“Go home,” a neighbor was shouting at her. She put her hands to her head and ran home.
What about Mamina and Baba? Twenty minutes later, they returned. They were sweaty and jumpy.
“There was nothing left of them. Not even body parts,” Baba said about the bus passengers, sitting breathlessly on the couch.
“No, no, no!” Nunu shouted, her head in her hands. She slammed her hand against the table. “They don’t want us to have a life.”
She ran into her room and cried on her bed. She felt sad for those on her street who lay dying. She felt sorrow for the pieces of herself that were dying—the virtues of tolerance, forgiveness, and Iraqi pride. All she had inside these days was hatred; hatred for the terrorists and for the militias, enough hatred to make her wish she were dead.
Later, they found out that thirty-one people had died, including their neighbor’s small son and Usama, the poor, gentle man who had sold trinkets at the corner for as long as Nunu could remember. Usama had not been injured by the first bomb and had rushed over to help the victims, but was wounded badly from the shrapnel of the second bomb. Baba visited him in the hospital out of respect for his baby daughter and a pregnant wife. The day after he died, people lit candles where his kiosk had stood.
For as long as Nunu could remember, this street had been her home. She had played soccer on it growing up, and ridden her bicycle there. She knew every alleyway, every family, and everyone’s story. Their block was not even a quarter mile long; she could see clearly from one end to the other. It was known in Baghdad as the “street of oil paintings” because so many artists used to display their work there.
Yet now she realized she was surrounded by vacant properties, nothing but fractured families and death. At the top of the street lived a teacher whose son had been killed by the rocket that had crashed into the photographer’s shop. At the other end was a small store that had been run by a man who had always been friendly to Nunu. A Sunni terrorist had kidnapped the owner’s brother and held him for ransom. He tortured him and threatened to kill him, so the man sold his house and his store and turned over the money, but it turned out that the terrorist had kidnapped the brother by mistake because his name was Haider, a common Shia name. When the brother was able to prove he was Sunni they released him, but by then, too many people knew the family was Sunni, so they had had to leave for Syria.
Next to them was the home of a Ba’athist where, back in 2003, someone had scrawled “May the Ba’ath Party fall.” Soon afterward the father had been gunned down. The family stayed in the house, and the son, who was Nunu’s age, opened a small arcade in 2006, with billiards and other games. A religious militia threatened the store, but the son couldn’t close it because he had just gotten married and had a baby girl and he needed the income. Two days after the threat, the gang arrived at his arcade and gunned him down. The mother, wife, and daughter left town.
Next door to them was an old man. His son had recently disappeared. He had driven to see a friend in Dura, a Sunni neighborhood, and he never came back. Sometimes Nunu saw the father standing alone outside, staring up and down the street.
Beyond him had been Usama.
All these neighbors made up the fabric of Nunu’s small world. She knew them intimately—what time they left for work and arrived home, how they dressed, what vehicles they drove, and how they treated one another. She had grown up with them. On Nunu’s street alone, four men had been murdered since the start of the war. This is madness, she thought. And yet her building was not an exception. When someone talked about Nunu’s family, they probably said, “That is the family whose daughter was killed for working for the Americans.”
NUNU AND MAMINA never told Zia about any of this. After the double bombings, few neighbors ventured outside anymore. The violence and stress took its toll within the family too. Tensions surfaced and fights began. Since they could not take their anger out on the militias, they turned on one another.
Mamina wanted Baba to line up to buy much-needed gasoline for the generator. But the lines for gasoline stretched for miles, and men began waiting before dawn. Since the gas stations were also common targets for suicide bombers, Baba refused. Mamina felt this was unfair. She left the house each morning for school, traveling on roads that were frequently violent. If she could swallow her fears, Baba could too. But he wouldn’t.
Then they argued over the generator, which Baba shared with a neighbor, whom Mamina considered wasteful. “He uses the power for his fish tanks,” she complained. But Baba insisted on being a good neighbor and warned Mamina not to challenge him.
