by Zahra Hankir
These might be natural questions to ask for many progressive editors in chief. But it took me time to start asking them. In all my years running newsrooms, I had never been known as an editor who encouraged the coverage of gender issues, women’s issues in particular. But through my educational process, which was mostly mediated in shared spaces of love filled with progressive feminist women, I slowly embraced the challenging task of activating a gender lens in the way I view and engage with my surrounding world.
Before getting there, I might have been the subject of Arundhati Roy’s disdainful gaze, when the writer, in conversation with Aishwarya Subramanyam, said she felt annoyed when “cool young women” say they aren’t feminists. Roy spoke of a battle between those who sidle up to power and those who have an adversarial relationship with it, and how it is through these battles with power that many freedoms are won.
While I believe myself to be naturally averse to power, I also subscribe to its complexity, best described in the academic Avery Gordon’s text Ghostly Matters. “Power,” she writes, “can be invisible, it can be fantastic, it can be dull and routine. It can be obvious, it can reach you by the baton of the police, it can speak the language of your thoughts and desires.” In subscribing to the complexity, at times invisibility, of power, I made peace with a trajectory that started off with a constant distancing from the troubles of gender and ended with a confrontation with them and all the nuances they come with.
* * *
—
One night shortly before my father passed away, I climbed over his hospital bed like a child would to sing a song into his left ear. I wanted to distract him from his delirium so that he would give up trying to leave his bed—he was bedridden at that point due to tubes in his body that the doctors had hoped would keep him alive for a little while longer. It worked: he left his delirium temporarily to sing along to a Sayed Darwish song that he loved. Neither of us had experienced such victory together during the time we’d shared when he was in good health.
I don’t know yet if it was that particular encounter with the body—a frail, departing corporeality—that opened up the uncharted territory of revisiting my personal history and unearthing its murky origins. At the end of the day, my encounter with death was a reminder that we often can’t quite trace the beginnings, but we do see the end. It was also perhaps a reminder of what philosopher Walter Benjamin was talking about when he wrote “Death is the sanction of everything the storyteller can tell.”
From the window of that end, however, I can trace a continuum of a set of biological realities: of birth, reproduction, and death, of a toddler being carried around a dining table and an immobile corpse on a deathbed. One day, that corpse had helped create a body that it thought it owned, similar to how power is imagined before it can be practiced. In the face of that power, that body was unarmed and unwanting to fight for its freedom. Yet, paradoxically, it kept running away to other, bigger battlefields, standing fragile under the open sky, until it found freedom within itself.
Crossfire
Maps of Iraq
Jane Arraf
It was a lovely spring morning in 2004; the air that would soon heat up to the temperature of a hair dryer was still a caress rather than an assault. I was heading out of the office with an Iraqi colleague to cover the annual Shi’a pilgrimage to the Kathimiya shrine in Baghdad. I remember saying out loud that nothing bad could possibly happen on such a beautiful day. As we approached the streets thronged with pilgrims, we heard the sirens. Ambulances and pickup trucks were racing away from the shrine with bodies of the dead and wounded piled in the back. Three bombers had detonated suicide belts at one of the most sacred sites in Shi’a Islam.
We walked toward the shrine, even as people ran from it. Waved in by distraught guards, we found an imam standing in the courtyard. He was surrounded by severed limbs in pools of blood on the white marble tiles. I offered condolences in both Arabic and English, telling him, “I’m so sorry.” “You’re sorry!?” he roared back in English. And then he burst into tears. In either language, the words of comfort couldn’t begin to encompass the enormity of the unfolding tragedy.
With one foot in the Arab world and one foot in the West, my Iraqi producer and I were the ones trying to explain to viewers Iraq’s shocking slide into violence.
* * *
—
Hoping to improve relations with the U.S. government, Saddam Hussein had invited American television networks to open bureaus in his tightly controlled country in the midnineties. CNN’s idealistic founder, Ted Turner, took him up on the proposition, and I opened the network’s first Baghdad bureau in 1998. For almost three years I was the only Western journalist based in the country.
As a Palestinian Canadian, I was expected by Iraqi citizens to be more Palestinian than Canadian. The Iraqi government saw me as a U.S. agent, while the U.S. government saw me as an Iraqi apologist. I was kicked out of Iraq a few months before the start of the war for coverage that was less sympathetic than the Iraqi government demanded, but made my way back through Kurdish-controlled territory to northern Iraq through Iran to cover the conflict for CNN.
A few months after Baghdad fell in 2003, invasion turned to occupation, and the soldiers on the ground—generally well-meaning guys from small towns in America—realized how far they were in over their heads.
Embedded with the army and the marines, I covered the battles for Samarra, Tel Afar, and Fallujah and smaller battles in almost every Iraqi province live from the front lines.
