Sisters in War

by Christina Asquith

  It was a lot for Zia to digest, she knew. In Iraq, a woman’s wedding was the biggest day in her life. She couldn’t imagine the day without Mamina and Nunu and Aunt Sahra and Aunt Ilham, her cousin Lara, and Nunu’s friend Noor. She missed Baba and longed for his approval, but no one could even tell him about the wedding. He still refused to hear about what Zia was doing in the States, or even hear Keith’s name, despite the help he had offered when Zia was attacked.

  A few days later, Zia sent them photos from the wedding. Keith had surprised her by asking her to get a dress, and by reserving a photographer and a chapel for the ceremony. In her spectacular white gown, with gold leaves in her hair and wearing her best jewelry, Zia was a vision to behold, but inside, Nunu understood, she felt tiny and alone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  AS TIME WENT by and the civil war got worse, Nunu longed to confide in her sister about what was happening in Iraq.

  “This will only cause her pain,” Mamina said. They knew Zia felt guilty and worried for having escaped and left her family behind, and that she’d started having nightmares about Iraq. “When she hears about problems with us, she fights with Keith.”

  “We are fine,” she told her daughter on the phone. “Don’t think about us. Be a good wife to Keith and be American. Get a job and don’t be a burden on your new country.”

  Nunu relented, not wanting to say anything that would upset her sister. She knew that Zia and Keith, while generally happy, had started bickering about little things just because of the stress and trauma of their time in Iraq, from which they hadn’t yet recovered. There was no point in making her sister as unhappy as she was, she thought. That was the only light in Nunu’s dark existence. But Zia felt very far away.

  Until Zia’s wedding, Nunu felt that she, Mamina, and Zia had been a team, experiencing the excitement of America together. After the wedding, though, the dynamic among them changed. Zia was no longer out of their lives temporarily—she was gone for good. She was an American wife now. Who knew when the three would be united again?

  So when Zia would call them at the end of her day, they tried not to talk about Iraq. Zia and Keith had moved just outside Sacramento, into a community of several hundred new homes built atop what was once farmland. She had a three-car garage, a manicured front lawn, and a sidewalk running in front of her house where neighborhood children rode their bicycles. She worked part-time at Sears, and cooked and cleaned the house each day. This was the life of abundance and freedom she had dreamed of in Iraq, and yet she felt she had only one foot in her new world. At night she lay awake in the darkness worrying about her family. Zia still heard stories from the news, or from acquaintances. Someone emailed her to say that two of her friends had died in car bombings, including her childhood friend Mustafa, whom everyone called Toofy. He had been a ball of energy, a fun-loving friend who had never hurt a soul, and now a terrorist had killed him for no reason at all. Zia became preoccupied with the fear that her family would be killed. She had visions of them being blown apart by suicide bombers, kidnapped, raped, or hit by a rocket. She called constantly, just to hear their voices.

  “Mama, put Nunu on,” she said, one evening.

  “No, Zuzu, she doesn’t feel like talking now.”

  Zia grew agitated. “What happened?”

  “No, my dear, everything’s fine.”

  “I don’t believe you!” Zia became hysterical. Maybe her sister had been killed by a bomb, or hit by a rocket—would Mamina even tell her? “Something’s happened that you’re not telling me.”

  Mamina had to put Nunu on the phone so Zia could hear her voice and reassure herself that Nunu was still alive.

  “Hello?”

  Zia took a deep breath. “Hi, Nunu, what’s up?”

  “Nothing. I did nothing today but sit inside the house and watch television,” Nunu said.

  They both tried, but the sisters had little to talk about anymore. Zia didn’t want to tell happy stories, and Nunu was despondent and listless.

  “Nunu, I can tell by your voice that something has happened.”

  Finally, Nunu broke down. “Noor’s brother was killed,” she sobbed. Nunu’s one and only friend, Noor, had visited the house the prior afternoon. With a tearstained face, she told Nunu that she and her parents had returned home and found her brother shot dead on the living room floor. The militias had killed him. “Nunu, you must take care,” Noor had said, trembling. “My brother knew not to open the door to anyone. So this must have been done by a friend, someone he trusted.”

