Sisters in War

by Christina Asquith

  “God, that sucks,” someone said. Silence followed. Zia could see that her colleagues didn’t want to hear the details. Her danger was just one more failure for which they didn’t want to take responsibility.

  Only two people took real action in standing up for her: Keith and Amar. Amar drove her home each day, both of them in the front seats with their guns at hand. As he dropped her off, he said, “If you have problems, call me and I will be here in five minutes. If there is no place safe for you to go, Zia, I will get out of my bed and sleep on my doorstep and you can sleep in my bed.”

  “Amar, you are the only person to really act. You are a real man,” she said, gratefully but wearily.

  Zia knew a secure hiding place existed—Keith’s trailer. She could move in with him and lie to Baba, but she refused, and Mamina wouldn’t even consider the idea. Meanwhile, Keith worked his female contacts inside the Green Zone. He talked to every friend he had, and eventually found a woman with space in her trailer. He convinced her to take in Zia, like a refugee in her own country.

  SO ZIA MOVED to the Green Zone, into a flimsy trailer no bigger than one of the palace bathrooms. She shared it with Camille Elhassani, an IMN employee who was raised in the States but had an Iraqi father. She was a pretty thirty-year-old who had worked at ABC Television news in New York before coming to Iraq. They had a skinny bed each, just a few feet from each other. Zia would wake up earlier, but wait for Camille to use the bathroom first, since she was a guest. Camille let Zia stay out of kindness, and Zia wanted to be a thoughtful roommate. They made up small rules (no combat boots in the trailer) and each hung her CPA badge on the door when she came in. As Zia was in the Green Zone unofficially, she had no right to come and go. If she left the grounds, she couldn’t be guaranteed she’d be allowed back in. When she bade farewell to her family and drove over the Tigris, she was going less than a mile away but couldn’t be sure when she would see them again. Mamina and Nunu had cried in saying goodbye, but Mamina expressed relief that her daughter would be safe and close to Keith. Baba reacted coldly, in the same unemotional way as when she, Mamina, and Nunu had left for Hit. During the spring uprisings he had cursed at the television, frustrated by both the Iraqis and the Americans. Since then, his anger had given way to hopelessness and resignation. He seemed tired and older. Perhaps he was cursing himself for relenting to allow his daughter to work with the Americans. But if he felt this way, he didn’t say so openly to Zia.

  Life in the Green Zone was safer but still not safe. Before moving into her hiding place in the trailer, she had floated a story around IMN that she was leaving Iraq, but now any one of the hundreds of Iraqi staff—groundskeepers, cleaning ladies, translators, technicians, or engineers—might recognize her. If they caught her, word would spread that not only was she still in Baghdad, but she was “really important” because she was being given housing by the Americans. Potential kidnappers could go after Nunu and use her for ransom. Whenever Zia saw an Iraqi who knew her from the office, she’d have to race back to Camille’s trailer and hide. It was a bizarre life, and yet one that had become increasingly normalized in the war zone of Iraq.

  She had only one friend whom she trusted. But this girl was preoccupied with her own problems. She had recently become engaged to a young man who was head of the guards at IMN. Zia had considered this man to be too uneducated for her friend but stayed quiet because she knew her friend was in her late twenties and under tremendous pressure from her family to marry. Shortly after Zia moved into the Green Zone, the girl approached her. Her cheeks were tearstained.

  “My friend, I need a favor.”

  She wanted to borrow seven thousand dollars. She said that her fiancé was insisting that they put on a splashy wedding for the public, and that he give her a big dowry of gold and set up a furnished household—except he had no money with which to do this. He wanted his fiancée to secretly give him the money. In exchange, he promised, he would let her continue to work after they were married.

  “He has paid for nothing. I paid for this and that and now he wants seven thousand dollars to furnish the house. He told me, ‘If you don’t get the money, I will break up with you and make a big scandal so no other man proposes.’ ”

  Zia felt frustrated for her friend and lent her fifteen hundred dollars. The episode bothered her tremendously. “Successful Iraqi women cannot marry their equals,” she said to Mamina on the phone one evening. “Most Iraqi men now are alike—thinking they are bosses of their wives.” Zia would have struggled with a husband like this before the war. She had changed and grown so much in her job with the Americans, she couldn’t bear to do so now. This situation only reinforced Zia’s appreciation of Keith, and yet made her feel uncomfortably desperate at the thought of losing him.

