She had applied for the position of Iraq “Chief of Party” for the United States Institute of Peace, a D.C.-based think tank funded by Congress that produced research and programs to promote peace. She would take over the job from Sloan Mann, who was moving on to Afghanistan for USAID. Most important, her new job would be civilian, not military. She had been sickened by the photos that had surfaced in April of Iraqis being tortured by her fellow soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison, and she couldn’t bear wearing the uniform any longer. But she also couldn’t bear the thought of the USA losing the war. She didn’t want to believe that the country she loved wasn’t capable of pulling this off. She wanted to prove that intervening to topple Saddam had been the right thing to do. The alternative seemed unfathomable. Losing Iraq would be disastrous for the USA and its standing in the world. Worse still, what would happen to the Iraqis? She had befriended several over the last year, and they had begun begging and pleading with her not to leave. “Miss Coyne, the militias will take over,” Thanaa said. “There will be civil war.” She could see they were terrified. She couldn’t fathom the thought of betraying them, and all the women’s rights activists with whom she had worked, so profoundly. Staying seemed the only way to redeem her role, however trivial, in this colossal disaster.
Not everyone felt as she did. Many in the CPA were cheered by the thought of getting out. Most did not acknowledge the mess left in their wake, and if they did, they blamed it on Iraqi incompetence. They bragged about parlaying their “wartime experience” into jobs higher up the payroll at the State or Defense departments. Inside the palace, they snapped up souvenir T-shirts that read WHO’S YOUR BAGHDADDY? Others were busy planning a blowout barbecue at Saddam’s palace, with fireworks for all of Baghdad to see, to celebrate the Fourth of July. Bremer, as a thank-you to his staff, was inviting different groups into his office for an official memorabilia photo. Although Heather didn’t blame Bremer for all that had gone wrong, she couldn’t grin alongside him, acting like some proud member of a successful team. When her office went in for a photo, she had stayed behind.
She thought about all of this as she pedaled faster, huffing and puffing as she approached the palace. Suddenly, a marine guard stepped into her path, almost causing her to lose control.
“Ma’am, no biking on the street. Only on the sidewalk.”
Her heart was pounding. She was in a huge rush to get to the next meeting, and all she had to do raced through her head. There was no sidewalk. The road petered out into rubble and loose stone.
“The sidewalk is for pedestrians,” she replied. “The street is where bicycles go.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “You can’t proceed.”
“That’s absurd. I’m almost at the palace. Just let me through.”
“I can’t do that, ma’am.”
Heather understood that marines just follow orders, but she lost her cool. This was exactly the kind of bureaucratic, illogical overreaction by the military that had screwed up dozens of almost-successful projects. Mounting stress and fatigue began to strain her normally tightly controlled public façade. Did he care that his “orders” made no sense?
“You know what? I don’t have time for this,” she said, and tried to pedal past him.
“Stop!” Several marines suddenly appeared. She found herself staring down the barrels of several rifles. Sweat poured down from under her helmet. Realizing that arguing would get her nowhere, she gave up. “Okay, fine, I’ll turn around and be late for my meeting.”
“Oh, no, sorry, ma’am. You can’t turn around. You can’t ride your bike up the street against traffic,” he said.
“What? So I can’t go forward. I can’t stay here. I can’t turn around.” Heather threw up her hands.
An enormous stone-gray Jersey barrier ran between the two sides of the road. “You’re going to have to cross the barrier and go back on the other side,” he said.
Heather stood dumbstruck. He wasn’t kidding. The marine watched awkwardly as Heather struggled to lift her bicycle to elbow height and wrestle it over the concrete barrier. It teetered and swayed, with the pedal catching on her shirt and the handlebars in her face. It suddenly flipped over, bounced, twisted, and clattered onto the asphalt. Books and papers she had in the carrier scattered everywhere.
Hot tears sprung to her eyes. Missing the meeting seemed unfathomable to her. But even more frustrating was the illogical reason, presented to her so innocently by a young soldier who was just following orders. She had confronted this kind of stupid military bureaucracy every single day since deployment and had fought in vain against it. The meeting—everything she was doing—seemed so senseless and futile. Before she could see it coming, the floodgates opened. She was sobbing. The marine shifted uncomfortably. Finally, she lifted herself and scrambled over the barrier. Irritation was compounded by the humiliation of crying in front of all these male soldiers.
Yet as she gathered herself, she caught a final glimpse of the marine’s face. He looked apologetic, but she knew exactly what he was thinking, and it killed her: I’m just doing my job.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ZIA KNEW SHE was in trouble, but she was convinced that the Americans would protect her. She had worked side by side with them for a year. They were her close friends. They trusted her. Or did they?
The mood in Baghdad changed after Fern was killed, then the Blackwater contractors in Falluja, then Nicholas Berg. Not only had Iraqis killed them, but rumors flew around that they had been betrayed by Iraqis posing as friends. Similar double agents had penetrated the Green Zone, people whispered. No one could be trusted. Iraqis working inside the U.S. compound found their bosses staring at them suspiciously, and their colleagues whispering when they were around. They were left out of meetings and email, and treated roughly by soldiers.