  Zia tried in vain to comfort her. “Be strong. I’m sorry this is happening for you,” she said. “One day it will be over. In Jordan things were pitch black for me and I had nowhere to go. With patience, the situation got resolved and my dreams came true.”

  “No, things won’t change in Iraq. It’s too late. A generation will pass before there will be peace.”

  Wracked with guilt, Zia was quiet for a long time, and eventually Nunu said good night.

  Months would pass before the sisters spoke again.

  AFTER HER COLLEGE graduation, it became even harder for Nunu to keep her spirits strong. Without the distraction of her studies, or the goal of gaining her degree, the days felt long and pointless. Most nights, she sat alone in her bedroom listening to Radio Scheherazade. She tried to get a job, but wasn’t too hopeful. None of her classmates had found jobs, and many had left Iraq. She sent in her application to ministries and universities, but never heard back. As a Shia, she couldn’t work for any of the government ministries located in Sunni neighborhoods or that required her to cross through Sunni areas in her commute. She couldn’t work for any foreign companies without fear of retaliation, and she couldn’t work for any schools taken over by the Islamic militias, unless she was willing to wear a black cloak and headscarf, which she wasn’t. Few women felt the city was safe enough to commute daily to an office. One news report said that unemployment in Iraq was at 70 percent. Uncle Khadum worked in the administration at the Ministry of Oil. He spoke to some people. “I can get you a position for six months,” he said. “But they want a six-hundred-dollar bribe.”

  “But it will take me three months to earn back that money, and who’s to say they won’t fire me after that?” she said.

  “They probably will,” he conceded.

  The months passed. Nunu barely moved more than ten yards from the kitchen to the living room to her bedroom. Sometimes, she didn’t bother leaving the bedroom. Each hour was like the last. There was no difference between the days, even between night and day. Sometimes Nunu would sleep all day and stay up all night. With the curtains drawn, she didn’t bother to look at the time. Each day was the same. Sometimes, in the middle of her chores, Nunu would break down and sob on the floor for minutes. But then pity made her angry at herself. She had no right to cry—at least she had her life, unlike Noor’s brother, unlike so many other young people killed by the suicide attacks. She felt a responsibility to get up and live her life because she was the lucky one. She would try to continue her chores as though nothing had happened.

  After a year, her skin became pale and blotchy with acne. After a while, even the crying episodes stopped, and she missed them. She felt only numbness.

  Trips out of the house were few and far between. She and Mamina decided to go to the doctor, since Mamina had been bleeding and feeling pain in her abdomen, and Nunu wanted drugs for depression—a treatment that had become common in Baghdad. But they got the same response at each medical center they tried: “The doctors have left the country”; “The doctor was killed.” The city they drove through looked apocalyptic: blackened, charred sites of bombings, morose passersby, date palms hacked in half and pushed across the road to create checkpoints.

  Finally, they found an open clinic. The doctor diagnosed Mamina quickly: she had a dangerously large fibroid in her uterus—a serious though not uncommon problem, but one that needed to be treated with surgery. However, the hospital equipment had been loote
d, and the lack of electricity created a long waiting list. The surgery specialists Mamina needed had fled the country or been assassinated, the nurses told her. They gave her iron pills for anemia. She also had hypertension due to stress. She needed rest.

  For Nunu’s depression, they gave her small white tablets. Now she slept even more, and she couldn’t even get up from the bed. Nunu turned her anger and frustration inward. She wondered if the Islamists were right: I am a weak girl, she thought. I am unimportant and stupid. Her journal entries grew darker and darker.

  I feel depressed. There are many ideas that come to me. Sometimes I think to get rid of the sadness and end it by myself, other times I say to myself that tomorrow will be better and this black cloud will die away. But I feel inside that there is no hope. I begin to lose my hope and my strength. I don’t know what to do.

  Almost two years had passed since Zia had left for the States, and now Nunu couldn’t distinguish one month from the next.