  AFTER ZIA’S FRIEND married, she paid back Zia, and they tried to keep up a friendship. But Zia felt that her friend was becoming more quiet and subservient, adapting as she must to keep the peace in her marriage. The changes were obvious to both, and the friendship grew strained. Her friend didn’t want to think about the path she had chosen, nor Zia of the consequences of not following the same path. For the first time since the war, it crossed Zia’s mind that women were facing fewer choices now, not more. These thoughts only added to her anxiety over her own future, and she preferred to distract herself rather than to dwell on it.

  Life inside the Green Zone itself wasn’t as easy as it had once been, either. After the first checkpoint, people were able to roam freely. But fears abounded lately that Iraqis were smuggling in bomb-making materials piece by piece to construct bombs inside the Green Zone. Security checkpoints had gone up across the compound. One rumor suggested that $35,000 was being offered to any Iraqi who kidnapped an American woman, and female soldiers were being strongly advised not to jog, ride their bikes, or walk back to their trailers alone.

  The ubiquitous checkpoints were a huge hassle for Zia, as her badge still had the red rim around it marking her as a “local.” Since she wasn’t technically supposed to be there, she could be arrested and evicted from the Green Zone by an unsympathetic checkpoint soldier. The simplest tasks became difficult, even just eating. Her trailer with Camille had no kitchen, so she couldn’t cook for herself. “Locals” couldn’t get into the palace cafeteria, where all the Americans ate. So she had to eat at the Green Zone Café or the Chinese restaurant. Yet, if she had to go through a checkpoint to get there, she needed to be escorted by someone with authorization, which meant phoning around looking for an American to interrupt his or her busy workday and take a “local” to lunch. If not for Keith, she would have starved. She tried to keep up her job, working on her laptop and occasionally attending morning meetings in the Red Room, the ambassador’s room, which had a red carpet, couches, and a wall of mirrors. But the real work was being done back at Salhiya, and she couldn’t be there. She found herself hanging around the tiny trailer, feeling increasingly unwanted.

  She was not the only Iraqi seeking refuge inside the Green Zone. It was June 2004, and the CPA had officially dissolved. The ministries were returned to Iraqi control. As the U.S. teams had packed their bags, their Iraqi staff scrambled to secure their futures. Under a death threat, and tainted by their ties to the Americans, they were applying for scholarships, visas, or jobs with any Americans who would stay on in Iraq or in the future U.S. embassy. Many, like Zia, feared for their lives and tried to move into protective custody, but the only ones with any luck were those with good connections—usually romantic entanglements. Rumors flew around Baghdad that Iraqi women were hiding in American men’s trailers inside the Green Zone. One newspaper, Al-Mashriq, reported that six Iraqi women were being kept inside the Green Zone because they were pregnant by American soldiers.

  Zia found herself clinging to the small asides Keith made in regards to their future. His contract ended in six months. They spoke about leaving Iraq, getting married, and moving to the Gulf, maybe Dubai, where jobs were plentiful for Americans. Zia dreamed of this day
and prayed for patience. Once she got settled somewhere safe, she imagined, her family would join them.

  …

  BUT EVEN THINGS with Keith weren’t problem-free. In the Salhiya office of IMN, Zia and Keith had been around only a few of Keith’s American friends, and they had hidden their new relationship as best they could. But once Zia moved into the Green Zone, they came clean and socialized nightly together with dozens of his friends, including his brother Loren.

  One day, Loren pulled Zia aside, and the awkwardness she always felt around him became clear. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Z,” he said. “But Keith’s still married.”

  Zia felt her stomach drop.

  “He’s separated from Cathy, but they aren’t divorced.”

  Zia felt a pang of jealousy run through her at the woman’s name, and how Loren said it with such familiarity. She rushed to Keith to confront him. “You said you were divorced!”

