! The Americans are the only ones keeping the peace. What will happen after they leave?”

  Even Keith and Zia began to argue. Talk of their wedding was always at the back of Zia’s mind but had not progressed, given Mamina’s belief that Baba would say no if Keith formally asked. As the country plunged into a state of emergency, Baba’s blessing seemed less likely and Zia was getting desperate. “The Americans should have done to Falluja what they did to Hiroshima,” Zia said angrily over lunch.

  Keith looked surprised. He tried to soothe her. “Hey. Relax,” he said.

  “Relax?” she shouted. She turned her irritation on him. “Everything with you is ‘relax.’ ”

  What, did he think democracy was going to solve this situation? “Keith, this is very bad.” Her tears began to overwhelm her. “The Americans can’t lose.”

  Zia didn’t know how to begin explaining a situation in which she herself had only snatches of understanding. She didn’t know half the insurgent groups running loose in Iraq now. Rumors were that Al Qaeda groups were in western cities such as Falluja, Iranian militias were in the south, and the radical Islamic Dawa Party was trying to take over the U.S.-installed government. In the north, Kurdish guerrillas were fighting to break away into an autonomous Kurdistan. Still, there were dozens more groups, in the neighborhoods and on college campuses, that no one had heard of before. In the absence of a brutal dictator like Saddam, Iraq regressed into all the tribal and religious identities that had reigned for hundreds of years until the British forced the country together in the 1920s. The country was fracturing, and the national government cobbled together by the Americans seemed weaker and weaker. The prospect of U.S. defeat in Iraq—which had seemed inconceivable only a few months ago—suddenly seemed a strong possibility. Iraqis who had stuck their necks out for the Americans were going to be at the top of the assassination lists when the Americans evacuated. If that happened, Zia and her family would be hunted down and killed, just as the Ba’athists had been hunted down and killed a year earlier. When the Americans had arrived last spring, she had thought Iraq’s nightmare was over. But was the real nightmare only beginning?

  Keith listened, and supported her, but she couldn’t help but feel circumstances pulling them apart. He was an ajnabi. At any point, he and his friends could pack their bags and return to a peaceful country. But she was an Iraqi. This was her country, and she had nowhere else to go.

  …

  JUST AS THE marines were pulling out of Falluja, another, more portentous, front opened up.

  In southern Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr had used his widely circulated newspaper to call for all Shias to attack Americans. In response, the U.S. forces chained shut the newspaper offices and issued an arrest warrant. This provoked a huge outcry by the mullah’s supporters, and uprisings spread throughout the Shia communities in Baghdad. In Sadr City, where he had most of his support, people rioted in the streets, and the U.S. patrols—sent to restore order—opened fire on scores of young men. Dead bodies left on the sidewalks evoked further anger toward the Americans. The soldiers had expected to face resistance from Sunni groups long loyal to Saddam, but now they were battling against Shia groups as well. Tensions ran high in the city.

  At Nunu’s university, Muqtada al-Sadr’s black-clad militia tried to shut down the campus. On April 5, a demonstration kicked off near the college of architecture, and the protesters were setting fire to an Israeli flag. “No, no coalition forces,” they chanted. “Sunni and Shia unite against the enemy.”

  Almost a year earlier many students had enthusiastically welcomed the U.S. troops, but now Nunu didn’t know a single supporter who dared to speak up. The students were tired, suspicious, and felt disappointed by the CPA, or, like Nunu, were too fearful of retaliation to defend them. But that didn’t mean they supported the militias.

  Nunu decided the campus was unsafe and returned home. Later, she heard reports from friends. Although several thousand students milled around campus, only about three hundred had joined the demonstration. The rest of the students wanted nothing to do with the “radicals,” and were just trying to get to class. As the protest drew to a close, men dressed in the uniform of Muqtada al-Sadr’s followers—solid black with beards and headbands—brusquely herded the crowd into a line to march through campus. “We are a higher authority than the Iraqi police and the U.S. military,” they said. “We don’t recognize the Iraqi government or the CPA.” A female demonstrator glared at the Iraqi women sitting silently on the benches in T-shirts and jeans and said loudly: “You girls who dress in a Western way think you are expressing freedom, but this is wrong. I’m not allowed to show my hair or body, and on Judgment Day, God will say ‘you were good.’ ”

  The protest had called for “Iraqi unity,” but the rest of the campus looked intimidated as the militants passed. After that demonstration, many female students, like Nunu, began to fear attending classes at all without a veil. Students faced a bleak choice between U.S. occupation and religious fundamentalism. The majority of those in the middle had become too afraid to speak out.

  THE VIOLENT UNREST in Falluja and Sadr City in March and April 2004 became known as the “Spring Uprising.” The military said that 147 soldiers were killed in April alone, three times as many as in any of the prior months. An estimated 1,200 Iraqis were killed in the same period, twice as many as in each of the past months. Some reports gave a much higher Iraqi casualty rate.