  More than anything, she wanted to reach out to her sister. Zia called twice a week but usually spoke only to Mamina or Baba. Months passed and not a word was exchanged between them. Nunu and Mamina held to their pact not to tell Zia about the violence dominating their lives. Nunu could barely summon the energy to come to the phone when Zia did call. She missed her terribly, and wanted to cry to her and tell her everything. But if Zia knew the truth, she might decide to return to Iraq to be with them. That would be her death sentence.

  So everyone agreed to pretend.

  WITH NO JOB, and unable to leave the house, Nunu became an unwilling spectator to the civil war. One afternoon, Baba came home pale-faced. “An explosion happened near Mustansiriya University,” he said. Mustansiriya was the second-largest university in Baghdad and one of the oldest universities in the Arab world. Noor had been a student there.

  Mustansiriya had an enormous walled courtyard, and only students with college ID were allowed inside. Like the ones at Baghdad University, the school guards were controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr, and they stood at the entrance harassing any girls who were dressed “improperly.” Although the students felt safe inside the college walls, the buses that picked them up pulled up in front, where there was no security. Masses of cars driven by fathers and brothers were always pooled outside the gates, and 3:30 p.m. was the busiest time, when daytime classes let out and students for the evening classes were arriving. Hundreds and hundreds of students milled outside the gates, buying fruit juice, running over to the copy shop, sitting on the stone wall and gossiping. Men smoked with friends and sipped Pepsis. Groups of girls carrying books waited for the bus to arrive.

  Nunu had felt the two bombs in her living room, miles away. They turned on the evening news. Nunu saw the familiar gate of the university, now blackened by smoke. That afternoon, two bombers had driven their cars to opposite ends of the college gates. The force of the blast from the first car bomb was enough to kill those standing in the immediate vicinity, decapitating many students, blowing off hands, arms, and legs. The devastation was compounded by the flying metal, the glass from the windshield, and the flaming gasoline. The sound blasted eardrums and some were blinded by the flying debris.

  Nunu understood the graphic details of a suicide bombing far better than she cared to. Most victims die not from concussive force, but from pieces of steel shrapnel built into the bomb that can fly with the force of a bullet. Therefore, a bomber walking into a crowd might be less effective than a bomber standing at a short distance in a sparsely filled room, since more people would be hit by flying metal. Since the first suicide bomb at the UN building in August 2003, the attackers had refined their tactics. Since it was hard to kill large numbers of people with limited explosives strapped to the body, many bombers drove cars, or climbed onto buses, so that the gasoline could double or triple the effect. Nunu’s body felt numb as she reflected on all of this.

  According to the newscast, in the seconds after the blast there had been a stunned silence. Then the coughing began, followed by screams as survivors looked around them. Students could be heard in the background moaning and crying. Nunu gagged at the broadcast images of severed feet and pools of blood, of men wearing gloves to put body parts into white garbage bags.

  The suicide bombers had predicted, correctly, that most students would react by rushing away to the other end of the gates, where the second car awaited them. The bomber detonated his device several minutes after the first, and there the devastation had been even greater.

  The television reported sixty dead and hundreds injured. But Nunu knew the injured would probably die. The hospitals couldn’t help them and the country lacked medicine, equipment, and doctors.

  She was right. For several days students continued to die from injuries. Most were only eighteen or nineteen years old. For weeks, mourners came to the gates of the university to cry and lay roses for the victims whose bodies were never identified, but whose charred IDs had been uncovered amid the rubble. Almost two hundred people were killed at the gates of Iraq’s oldest university.

  For what? screamed a voice inside Nunu’s head. She sobbed for the students. She banged her palms on the couch. Temporarily, her numbness was replaced with outrage. Why? Why kill these beautiful young people who are just beginning their lives? Innocents who have committed no crimes!