  He assuaged her. “We’ve been separated for years. We’re in the process of getting a divorce. It takes a long time because of California law. I thought it would go through by now, but it hasn’t.”

  After months of the tension of living under death threats and fearing for her family, Zia finally cracked. In an environment where Zia felt she could trust no one, her relationship with Keith—they were soul mates—had been the only source of security. She broke down. He insisted she could trust him, but her suspicions ate at her. One afternoon, Zia went on to Keith’s computer and checked his email. As she scrolled through months and months of communication, she paled as the same name appeared again and again: Cathy, often several times a day. The emails were perfunctory, involving bills for their daughter or tax issues. There were no romantic exchanges or emotional missives, but neither was there any mention of Zia. She felt blindsided. Cathy clearly played a big role in his life, and yet, eight months into a relationship in which he and Zia spent hours together each day, this woman’s name had never once come up.

  A HUMAN BEING can do without many things in life, and under Saddam, Zia learned to live without a comfortable home, meat and vegetables, soaps or schoolbooks. Mamina was a master at making do. The abundance of love with which Mamina showered her girls only increased as the shortages had grown worse. What she could never give them, though, was choices or control over their destiny. This was what the Americans offered that Zia had been so drawn to. Yet she now found herself feeling more desperate than she ever had under Saddam.

  Her pride made her want more than anything to storm away from Keith, but she literally couldn’t move more than a few hundred meters without encountering a military checkpoint that she needed Keith and his security clearance to accompany her through.

  She went three more weeks living in her trailer. By July, she felt she couldn’t take it anymore. She felt outside herself and couldn’t think straight. She couldn’t sleep for nights on end and then would sleep fourteen hours straight. Meanwhile, there was chatter among the security guards that “Zia had to go.” More Americans were arriving to help with the reconstruction, even though most work was being done inside the Green Zone. “We need the space and she’s got to move out of here.”

  Zia tried to obtain a visa to Kuwait so she could relocate her job to the company’s Kuwait office. But the Kuwaiti government refused her a visa because she didn’t have a Department of Defense badge. She turned to her supervisor for help, but their relationship had chilled since Zia had challenged her over the rumors surrounding Nicholas Berg’s murder. Many of the American friends she had made—people who had always been so kind and supportive of her—seemed to be at a loss as to how to help her. The answer always came back the same: “It’s not our decision” or “No way.”

  At one point, she had lunch with an Iraqi friend who had a similar story of abandonment. “They are just trying to get us off their shoulders now,” she said.

  Zia nodded bitterly. “They don’t care how many Iraqis die. Would they have to pay for me? No, I don’t have insurance. Would they have to pay for my family? No. If I were to die, they’d miss me as a friend, but formally? No one at IMN would care.”

  The only person who stood by her, and didn’t make excuses, was Keith. He knew Zia felt betrayed and angry, and he vacillated between apologizing and defending himself. They argued, and the relationship became tense, aggravated by the fear they both felt for her life. He pushed their employer, the Harris Corporation, which in 2004 was given the contract to run IMN, to write a letter to the U.S. government appealing for its help in relocating their Iraqi staff. He lobbied hard to keep her in the trailer. But it wasn’t working. Finally, Zia decided she’d had enough, and she knew she’d soon be forced out anyway. She called Mamina.

  “I can’t stand this anymore, Mama,” she said. “I have to get out of here.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  FOR THE FIRST month after Fern’s death, Manal wore only black—black abaya, black pants, black shirt. She wore no makeup. Although she had changed back into regular clothes, she still felt a black cloud around her, and she had lost her energy. In the months after Fern was killed, one bad event had followed another—the marines invaded Falluja, Muqtada’s militia had risen up in the south and in Baghdad’s Sadr City, and then the photos from Abu Ghraib were released. As the chaos worsened, her staff had begun arguing. Some were appalled by the photos from Abu Ghraib, but others, including Ahmed, were convinced the photos were a hoax, orchestrated by Saudi Arabia to further embarrass the Americans and undermine support for them in the Arab world. Allegiances often broke down into Sunni versus Shia, and Manal struggled to keep everyone united.