  The occupation would suffer yet another setback when, in late April, photos of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib surfaced. On her office computer, Zia shuffled through the images in dismay and disgust. They showed not only torture and abuse—which Iraqis expected in Abu Ghraib—but also sexual perversion. Images of female soldiers piling naked Iraqis on top of one another in pyramids, pointing at their penises and mimicking sexual acts, reinforced an already existing stereotype of depraved, sex-obsessed, godless America, a country that produced aggressive, whorish women. Zia was convinced that most Americans were good people, and only a few soldiers committed such atrocities, but in light of such images, her words fell on deaf ears.

  One afternoon, her boss, Amar, walked into the office she shared with him.

  “You remember the kid who was in here a few weeks ago, with the red baseball cap?”

  “Yes,” Zia said, thinking of Nick Berg.

  “He’s been captured by Al Qaeda. They killed him.”

  Zia’s mouth dropped open. The last she had heard, Nick had been trying to pick up a contract erecting satellite towers across Iraq that could be used for IMN’s broadcasts. She knew he walked from place to place with no guard, and traveled around the country. She looked at the black swivel chair where, just a few weeks or so earlier, Nick had been sitting, laughing with her and making jokes. He had worn dirty jeans, tennis shoes, and a T-shirt. He was biting his nails, which were filthy, and talking about how exciting it would be to work
for IMN, which had been interested in hiring him because of his engineering skills. But the deal didn’t go through because he didn’t like the low pay or the Department of Defense’s tight security regulations, which would have bound him to the office. She wasn’t sure what had happened.

  But now Nick was dead.

  The next day, she heard the gory details. He had been beheaded, and the insurgents had recorded the act and sent a DVD to IMN. It was also being sold on the street in Baghdad for a dollar. All the news channels had the footage. They aired the edited version, which was chilling. Zia saw her friend Nick, awkwardly sitting on the floor in an orange jumpsuit with his hands and ankles bound. She recognized him, but he was cleaned up a little. He had lost weight and looked gaunt. His beard was a little bit longer. Five men stood behind him, swathed in black, their faces covered.

  Amar had the DVD of the entire beheading, but Zia chose not to watch it. During the day, other employees came into her office to watch it. She turned away, and could hear them shouting, “Ahhh!!! Ohhh, man!” as though watching a sports event. She left the room, preferring to distance herself from something so brutal.

  But after a few days, her curiosity got the better of her. “Okay, I want to see it now,” she said to Amar.

  Amar turned on the television. “I could tell this man would get in trouble because of the way he deals with the world,” Amar said to himself. “He was the kind of kid who thought he could do anything. Nothing could stop him.” As the video began to play, he added, “But I didn’t expect it to be this kind of trouble.”

  As soon as the slaughter began, Zia regretted her decision to watch, but she couldn’t look away. Nick had been sitting quietly on the floor of a white room for the first few minutes of the video, as men with faces wrapped in scarves stood behind him. But as two men took him by the arms, and a third brandished the knife, Zia felt like something inside Nick snapped. He began to scream. Zia almost couldn’t believe a human being could make such a sound. His scream was the earsplitting, terrified wail of someone who knows he’s about to be slaughtered. With bound hands, he wrestled and struggled for his life. Zia watched the man slice into his neck. Beheading a human being is not easy, and the murderers needed several minutes to accomplish their grim task, as Nick’s body twitched and resisted throughout. When they had finally finished, blood spilled across every inch of the shot. The murderer held up Nick’s head by the hair, holding his knife in the other hand, and shouted, “Allahu akbar,” God is great. “This is what happens to the infidels and the Americans,” he said. Zia felt she could still hear Nick wailing.

  “Zia, are you okay?” Amar was shaking her. “Zia? Sit down.”

  She was crying and trembling.

  “Why did you let me watch this?” she said.

  She looked at the swivel chair where Nick had sat. Zia’s head pounded as she sobbed. “I should have told him to go back to America. I should have warned him to be more careful.”

  “You should go home,” Amar said. “Take the rest of the day off.”

  She went home, but in the silence of her bedroom, she still heard the wailing in her ears. She couldn’t escape the grotesque image of her friend’s severed head, and the calculated, measured movements of his murderers. She thought about Nick’s parents, and she prayed for them. What was his crime? she wondered. He had traveled across the world to help, and they killed him without mercy. She lay in bed staring at the ceiling, trying to keep images from the video from flashing into her mind. Several times, she raced to the bathroom and vomited. Mamina tried to comfort her, but her headache would not go away. “Mama, the killers had no remorse. They had no more reaction to what they’d done than had they lifted and moved a chair across the room.”

  “Habibti, don’t think of them. They are not Iraqis, they are foreign fighters. They are animals and not humans,” she said. Neither woman wanted to acknowledge out loud an even deeper fear: somewhere, the killers were still out there, and they were calling on all Iraqi men to do the same thing to her if they could. They would kill Zia for working for the Americans, and they would kill Mamina for allowing her to.