Mostly, though, they fought over the television. Nunu wanted to watch talk shows and sitcoms. Baba wanted to watch only the news, which Nunu hated. Headless bodies floating down the Tigris, mass graves discovered, policemen mutilated by drills with their hands bound behind their backs. It gave her nightmares.
One evening, Baba came home while Nunu and Mamina were watching an episode of Oprah that featured “women who change the world.” Oprah was talking to a female doctor who traveled to different countries to help sick people.
“Change this,” Baba said. He wanted to watch a new show, Terrorism in the Hands of Justice, which aired on the American-funded station Al Iraqiya. The show broadcast “confessions” of captured insurgents, and was intended to show to average Iraqis that the insurgents were hardened criminal thugs, not glorious freedom fighters—with the interviewer often taunting the bound prisoner, the prisoners appeared more like ignorant gangsters than honorable martyrs.
The show was hugely popular among Iraqis. Baba loved it. He settled onto the couch and watched as a young man appeared with a bruised face and began answering questions.
“Why don’t they execute him on the spot?” Baba demanded. “There should be no mercy.”
The man said he had been tricked into working with Al Qaeda against the Americans. He was told to kidnap Shia doctors, whom Al Qaeda would hold for ransom. But Al Qaeda just murdered them outright. “Please forgive me,” the man begged. “I didn’t know they would be killed.”
Baba shook his head. “He invited the devil into his home. How did he expect him to behave? Kill him.”
Nunu sat on the couch, cross-legged and unhappy. The next detainee admitted to taking part in the gang rape of a woman whom he had kidnapped from the university.
“Didn’t she beg you not to?” the interviewer’s voice asked.
“Yes, but we raped her nonetheless,” the man said.
“How many of you?” the interviewer asked.
“Six of us.”
“Why?”
“Because she was pretty. We tricked her into coming to talk to me, and then my friends arrived with guns and we took her, and raped her.”
“You raped her?”
“Yes, I was last.”
Nunu’s face darkened. What she heard next she would never forget.
“How could you rape this innocent girl? Didn’t you hear her cries?” the interviewer asked. “Didn’t you see her tears?”
The criminal answered, “By the time it was my turn, I think she was already dead.”
Nunu felt all the wind collapse from her lungs. The blood rushed to her head, and she fainted.
Mamina’s furious voice snapped her awake. “Turn this off! We have no escape from this violence.”
Tired of arguing, Baba disappeared into his bedroom, his sanctuary, where he had air-conditioning and another, smaller television. Nunu switched the channel back to Oprah to try and forget what she had just heard. But in the cramped apartment, the two televisions competed with each other, and neither could be heard clearly.
Baba came back into the living room.
“This rubbish,” he said, pointing to the television. “Look at that woman wearing that short skirt.”
“This woman is a doctor,” Nunu said. She was brimming with anger. “Maybe she doesn’t pray all day. She goes out in the world and saves people.”
Nunu followed Baba
back to his bedroom. In the street, she could do nothing when men berated and belittled her and made her feel weak and worthless. But at home, on safer ground, she lashed out. She reached in and slammed the door closed behind him. It was a bold, unprecedented move, and before she had returned to her place on the couch, Baba threw open the door and rushed toward her.
“Don’t you dare look at me in the eye,” he shouted.
“I did nothing to have you treat me like this!” she screamed at him.
Baba raised his hand to beat Nunu. Mamina blocked his path.
“Stop this. You can’t hit her. She is a woman now, not a little girl, and that is shameful.”
“She has no manners,” he shouted. Nunu felt out of control. She flung the remote control across the room and it shattered against the wall. Baba rushed to it.
“Don’t worry about the remote,” Mamina screamed. “Go out and get some gasoline and burn this place down. This is no way to live.”
Silently, Baba returned to his bedroom and closed the door. Now the only sounds were the hum of the air-conditioning and Nunu sobbing on the couch.
“Oh, Mama,” she cried. “I hate him. Why didn’t you get me out of Iraq? I want to be with Zia.”
Mamina cradled her sobbing daughter, her own tears falling into Nunu’s hair.