  Yet she, too, was losing heart. It’s over, she thought. The window’s closed. We’ve lost. She wanted to go home.

  Three months after the pomp and circumstance of opening day, darkness fell over the Mansour Women’s Center. During the spring uprisings, a bomb had been placed outside the building. It never detonated, but shortly thereafter, gunmen drove past at night and opened fire, pockmarking the courtyard walls with bullets. In southern Iraq, someone bombed the Karbala Women’s Center, which Fern had been coming from when she was gunned down. A guard was killed. After that, Manal withdrew her programs from Fern’s centers. She felt guilty about abandoning the projects that Fern had died to build, but she couldn’t put her employees in any more danger. Plus, stories of corruption were rife after Fern’s death. Manal heard reports that the Iraqi staff was charging women for the classes. The Iraqis who took over after Fern died were hungry only for U.S. contracts and used the women’s centers as cash cows. Manal’s instinct was to charge down to the center and confront the bullies. But she thought of her family, and her promises to them to be careful; and of her staff. By now, she had met all of their families, shared meals, spent hours exchanging stories. Ahmed, who once treated her with condescension, had become her closest confidant. They discussed most decisions beforehand, and Manal openly expressed that she’d never forgive herself if something happened to her staff.

  Even so, Manal’s staff begged her not to close down the center. “Manal, this is the only job we have. We have worked so hard.” So she kept the Mansour Women’s Center open throughout the spring and summer to keep them on the payroll, even though little happened inside. To protect the center, she and Heather contracted to have a ten-foot-high security wall built around the perimeter, to absorb the shock if someone placed a bomb outside the building, as was increasingly common. Sympathetic to complaints that a concrete wall would destroy the gentle atmosphere of the center, Manal and Heather made plans to plant flowers all around it, but they never had the chance. Before it was even finished, the wall collapsed due to shoddy construction. Manal had gone through the Americans to hire the contractor, but he refused to fix it. With no rule of law, Manal had little recourse. When she shouted at him, he threatened her and the center with violence. Manal sighed—paying a man to protect them had created only another threat. The wall stayed crumbled.

  More than anyone else, Ahmed grew c
oncerned about Manal’s safety. Bigger aid organizations, with more security than Women for Women could afford, had already packed up their bags. “Sooner or later you will be noticed and they will come for you,” he said worriedly. But Manal was adamant about not abandoning her staff and the women she worked with. Still, as the attacks on Westerners increased, Women for Women required Manal not to leave the house where she lived and worked at night, and on some days she was told not to leave at all.

  Ahmed openly cursed their decision to work with the Americans on the center. “All of our problems at Women for Women began with this center. It brought us bad luck.”

  Manal had not wanted to admit to herself her growing misgivings about teaming up with Heather. “Everything started going wrong in March,” she replied wearily. “Not just for women.”

  ANY MOVEMENT ON behalf of Iraqi women’s rights had to come from Iraqis now. The CPA was gone, and most aid workers had fled the country, unable to afford security and terrified they’d be kidnapped or killed. In spring 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell had announced a $10 million contract to promote women’s rights in Iraq, the first such financial contract aimed specifically at Iraqi women, but much of it went to the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), the Republican group started by Lynne Cheney, and to the America Islamic Congress, which had backed the invasion. The IWF didn’t even have an office in the country, Manal thought bitterly; it was just a political payout.

  The Iraqi government wasn’t doing anything for women, since it was preoccupied with trying to stop the constant terrorist attacks, both across the country and on its own members. Of the three Iraqi women in the government, in particular, the attacks were relentless. The conservative member Salama al-Khafaji, who had replaced Aqila al-Hashimi, had risen to national stature on the back of her defense of the veil and her accusations against Western women. Yet, in May 2004, she was attacked in exactly the same manner as Fern had been killed. Gunmen pulled up alongside her convoy of cars and opened fire. She survived, but her bodyguard and her teenage son were killed. Still, al-Khafaji refused to quit, saying, “I am not the only woman in Iraq who has lost her son. We must go on.”