  “Mamina, if something happens to me, don’t ever watch. Promise me,” Zia said.

  “Shhh,” Mamina said, stroking her forehead. “Don’t say such things.”

  When Baba came home, Mamina explained what had happened. He wiped his face with his palm and sat down. “These foreigners are sick in the mind. They are worse than Saddam. The Americans let them in. God help us if they don’t drive them out.”

  ZIA RETURNED TO the office, and work continued, but she felt deflated. Now, when she sat alone, or in between conversations, her eyes took on a sad, worried look. When she spoke about the terrorists, angry sparks shot from her eyes. She was scared.

  In the office, petty disagreements flared. Bloggers had been posting accusations that the Americans were involved in Berg’s death; that they had created the video to distract people from the Abu Ghraib scandal. Others said he was killed for erecting satellite towers to spy on Iraq for Israel.

  Zia ignored this talk, until she overheard one of her American supervisors agreeing.

  “The Americans killed him just to make the terrorists look bad,” she said. “It’s propaganda.”

  Zia stared at her. “The Americans wouldn’t kill their own,” she said. “Why would they do that?”

  “Look, Zia, I’m older and wiser and I know more about life than you,” her supervisor said. “You saw the white plastic chairs? Those are the same chairs that are all over the palace. You see? Where did they get the orange jumpsuit from? That’s from Abu Ghraib.”

  Zia walked away. Later, she thought about how, in life, the smallest of incidents can suddenly reveal the huge gulf between you and someone you thought you were close friends with. After a year of friendship with this woman, she now could never look at her the same. Every day Zia willed herself not to feel bitter about the easy life the Americans enjoyed in the Green Zone, and the often callous ways they referred to Iraqis, but she could not excuse her supervisor. The woman enjoyed the luxury of sitting in the palace thinking up crazy conspiracy theories and criticisms; she didn’t have to live with the consequences. This woman was herself an immigrant to the United States from Colombia. The USA had given her everything. She had come to Iraq by choice, and had a fancy job with a rich American company, and was paid five times more than any Iraqi. At any time she could return home to the States, where she had rights and opportunity and freedom as a woman. But she never talked about any of that. She just ripped down her country.

  “Stay away from her,” Mamina advised. “If she’s not grateful she’s American, she probably isn’t grateful for anything.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  GRAVEL CRUNCHED UNDER the wheels of Heather’s ten-speed bicycle as she leaned into the handlebars and pedaled harder. After more than a year living inside the Green Zone, she knew the streets as she knew her own neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Compared to the bus, her bike saved her about four minutes in travel time from the convention center to the palace.

  Those four minutes really seemed to matter.

  Since Fern had been killed, she had almost doubled her workload, but no matter how she occupied herself, she had to face facts: they had failed miserably. Sure, she and Manal were still trying to open two more women’s centers. She had various democracy projects in the works. The elections and the vote on the constitution were still ahead. She could tell herself that they could still make a difference. But since the spring uprisings, the Americans had lost the widespread support of not only the Sunnis, but the Shias too. She felt a change in mood on the streets, and realized the Iraqis now saw them either as brutal aggressors or weak and irrelevant. The militias had gotten a foothold and were calling the shots. The window had closed.

  Heather pedaled faster.

  She was not a quitter, just as her mom had not been a quitter. When her mom had been told no by her high school guidance counselor, by her adviser
s at Cal Tech, by male students at Princeton, she had battled on and persevered. Heather would too.

  For the first time in a year, she’d taken a vacation last month. She had spent Thanksgiving and Christmas 2003 in Baghdad, and after Fern died in March 2004 she felt she needed a rest more than ever. Her family had flown over to Spain to meet her halfway, and everyone had excitedly planned for the reunion.

  But rather than relax, Heather was initially anxious, short-tempered, and distant. She didn’t want to talk about Iraq, and stared off into space during dinner. Rather than go to the beach, she spent the day in a frenzied hunt to find computer stores to buy a new laptop that she couldn’t buy in Baghdad. After thirty minutes in one computer store, customizing an order, the salesman apologized and told her they didn’t have it in stock. She shouted at him and stormed out, and, much to the shock of her father, erupted into frustrated tears. She felt lost outside of Baghdad; she couldn’t talk to her family about Fern, but she did share with them her misgivings and her hopes for the future. After several days of sleep, she felt herself relax and begin to reflect. But shortly thereafter, she got on a plane and headed straight back to Baghdad.

  As the CPA began withdrawing in May and June of 2004, Heather made a decision to extend her time in Iraq again. Even as she felt all efforts were futile, she couldn’t wrench herself away. She was in the bull’s-eye of the biggest foreign-policy initiative of her generation, and the high stakes, the hope, the tragedy, and the fast pace were all part of the addiction. The work was exhausting, but it was also a natural outlet for her intensity and her desire to be involved in something larger than herself. The longer she stayed, the less she seemed willing to leave. Even if the ship was sinking she wouldn’t throw up her hands and skip on to the next posting, as so many others had.

 

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