This poor treatment paled in comparison, however, to how Iraqi employees were treated outside the Green Zone. One afternoon, Zia opened an email with photos attached to it. They showed dozens of Iraqi women at American parties wearing lots of jewelry, with painted nails and big hair, holding drinks and dancing with American men. Some were simple photos of women in jeans carrying checklists, or in flak jackets talking to soldiers, or sitting at a lunch table in the Chinese restaurant with an American man. Others showed them in skimpy bathing suits sitting at Saddam’s pool.
“I’ve seen these photos,” Keith said. “They’re on the palace’s shared network.”
“These are on the network?” she wondered. “What idiot did that? Didn’t they realize how this will appear if it leaked out onto the street?” she said.
Within days, though, that’s where they were, being sold as CD-ROMs or posted on Islamic websites, where they appeared with the text, in Arabic: “This is a scandal. This is very demeaning and bad. You see, this is the liberty they brought us”; “All Iraqi women working with the infidels are whores”; “Look how the American men are here to steal Iraqi women.”
These images confirmed the “brainwashing” that most Iraqi men had suspected. Once women were given a little freedom, they took a lot. Suddenly, the more extremist Islamic websites were calling for the women in these photos to be executed, made examples of for dishonoring all Muslim women. Soon after the CD, more photos appeared on the websites. These had not been taken by Americans. Zia could tell some images were shot from a cellphone, and the angle was crooked and taken from a distance by someone who clearly didn’t want to be noticed. Zia realized that Iraqi men working inside the Green Zone were surreptitiously taking photos of women and providing them to insurgent groups.
Young women began to receive death threats. Handwritten notes were stuck under the windshield wipers of their cars: “Quit the coalition or you will have regrets.” Others invoked Islam: “Those who deal with the atheists and the infidels on the soil of the Arab homeland deserve death and annihilation. We warn you to stay away from the Zionists and blasphemers, the followers of Satan.” They were from a Sunni militia with ties to the openl
y violent gang Ansar al-Sunna, formed by ex-Ba’athists after the war.
In other cases, the women received threats via text messages on their phones. This raised the disturbing question of how the insurgents knew the women’s phone numbers. In one case, a list was tacked onto the wall of the Green Zone Café naming all the Iraqi women marked for death. Zia had somehow avoided being named, but most of her friends were on the list, and its accuracy confirmed a deeper fear—that those making the threats were not only groundskeepers or uneducated radicals. They had to include the women’s young, educated male colleagues who also worked for the Americans. In other words, these messages did not come from a tiny, extremist minority. The threats were endorsed by the urbane, English-speaking Iraqi men who shared their office space.
Suddenly, everyone became a suspect. Women became paranoid. Cellphone cameras made it impossible to know who was being photographed. Women who were targeted threw away their cellphones so as not to receive the threats and stopped eating lunch in public places. Zia disguised the names in her cellphone. If she was kidnapped, someone might scroll through her contacts list and target her friends. She took different routes to work.
Many women suspected that the tea seller in the parking lot was an informant. He was a mustached middle-aged man who smoked most of the day. Zia speculated that he was a former employee of the Ba’ath Party, or maybe an Islamic fundamentalist. Or maybe he was just a poor man who needed money so desperately he would work for the insurgents. Either way, each morning, he arrived by donkey at the lot outside the Green Zone and set up his tea stand. The cart had two metal rods propping up a strip of canvas, which shielded him from the sun. At his feet was a plastic gallon of kerosene. A stand alongside him held dozens of small glass cups and saucers, tiny silver spoons, a plastic pitcher of water, and an enormous bowl of sugar cubes. He worked over two small boilers and always included two cubes of sugar in each cup.
Alongside his mobile tea shop sat several plastic chairs, open invitations for idle Iraqi men to keep him company with conversation. When Zia left the Green Zone at the end of the day, she would often see these men stare at her, dishdashas bunched between their knees, a cup of tea in one hand, prayer beads in the other, and hatred in their eyes. Other young women noticed the same thing. The tea seller was watching them, noting when they arrived and left, perhaps what they were wearing, and writing down the license numbers of their cars.
This practice of spying and recording people’s every move had been commonplace during Saddam’s time. The Ba’ath Party kept copious files on everyone. When the regime fell, an Iraqi scholar found five million documents in the Ba’ath Party headquarters, many of them filled with mundane details of life, even recording people’s trips to the toilet. After so many years of twisted spying, men like that couldn’t imagine a different kind of life.
Zia asked the Americans to make him leave, but they wouldn’t. They claimed to take her concerns seriously, but each day she saw he was still out there. She kept pushing them to do something, but she also sensed that they didn’t want to be bothered, or to hear the stories of how bad it had gotten. They didn’t want to believe that a campaign of assassination had begun against their Iraqi employees. And besides, although Zia was on the same contract as Keith and the other Americans, her security fell on her own shoulders, because she was Iraqi. They didn’t want to have to worry about her.
So she bought a gun, a small silver Beretta that fit into her purse. When the beefy American security contractors saw it, they thought it was funny. “You think you’re one of Charlie’s Angels,” they said, laughing. She laughed too. She wanted to feel that they were all still on the same team.