“Oh, my dear daughter. I would give my life for you to have freedom from this. Please, God, protect her. Please, God, take her out of Iraq. This is no life for her.”
…
LATER THAT WEEK, Mamina returned from school to find Nunu lying in the dark in her bedroom.
“Nunu, get up! Wake up! Don’t stay in bed all day.”
But Nunu had no sense of whether it was day or night. “Leave me alone, Mama,” she said, her voice sluggish in the dim bedroom. “I’m making a plan. I’m going to run away to Turkey.”
Mamina sat on the bed. Both women had heard stories of smuggling routes through the Kurdish mountains into Turkey or across the Shatt-al-Arab and into Kuwait. Nunu wanted to try and get out this way. Zia had escaped Iraq, as had Noor, and Nunu believed she could make it out too.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
FROM THE RELATIVE safety of Amman, Manal continued to advocate for Iraqi women through 2006 and 2007. Women for Women was still able to do some work in Iraq thanks to its twenty-four Iraqi staff members working in administration and counseling.
Even from this safe distance, the violence hit close to home. Manal and Ahmed were now happily married, but their wedding had been bittersweet. Several days before their nuptials in September 2005, Ahmed’s brother-in-law had been brutally murdered by insurgents, leaving widowed Ahmed’s sister Rana and three young children. Their wedding was replaced by a funeral. Manal and Ahmed had helped move Rana to Jordan into their small apartment and were caring for her and her children.
Meanwhile, Ahmed was still traveling in and out of Iraq, and he had moved their outreach efforts out of Baghdad and into the southern cities of Hilla and Karbala, where Fern had once operated. Manal had distanced herself enough that few knew the programs were U.S.-funded, which gave them a measure of protection. They offered women classes in politics, family, and nutrition. One class offered was “Equality in Raising Boys and Girls.” Another class was “Stress Management,” to try and help reduce the emotional impact of daily violence and chaos. Women for Women was one of the few Western nonprofits still on the ground, even though the need grew every day. War always hurts women. Manal had known this from the beginning, and by now its myriad effects were in full evidence: increased alcoholism among the men, depression among women, and rising reports of spousal abuse. Most Iraqi women experience war from behind locked doors in their kitchens and bedrooms, robbed of all freedoms. Although women have much smaller casualty numbers, death would, in many ways, be an escape from the lifelong grief of mourning that women face after losing their fathers, husbands, and sons to war. Some international groups counted seventy thousand Iraqi dead by 2007, but most Arab groups suggested a number double or triple that. A study published by Baghdad University and an Iraqi women’s group in 2006 estimated that the combined impact of Saddam’s wars and the U.S. invasion had left three million widows in Iraq. Their daughters, the report stated ominously, would make up “a generation of spinsters.”
For the small number of women who attended, the group sessions held at secret Women for Women offices were the only times that victims could exchange stories and receive support. The sessions became an increasingly important part of their lives. In Hilla, many women still attended class even after a large bomb exploded in a public market. The letter-exchange program continued, and thousands of women from California, Florida, New York, and elsewhere corresponded with Iraqi women, offering sympathies and sharing a connection across the globe, no matter how different their circumstances.
Getting solid information on the status of women had become almost impossible by 2007, as all the aid agencies had been forced out of the country and journalists were unable to travel freely. Few were documenting the tragedies anymore, or counting casualties. The targeting of women’s rights groups by radical Islamic groups persisted. Halima Ahmed al-Jabouri, the president of Women and Children Without Borders in Kirkuk, was gunned down in front of her children in November 2006. In another case, the director of a women’s cultural center was shot five times. In Amara, a group called the Association of Widows came under threat by a religious militia. When it refused to close down, the headquarters was bombed. On April 27, 2005, Lamia Abed Khadouri, a female member of parliament, was killed in her home. The examples were endless, and horrifying.
