Sisters in War

by Christina Asquith

  Baba deftly navigated through side streets, then turned back onto the busy main road. Zia didn’t know which was safer. Whatever happened, they had to avoid stopping. A side street might be blocked off by a makeshift checkpoint, but on the main road they could hit a traffic jam. Baba straddled the middle of the road, attempting to prevent the car from pulling alongside them. Zia tried to focus on the practicalities, but her imagination went wild. What does he want? Were these the kidnappers with the dark blue BMW? Or was this someone with a wholly different intention? She remembered the story of the two sisters, working as army translators, who had been gunned down on the street. Now she understood the horror of the last few minutes of those girls’ lives. This was the moment she had dreaded for months. She felt stupid for putting herself in this position. What if he kills Baba too? There was no honor in any of this—what had she been thinking? “I’m sorry, Baba,” she said, tears clouding her vision.

  But Baba was calm. “No one is going to die at the hands of this idiot,” he assured her. But her panic continued to swell. Not knowing what else to do, she called Keith.

  KEITH HAD SAT in the car for a long time, as he almost always did, watching Zia walk away from him in the evening sun, her gorgeous hair hidden under a veil. Dropping her off like that was never easy. He worried about her constantly. As he finally made a U-turn, Zia’s number appeared on his phone. His stomach sank. She would never call him in front of her father, unless there was trouble.

  When he answered, her voice was panicked. “There’s a man and he’s following us.”

  “Jesus Christ, where are you?”

  Zia named a cross street, but he had no idea where that was. Keith swerved his car around and sped toward the bridge. Where am I going? he thought. He hadn’t been in downtown Baghdad in almost a year, and the complicated maze of city streets was impossible to navigate anyway. To leave the Green Zone could be a death sentence for an American; it meant risking kidnapping and possibly a beheading, not to mention automatic termination by his company. But he wouldn’t leave Zia out there on her own.

  The phone cut off. They both redialed and Keith got through. Zia was switching languages rapidly, cursing in English and saying, “Baba, turn. Turn here!” and then falling into Arabic again.

  “Can you find the police or a convoy?” Keith asked.

  “We’re trying. He’s right behind us now. He’s really close.”

  Driving as they talked, Keith neared the bridge and almost flipped his car crossing a speed bump. Suddenly he hit the brakes. Am I nuts? he thought. Racing his car toward a checkpoint of nervous soldiers was the surest way of getting himself shot in the head. These checkpoints came under regular attack from suicide bombers, who often tied their hands to the wheel to avoid a change of heart. Only a few months earlier, a bomber had rammed into the main checkpoint of the Green Zone a mile away, nicknamed Assassins’ Gate, killing about thirty Iraqis and wounding dozens more.

  Keith stopped momentarily, trying to figure out what to do. Should he really exit the Green Zone? Zia could be a stone’s throw away, or she could be deep into one of the neighborhoods. Keith didn’t even know what kind of car her father drove. He managed to get hold of her one more time, to tell her to come back to the bridge, that he’d warn the soldiers what was happening, but by now she was so hysterical he couldn’t understand where she was or what she was saying. She was crying and gasping for air and speaking rapidly in Arabic to her father. The last thing she said before the phone cut out again was, “Oh God, I don’t want to die.”

  ZIA AND BABA were trying frantically to return to the Green Zone gate, but turning around in Baghdad’s ancient street system was not easy.

  An intense silence returned as they tried to figure out the safest route back to the Green Zone. Suddenly Zia’s hysteria left her, and she felt incredibly focused on surviving, navigating the streets with a power of concentration she didn’t know she possessed. Baghdad seemed so quiet, all of a sudden. Zia felt they were gliding nearly invisibly. She stared almost calmly out the side window, taking in the sidewalk scene as if in slow motion: women in black abayas balancing six-packs of bottled water on their shoulders; couples sitting at tables eating dinner. People were going on with their daily life. Her nightmare didn’t affect them at all. Baba passed a car and her eyes met those of a woman in the passenger seat. Three small children were in the back. The woman’s eyes locked for a moment, but then she looked away. Just as suddenly as the calm had come, it receded. Zia felt like screaming to the woman, begging her family’s help, but the car moved on.