ONE AFTERNOON, ZIA was sitting in her offices at IMN when an Iraqi security guard entered, his green eyes filled with fear. Zia knew him only vaguely, from when she had given him money at the end of Ramadan. He had thanked her warmly. Now, though, he looked around sheepishly and spoke with a low whisper.
“Miss Zia, I must tell you something,” he said. “There is a plot to kidnap you, in three days.”
Zia’s heart skipped a beat. She felt that she was finally receiving the bad news she had expected for a long time.
“Muqtada’s army came to my house. They wanted to kill me for working here,” he said. “Instead, they asked me if Americans ever leave the compound. They asked about you—they knew your name.”
The militia gave him a choice: they would kill him, or he could work as a double agent, and report on the movements of other, more important individuals, whom they could kidnap and hold for ransom. “Everyone knows you have relations with Mister Keith, and that he will pay a high price for you,” he said.
Zia called Keith immediately, and he jumped into his white SUV and drove the five minutes from the palace into the Salhiya compound to be by her side. He insisted on getting IMN security involved.
Soon, the room was filled with people. Zia’s heart sank as she discovered that the militia had gathered an alarming level of detail about her life: her street address, her route to work, her time of departure. The guard said the gang members drove a dark blue BMW. They planned to kidnap her, take her to a safe house, and send the ransom demand to Keith.
“They wanted,” he added, hesitatingly, “to do forbidden things to you. I have a daughter your age. God would not allow me to let this happen.”
Zia’s eyes widened and filled with fear at the thought. She and Keith met with Reed Security, which had the contract to provide security to all IMN employees. They wouldn’t give her the particulars of their coverage, but that was fine, Zia was accustomed to security details operating confidentially. “We’ve got your back,” they told her.
Days passed and Zia was too nervous to eat or drive even a few seconds without glancing at her rearview mirror. But nothing happened, and she tried to remind herself that the Americans were keeping her safe. She continued to commute between her house and the IMN offices.
One evening at the end of the week, there was a knock at her door. Zia had told her family about the kidnapping threat, but reassured them that the Americans were protecting her. Still, the knock made everyone jump. Baba checked through the curtains, then opened the door. It was the owner of a small grocery store on their street. He sat heavily on the sofa.
“I want you to know there’s a man lingering around in front of your house. He is shabbily dressed and pretends he is drunk,” he says. “Every day he stands in front of your house looking at my store.”
The grocer assumed that the man was intending to rob his store. “I confronted him today. I said, ‘You’re acting drunk, but you’re not. Get out of here,’ ” he recounted. He said the man had pulled out a cellphone. A few minutes later, a car showed up and he climbed in. It was a dark blue BMW. Zia swallowed hard. “Could you please keep an eye out for this man, and alert me if you see him?” the grocer said. The family promised to keep a watchful eye, not wanting to reveal that Zia was the more likely target.
The next day, when she arrived at work, she called the men from Reed Security into her office and related the story. “I thought you were protecting me.”
They told her not to worry, that “it’s been taken care of.”
When she pressed them for specifics, they were vague, until finally one admitted, “We did what we could, but U.S. policy is not to get involved when it’s ‘Iraqi on Iraqi.’ ”
Zia felt the blood rush to her head in terror. “What are you talking about?” she said, trying to remain calm.
“We don’t guarantee security for locals. That’s not our call—that’s corporate’s decision.”
“But you told me you were protecting me,” she said.
“We handed it over to IP. They said they would deal with it,” one said. “They said they assigned a detective to cover you.”
“IP? Iraqi police?” Zia sputtered. “Are you crazy?” Now the Iraqi police knew she worked for the Americans—that was truly dangerous. Everyone knew the police had been infiltrated by Muqtad
a al-Sadr’s army. Not only would they not protect her, they might organize her kidnapping themselves.
A horrible feeling sank in as she realized the depths of the betrayal. “I thought you guys were my friends,” she said softly.
She called Keith, who once again rushed to her defense. He discussed the situation with the Reed security guards, and one man came back with the group’s recommendation for her.
“Go home. Don’t come into the Green Zone. Keep your gun with you. Stay in the house and keep your family inside and stagger their leaving, if they must leave at all.”
“How can I stay in the house? I work here. I have my job!” she said. They just shrugged. She felt her face burning with humiliation, and realized she was going to have to solve this problem on her own.
And what about the loss of money—who would take care of her family? When she asked if she would receive compensation during her time in hiding, the Americans shook their heads. Zia knew her house and her neighborhood were very dangerous for her now, but they would not help her with relocation costs either. Even though Zia and Keith were both classified as contractors for the same Florida company, which had been given $165 million to run IMN for the year, Keith not only had a salary that was five times higher than Zia’s, he was compensated for moving costs, housing, security, meals, vacation time, and travel. But Zia was Iraqi. When she tried to apply to move into one of the thousands of trailers erected inside the Green Zone, her request was denied.
Standing around the office several days later with several sympathetic colleagues, Zia fumed. “They are basically saying: So what. It’s your choice. If you don’t want to take the risk, go home. Quit.”
Sisters in War Page 24