Islamic fundamentalists, emboldened by the anarchy, were violently taking control of the country. Although the majority of Iraqis didn’t want fundamentalists in charge, they were desperate for some sort of order, which the militias offered. This was how the Taliban had come to power in Afghanistan, following ten years of war with the Soviet Union and six years of civil war. It made Manal’s heart ache to think Iraq was headed in the same direction.
In the south, so-called Committees for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice roamed the cities with weapons, looking for women who were, in their opinion, violating the tenets of Islam. Such women were harshly punished. One of Manal’s staffers was a Christian woman with family in Basra. She told Manal that women caught driving had their hands cut off. Women caught unveiled were whipped and in some cases beheaded. Women wearing jeans were considered prostitutes and were raped and killed. Even attending school was forbidden for girls in some places.
Women’s rights groups began to see evidence of trafficking. The way young Muntaha had been, desperate Iraqi women were lured into promises of housekeeping jobs in Dubai, Kuwait, or Syria. Once they left their homes, they were forced into prostitution. In both Kirkuk and Najaf, Iraqi police units busted criminal gangs that were kidnapping young women and selling them to prostitution rings. Given the larger incidences of violence, the military paid scant attention to stopping such prostitution and trafficking. Many whispered that the soldiers themselves were involved.
Some of the crimes against women were disguised as “Islamic practices.” Hanaa Adwar, a Christian woman who ran the Iraqi Women’s Network, knew firsthand of incidents in which Al Qaeda fighters arriving in Iraqi villages to commit suicide bombings against U.S. soldiers or the Iraqi army would first demand to be married to a tribesman’s daughter. After a night of sex, he would blow himself up. The bride, sometimes as young as thirteen, would be expected to live the rest of her life as the widow of a “martyr.” In northern Iraq, the group ASUDA (Organization for Combating Violence Against Women), which ran a women’s shelter, was a lone organization documenting crimes against women including honor killings, public stonings, and acid attacks. Manal had tried to send Muntaha there years earlier for protection, and she continued to fly to Sulaimaniya to run training programs. Other than Manal’s help, ASUDA received no U.S. funding or attention, and was kept afloat by the efforts of local women. In M
ay 2008, a gunman attacked the center. No one was hurt, and the women quickly returned to work.
Even those on the periphery of women’s rights advocacy were not safe. Lawyers who defended women in honor-killing cases were kidnapped for their “crimes,” then ransomed for thousands of dollars. One lawyer who prosecuted perpetrators of honor killing was murdered for his work. The note left by his body said: “This is the price paid by everyone who does not follow the teachings of Islam and who defends all that is dirty and evil.”
AS THE VIOLENCE spread, the war spilled beyond Iraq’s borders. The stream of refugees that had trickled out in 2003 and 2004 became a deluge as the civil war started in earnest. By 2006, almost two million Iraqis had fled the country. Another two million were displaced within Iraq, forced out of their neighborhoods or cities in fear of sectarian violence. Most refugees escaped to Jordan or Syria. In the building where Manal lived in Amman, ten of the twelve apartments were occupied by Iraqi refugees. Manal counted that eight of these ten families had fled after a family member was killed or kidnapped. The building collectively mourned the civil war only a few hundred miles across the border.
These were the lucky ones, however. Many poor Iraqis weren’t able to find apartments in Jordan. They sneaked into the country with almost nothing, and tried to survive illegally, without access to schools, hospitals, or jobs. Many stayed inside for fear of being picked up by the Jordanian police and taken back to the border. The worst cases Manal saw were the women who traveled alone. Many were forced out of Iraq because they had been raped, widowed, or had lost their father. They had no choice but to turn to prostitution. The market was thriving, fed not only by Jordanians but also by wealthy visitors from the Gulf, lured to Amman by the bars, prostitutes, and nightclubs that were forbidden in their conservative countries. Many of those designated to help often preyed on the women instead. One woman told Manal that an Iraqi employee at the embassy in Syria was telling women his mother would help them, and to meet her at a private location. Lacking alternatives, young women would go, only to then be raped and trafficked into prostitution. Helping these women was a challenge because many hid from the authorities in fear of being deported, arrested, or further exploited by the very people paid to help them.
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