  Finally she recognized, ahead of them, the entrance to the 14th of July Bridge, but her heart stopped as she saw a huge line of traffic. She started crying uncontrollably, wracked by terror.

  Baba screeched to the side. “Get out and run,” he shouted.

  Zia jumped out of the car like a wild woman. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the Toyota swerve alongside her. The man leaped out. He was fat and sweating. “Hey, you bitch,” he said, pulling a curved knife, a harba, out of his jacket as he chased her. He was waving the knife and gaining ground, now less than ten feet from her. “So you work for the Americans? You will see,” he said. Zia stumbled over the sidewalk and raced blindly toward the checkpoint. Her voice—“Help! Help!”—sounded feeble and hoarse. “Please, I work for Harris Corporation. This man is going to kill me!”

  BY THE TIME Keith convinced a marine guard to walk him outside the perimeter, it was over. The Iraqi attacker was sitting with a bag over his head, under guard, and Zia was sitting on the wall in a daze, surrounded by concerned soldiers. Nearby, her father was staring off into the distance, smoking. Keith rushed toward them. Zia was numbly relieved to see him, but she didn’t move. She couldn’t. She kept losing consciousness, and when she came to, she shook all over. With Baba there and all the people milling around, Keith knew he had to stop himself from embracing her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, looking into her eyes. She was crying.

  “Can I get them into the Green Zone?” he said to the marine guard.

  “Sorry, sir, he doesn’t have the proper ID,” the soldier said, nodding in Baba’s direction.

  Some discussion ensued. The crowd of Iraqis gathering around them swelled and the soldiers were getting nervous.

  Keith had on a wedding band that Zia had given him. Frustrated, he blurted out, “Look, this is my wife and my father-in-law. I’m going to escort them in.”

  Zia’s eyes widened—nothing had ever been made official with Baba. But her father didn’t react, and Zia wished she could hug him. Finally, the guards relented.

  Baba and Zia headed back to get the car to drive into the Green Zone, where they would be safe, for the moment.

  NUNU AND MAMINA were very worried. They kept calling and calling but no one answered. Zia and Baba were always home by eight o’clock, but at eleven there was still no sign of them. When they finally did arrive, around midnight, Zia was pale and trembling, with red-rimmed eyes.

  Nunu was alarmed. “What happened?”

  Mamina looked at Baba, but he just collapsed on the sofa. “Don’t ask me any questions. Just let me sit. I feel very tired.”

  Iraqi guards had come back with them, and stood politely by as Mamina and Nunu learned an abbreviated version of the day’s events. Zia spent that night in the house, but it was for the last time. The next day she packed a bag and left her family’s home for good.

  Once again, Zia moved inside the Green Zone, but this time it was legal, albeit temporary. She was put under protective custody. This didn’t make it any easier than when she’d been hiding in Camille’s trailer, however, since she was forbidden to leave, and didn’t have the authorization to bring her family in.

  She and Keith never again talked about that day. Baba parked the car far from the house and sold it four days later. The U.S. Army said they had found in the pockets of her attacker photos of him with Saddam, and surmised he was a disgruntled Ba’athist. In his confes
sion, the man admitted that he was intending to follow Zia and Baba to their house and kill the entire family as an example. But because Zia had seen him, he changed his plan and just tried to kill her immediately. Zia never saw him again, and never knew if he was sent to jail, or released, or what.

  But it hardly mattered. At night she lay on her cot staring at the ceiling. There were thousands of others like him, waiting for the day when the Americans either kicked her out of the Green Zone again, or left Iraq themselves. Then they would come after her.

  She needed a plan.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  ONE AFTERNOON, A representative of the neighborhood sheik knocked on Manal’s office door. He had once sworn on his honor to protect her.

  “I am here to tell you that we cannot honor our promise to protect you. There are too many outsiders in the neighborhood now. We don’t know them, and we can’t predict what they will do.”