“I didn’t imagine you’d look so ethnic,” a marine said to me in 2004. We were lying in a schoolyard in western Anbar Province watching the sun come up. Before dawn, we had run across a bridge that the marines had warned us could be wired with explosives. He had never seen me on CNN, but had heard my middle-American accent on the radio. He was Italian American—an ethnic group that, unlike Arabs, had become part of the American mainstream generations ago.
My Arabic was far less than perfect, the product of listening to parents who spoke the language to each other but never required their children to speak it. In 2003, though, it was often considered the best Arabic in the army squads I was covering.
Would it have been equally painful to watch the train wreck unfold had I not been Arab? I think the tragic miscalculations of the war would have been. But I might not have been as conscious of the depth of misunderstanding as worlds collided.
* * *
—
In Diyala Province, an al-Qaeda stronghold and one of the centers of the growing insurgency, I covered American soldiers as they raided houses and arrested military-age men en masse in their search for al-Qaeda fighters.
The U.S. had invaded Iraq with a severe shortage of interpreters, which made their mission much more difficult. Along with their rifles, most soldiers and marines were sent off to war with a laminated cheat sheet called the Iraq Culture Smart Card. “Ihna Amerkan” (we are American) was one of its helpful phrases, along with transliterations of “turn around” and “drop your weapons.” But other terms on the card, such as mullah (religious leader) and madrasa (religious school), were rarely even used in Iraq.
In one house, a soldier urgently questioned the bewildered Iraqis with a single word from his smart card—mujahideen, or “jihadist fighters”—to try to determine whether any of them had seen al-Qaeda fighters. In another, the soldiers asked Iraqis whether there were any Palestinians with them. (There are tens of thousands of Palestinians in Iraq.)
At the beginning of each raid, there was an adrenaline rush: we didn’t know what would be behind the gates once the soldiers had kicked them down and shot the locks off the doors. But after that, the raids took on a numbing regularity.
Men and women were separated, and the men and older boys were forced to lie on the floor with their hands behind their backs. They were often blindfolded so they wouldn’t recognize the Iraqi informant, who would poin
t out people they were looking for.
The more indiscriminate raids were sweeps of entire villages where blindfolded men, their hands cuffed behind them with plastic ties, would be woken up in the middle of the night, loaded onto trucks, and driven away for questioning. Most were taken away while wearing long robes and no shoes—they weren’t given a chance to get dressed first.
I was there as a journalist to bear witness and report on the war. Embedded with American forces for an American news organization, I was required by regulations and common sense to wear body armor. The garment looked as different as possible from the military vests.
But the squad didn’t have an interpreter or an Arabic-speaking soldier, and the terrified Iraqi women who were herded into a room while their men were forced to lie motionless with their hands behind their heads couldn’t tell the difference. They assumed I was a soldier or one of the Arab American contract interpreters who would arrive in droves later on in the conflict.
With their children screaming in terror, weeping women would ask me where the men were being taken, or beg me to tell the soldiers that their sons, husbands, and brothers had done nothing wrong, and that there were no insurgents hiding among them.
I could offer only vague reassurance that the men would likely be released soon. I could see how humiliated the men and older boys felt about being treated as if they were criminals in their own homes; they seethed silently while they complied with the demands being shouted at them.
The language might have been a puzzle to American soldiers, but in some ways the culture was even more so. The essential Arab concept of maintaining dignity seemed alien to all but the savviest of soldiers.
* * *
—
But, then again, it wasn’t just soldiers who didn’t understand the culture. The Americans moved into Saddam’s palaces. L. Paul Bremer, a diplomat, was appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, a transitional government that took charge of Iraq. Less than two weeks after he arrived in his suit jacket, he signed an order disbanding the Iraqi army, believing—mistakenly—that he was dismantling the system that had kept Saddam in power. His decision proved to be the most misguided of the war. It created a security vacuum, stripped hundreds of thousands of men of their livelihoods and dignity, and fueled the insurgency that tore Iraq apart.
At the entrance to Saddam’s former palace complex, which had become the headquarters of the U.S. military, I watched as former Iraqi army generals—who hadn’t resisted the U.S. invasion but who were now out of work—gathered in front of the barbed wire to try to talk to someone in a position of authority. As spring turned into summer, they stood there, dressed in their best suits in the blazing heat, only to be told by young American soldiers in unwashed uniforms that they couldn’t come in. Inside, U.S. State Department contractors, who were paid for by Iraqi government assets and earning danger pay, threw parties by the palace swimming pool. Sometimes, I realized, stereotypes are true.
The most effective American officers and soldiers were those who realized the extraordinary importance of reaching across the cultural divide. While there were some enlightened generals who tried to make sure their troops realized that the Iraqi people were not the enemy, the officers and soldiers who made the biggest difference were the less senior ones on the ground.