  When Mamina spoke with Zia later on, she realized that in California her sister had not even heard about the bombings. Despite the death toll and the horrible cruelty of the attack, there was little coverage on Western channels. On the Arab channels, there was none of the outrage expressed if the troops accidentally killed even one Iraqi. Nunu could never understand why the foreign press was so much more interested in the few crimes of their own soldiers than the much worse atrocities committed by Islamic fundamentalists. Nunu and Mamina personally knew dozens of innocent Iraqis killed by the irhabeen, the terrorists, but no one who had been harmed by Western forces.

  A far, far greater evil than even Saddam had now entered Iraq, and the thought chilled Nunu’s spine. This kind of carnage was beyond what even Iraq’s two largest militias, Muqtada’s army or Islamic Dawa, would do. There was only one group sick enough to believe God wanted them to kill Muslim students at Mustansiriya, and that was Al Qaeda.

  Indeed, days later Nunu heard that Al Qaeda had claimed responsibility. The reason given was that university officials had refused to ban female students from enrolling.

  KARRADA, ONE OF the oldest settled neighborhoods in Baghdad, was in the middle of the city, the heart of the commercial downtown. It had no strong ethnic majority, and had for a long time been relatively safer than other parts of the city. Most of the ethnic cleansing had occurred in the denser religious neighborhoods on the outskirts. Shortly after the war, the Americans nicknamed Karrada the “White Rose” because citizens would emerge from their homes to offer them white roses.

  By 2007, a rumor spread through the neighborhood that Al Qaeda had sworn to “turn the white rose into a red rose.” Now the death squads moved closer and closer. The soldiers seemed either unwilling or unable to stop what was becoming a vicious civil war between Sunni and Shia. Mortars fired at the Americans in the Green Zone often missed their mark and fell in Karrada, killing people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Given the greater atrocities in the country, these kinds of deaths, by random rocket fire, rarely made the news anymore.

  One day, a rocket slammed into the photographer’s store at the end of their street. The family photographer, Anis, who had taken Nunu’s graduation photos, the family’s driver’s license photos, passport photos, and even family portraits in the 1990s, was inside. He was injured, but survived. His brother was killed. The store was destroyed.

  Now the neighborhoods that ringed central Baghdad had fallen under the complete control of the militias. They were being carved up by sect, and militias were going from door to door checking identity cards. Anyone from the wrong sect faced one of two fates: either they were killed on the spot and their ho
me seized, or they were given twenty-four hours to leave—and then their home was seized. A gentle old man who had worked at IMN with both Keith and Zia had died this way: one night, Shia militias came to his door and told him and his wife, “Be out of your house by tomorrow.” He was very old, and it was late, but he and his wife spent the night packing everything they had. In the morning, he went to borrow a truck from his friend, but the errand took too long. As they were packing everything into the bed of the truck, the insurgents returned. “We are leaving,” the old man pleaded.

  “We told you to be out by now,” they said. They shot him in the head and left the body on his street. They let his wife run away, and moved into his house.

  Stories like these were common. The more people killed, the more families there were that wanted revenge. In the west and north, neighborhoods such as Mansour and Adhamiya were taken over by Sunni radicals. In the east, Sadr City and and other neighborhoods were run by Shia militias. Life and death were determined by a street address. Iraqis watched in terror as their neighbors were killed or evicted; anyone who spoke up met the same fate. For those who weren’t threatened, the militias offered the only security they had experienced in three years. But they were hardly a welcome form of leadership. Militia members were typically uneducated, poor, and violent; they offered no form of government or plan for the future. Nunu and Mamina knew them to be no more than cruel, power-hungry gang leaders.

  One morning, fifteen minutes after Baba left to take Mamina to school, Nunu felt the house shaken by an enormous bomb that was clearly very close. She rushed outside to see giant plumes of black smoke and debris rising from the end of her street. Not stopping to think about her own safety, she pushed past the gate and joined the neighbors as they hovered around the blackened carcass of a bus, its windows blown out, its steering wheel melted, and with no passengers to be seen. Baghdad buses were used only by the poor people: day laborers, child workers, students, and widows. The entire corner had been demolished as well. As she stood there staring at the unimaginable, all of a sudden a second bomb detonated, louder than the first. Nunu was flung backward.