  Manal thanked him, but fear flooded over her as she closed the door. She knew this was happening in neighborhoods across Baghdad: traditional leaders were being overtaken by insurgents and foreign fighters. Some even said that Muqtada al-Sadr had lost control of his army.

  The security situation everywhere had steadily deteriorated since the spring uprisings, and Manal’s neighborhood was widely considered a battleground between the troops and the insurgency. Her Shawaka office was located on Haifa Street, also the location of IMN. It ran directly up to Assassins’ Gate, the main entrance to the Green Zone. At the edge of the neighborhood was a bridge leading across the Tigris to a Sunni area. Sometime after the spring uprisings, insurgents had begun using Manal’s neighborhood as a launching pad to shoot rockets into the Green Zone. The Americans ran missions regularly into the neighborhood, and Manal could almost always hear gun battles raging in the distance.

  Manal knew her office meetings would have sounded insane to an outsider. “Look, I don’t want to be paraded in front of the camera like Nick Berg,” she announced once. “I would prefer to be shot dead instantly than kidnapped.” But her days were relatively normal, made up of mundane tasks such as fixing the photocopier or filling out paperwork. The more intense her fear became, the more she, and others like her, normalized and adapted. Not even Ahmed’s presence could calm her, as he was nervous himself and increasingly haranguing her to leave. “The extremists are taking over,” he worried. She was so enmeshed in the situation that she seldom stepped back to think about the danger she was in, or that the obvious choice was to leave. It won’t happen to me, she thought, even as it was happening to those all around her. She had stayed after the UN bombing. She had stayed after Fern’s death. When some Red Cross workers were kidnapped that fall, she stayed after that, as well. Fear was like a strange, disorienting drug, and Manal was losing her ability to judge her own safety.

  Manal knew of at least fourteen women who’d been murdered during the eighteen months she’d been in Iraq. There were high-profile murders like those of Fern and her coworker Salwa, and the lawmaker Aqila al-Hashimi. Unreported were so many more deaths of women whom Manal had come in contact with in her work. There was Dina, a reporter for the U.S.-funded Al Hurra TV, who was shot while waiting for a taxi to go to work. Enaas, a translator for U.S. officials, had talked to Manal about her fears a few days before her death. “People keep threatening me, saying I should stop working for the Americans, but I have no other way. I have a son.” Soon thereafter, insurgents broke into her home and shot and killed her and her brother in their living room.

  There was Zeena, a pharmacist and businesswoman, who had received death threats for refusing to veil. She had been an old friend of Zainab Salbi, Manal’s boss and the head of Women for Women International. Zeena was kidnapped, murdered, and dumped on the highway, with a traditional headscarf wrapped around her hair. There was Wijdan al-Khuzai, an activist and parliamentary candidate for the first national elections, who had attended many of Manal’s women’s meetings. She had been tortured and shot in the face, her body found on the side of the road by a U.S. patrol. The list could go on and on. Manal imagined there were hundreds more victims across the country that she didn’t hear about. Such deaths rarely made the news, and only a few people sensed that these crimes were not random. They formed a pattern: women were being executed for standing up and speaking out, for working and refusing to veil.

  For so long, she felt unable to abandon her efforts. After so much time in a place, the rest of the world seemed to slip away. She had forgotten life was possible outside Iraq. She stayed throughout the summer of 2004 and into the fall. Even when she had spoken with her staff about shutting down all her programs, she had still intended to stay in Iraq, privately doing what she could.

  But then her friend Margaret Hassan was killed.

  An Iraqi citizen born in Ireland, Margaret was the fifty-nine-year-old head of CARE International in Iraq. She had lived in the country for more than thirty years, and was married to an Iraqi. Kidnappers ambushed her car on her way to the CARE offices, and she had been heard of only once since, in a videotape released by her kidnappers in which she pleaded for her life. Manal had become friendly with Margaret over the last year as their paths occasionally crossed, and she admired her as a determined, gentle woman whose commitment to Iraqis predated the war and the media attention. She spoke Arabic and, during her many years of living in Iraq, she had helped children by organizing deliveries of medicine and food. She was utterly beloved by the people. After she was kidnapped, two hundred Iraqis protested for her release outside the CARE offices in Baghdad. Manal allowed herself to hope that the force of Iraqi public opinion would save Margaret.