In a conflict where hasty arrests were common and apologies rare, one brigade commander took our camera crew with him when he went to deliver a public apology to a local sheikh who had been wrongfully arrested. The colonel left his body armor—and his boots, as is Arab custom—at the door. The sheikh welcomed him, and us, into his home. We were seated in upholstered chairs arrayed along a long reception hall, and the colonel told the sheikh that his unit had made a mistake in detaining him. By the time the colonel was deployed back to the U.S., he and some of his men had forged genuine friendships with Iraqis.
* * *
—
Every once in a while, no matter how at home I was beginning to feel in Iraq, I realized I didn’t know very much at all.
There was the language, and then there was the code: for instance, the questions that, during the sectarian war in 2006 to 2008 and even long afterward, allowed an Iraqi checkpoint officer to determine whether the driver was Sunni or Shi’a without ever directly asking.
As I passed through checkpoints, I constantly had to remind myself not to make eye contact with security guards the way one would do in the West. To do so as an Arab woman would be considered unseemly, and would give away the fact that I was a foreigner. “Just smile a little and look beyond them, as if you’re slightly above it all,” a female Iraqi colleague instructed me. I found if I followed her instructions, the guards rarely even asked to see my ID.
There were times, though, when I realized there were things I didn’t know that I would have never even thought to ask.
Once, when I happened to mention the moon landing in casual conversation, an Iraqi colleague interjected to make sure that I knew it didn’t really happen. Stunned, I asked everyone else in the room if they believed the moon landing was faked. They all did, sending me a video explaining the camera angles as proof. Growing up in Canada, I had always been inclined to believe that government officials generally told the truth. But in the kaleidoscope world of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, people had reason to believe the opposite. This skepticism spilled over into a belief that most things were not the way they seemed.
It could be hard to persuade Iraqis of a point of view most Westerners took for granted. Iraqis came to believe that the carnage was what Americans had intended all along—that it was part of a plan to destroy the country. It was difficult to persuade them that the even more frightening alternative was true: that there never was a plan for anything, just assumptions, miscalculations, and the fatal combination of ignorance and arrogance. When I would try to argue from my Western perspective that, however misguided, the Iraq War wasn’t a conspiracy to destroy Iraq, my Arab friends would often look at me with pity.
* * *
—
By 2007, when the U.S. military pumped more forces into Iraq to fight the insurgency, the soldiers had changed. Most were on their second or third tour of duty in a conflict they had originally been told would last six months. Fewer of them believed that a bloody handprint outside a house was a mark of al-Qaeda rather than a traditional blessing in sheep’s blood, a common misconception in the early years.
For them, the idea that the war was payback for the attacks of 9/11 or a response to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction—commonly held views at the start of the war—had faded. They were there because they were soldiers; they wanted to keep their buddies safe and get home alive. A lot of them didn’t. Most of the ones I knew wanted to help when they could.
One spring morning in 2007, I was with a group of soldiers on the outskirts of Baqubah, where they’d been going from house to house looking for weapons and al-Qaeda fighters since the break of dawn. The twenty-four-year-old lieutenant needed to secure a safe place from which they could keep watch on the street, and settled on the home of a couple with five daughters and a son. I was left to explain to the family that the soldiers would be there for a few hours, and that they wanted the family to stay in the bedroom.
Selma, the mother, was worried the soldiers would put them in danger, but she nonetheless offered the men glasses of tea and apricots from her garden. She was even more worried about her daughters Yasmine and Sabreen, who insisted on walking to school. The school had been closed for several days because of fears that the students would be kidnapped by al-Qaeda or other militant groups. Yasmine’s and Sabreen’s ambitions were to become teachers, and this was the only opportunity they had to take their high school exams. It was an hour-long walk through streets that could turn violent in an instant, and they weren’t even sure the school would be open. But the girls were already dressed in white shirts and long black skirts with matching robin�
��s-egg-blue headscarves, clutching their books in plastic bags.
Selma asked me to ask the soldiers if it would be safe for the girls to go. The platoon commander said he thought it would be okay, and radioed his soldiers to keep an eye out for the two girls walking through the area.
Selma stood in the doorway and watched her daughters walk away, winding through towering date palms, until they were specks on a dusty road. “I’m so afraid for them,” she told me.
While editing the story I later wrote about the experience, I looked for a long time at the photo I’d taken of the mother, framed in the doorway. You could see the tension in her shoulders even through the black abaya she was wearing. It was the tension of holding your breath until your loved ones walk through the door again, in a time when going to school or work could get you killed.
PHOTO BY JANE ARRAF.
It’s the same sense of suspended time I saw among the families of American soldiers, who were just trying to get through another day at home as they waited to hear whether their father or mother or husband or wife was okay. The tragedy of war, of course, is that no one emerges unscathed.
* * *
—
The U.S. base in Baqubah was darkened at night to avoid mortar attacks. Soldiers so exhausted they looked like they were sleepwalking made their way back from missions, aided by the red glow of infrared flashlights. The sound of helicopters shattered the silence at night. Many of them were “angel flights” transporting the bodies of soldiers killed in combat. It felt like the edge and the end of the world.