  But she wasn’t released. A month after she was taken, a videotape surfaced showing her brutal execution by handgun. It was a senseless killing, of a woman who had done so much for her adopted country, and everyone in Manal’s office had mourned—and worried. And then, on the heels of Margaret’s murder in November 2004, Amal Malachi, an adviser at the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Affairs and the co-founder of the advisory committee for women’s affairs, was killed. Her cellphone was taken, and the women listed on it, including Manal, were terrified they would be next.

  Iraqis who once pleaded with her to stay had changed their minds. “Manal, you should leave now,” said one woman visiting the center. “This is not a good situation.”

  And so she had.

  Her departure had been sudden, and felt as dramatic as the embassy workers clinging to the last helicopter in Saigon. She could tell no one she was leaving for fear that a leak would give kidnappers time to ambush her car. She couldn’t say goodbye, although the women she worked with would understand why. Her work would continue from Jordan, she promised her staff. She would set up the office and oversee the Iraqi staff and programs from Amman.

  She had lain across the backseat as Ahmed, Mustafa, and Fawaz had driven furiously to the airport. Flights out of Iraq were always targets for rocket fire, so the plane ascended at an angle that felt almost vertical and spiraled rapidly, making her feel dizzy and disoriented. As she looked back down on the country she was fleeing, Manal’s eyes welled up with tears.

  BY JANUARY 2005, Manal had permanently moved the headquarters of Women for Women to Amman, and had begun a campaign to register Iraqis living in Jordan to vote in the national elections. Five Iraqi staff had come with her, and Ahmed traveled back and forth. Free from the intensity of Baghdad, and the close scrutiny of the society, Manal felt suddenly aware of how much attention Ahmed paid to her. He had always kept his friends at hand, so as not to make her feel uncomfortable. He had even introduced her to his family at the same time that Mustafa and Fawaz introduced her to their families—so as not to make the introductions feel too freighted with intention. Manal had always thought, What good guys, but as her head cleared in Jordan, she suddenly realized that this had been Ahmed’s smooth way of making her more comfortable with him; of flirting, Arab style.

  On a visit to Jordan for a training session, he propose
d marriage. Manal was confused. In the frenzy of Iraq, she hadn’t had time to think about romance. She had never intended to remarry—never believed she would receive another offer—but Ahmed knew about her divorce and had accepted it. She realized that she trusted him completely and felt safe around him. He had become her closest friend. She introduced him to her parents, who had recently retired and bought a house in Jordan to be closer to their Palestinian family. They agreed to be married later that year.

  As Iraq prepared for the first national elections, Manal’s staff were monitoring the few voting booths set up in Amman for expats. In Iraq, Manal had put a couple of Iraqis in charge of the programs, and she intended to continue running them from Amman.

  It was much safer in Jordan, and she was glad to be able to continue her work for Iraq, but she felt lost and distant from her previous life. She hated working by remote control. She felt even worse when, three weeks later, the election returns came in. It was a disaster for women’s rights.

  Everything always turned out to be harder than the Bush administration claimed, and she was kicking herself for ever forgetting that. After the CPA disbanded in June 2004, the Americans had tried to prepare Iraq to hold national elections in January 2005, but many people didn’t think Iraq was stable enough yet to do so. It would have made more sense to get the factories running, secure the borders, and normalize day-to-day life, and only afterward have the elections take place, in an atmosphere in which people could feel safe and rational.

  But the problem was Ali Sistani, the white-bearded grand ayatollah who refused to allow the constitution to be written until an elected body of Iraqis was in parliament to oversee the process. The Americans didn’t want to leave until security and a newly elected government were in place, but too many Iraqis were swearing there would not be security until after the Americans left. In the end, the Iraqis had won.