I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

  Under Islamic law, sectarian allegiance is patrilineal. When I was in Fallujah or speaking to conservative Sunnis, I would tell them that my father was Moroccan. There are no Shia in Morocco, so the implication was clear. But I also played with it. In Shia neighborhoods, I would tell people that my mother was Ahl al-Bayt, a member of the Prophet’s family, and they would nod knowingly. In Shia Islam, this term, which can be translated “people of the house,” traditionally includes only Muhammad; Muhammad’s daughter Fatima; her husband, Ali; their two sons; and their direct descendants, the imams. In Sunni areas, people also liked to hear about my heritage. While some share the common Shia interpretation, others also count the Prophet’s wives as members of the holy family. But both sects agree on the honorableness of Ahl al-Bayt.

  The fact that both my parents are descendants opened doors, but it also showed me something terrifying: there were people who would refuse to talk to or associate with those who came from a different sect. For the first time, I was experiencing a dividing line within Islam that my parents, and especially my mother, had confronted years earlier, before I was born. I sensed that covering Iraq would be a turning point in my life, but I didn’t yet realize how much the war would teach me about my own family history.

  I spent the first few months at a house in the Jadriya district with Peter Finn and other colleagues from the Post. I quickly grew friendly with the brilliant and humble Lebanese-American journalist Anthony Shadid. We talked about the Sunni-Shia divide, and I told him that it shocked me. “It’s been going on for hundreds of years,” he told me, and he predicted that things would get worse.

  My task was still to find Ahmad al-Ani, the diplomat who had allegedly met with Mohamed Atta in Prague. I had phone numbers for two Iraqi diplomats in Baghdad—one that a contact in Germany had given me, the other from the man I’d met at the embassy in Berlin. I met with each of them separately at the Hamra Hotel, where the Post had booked a room to be used for interviews. For security, we never brought any of our sources to the house without discussing it with the bureau chief first.

  The Iraqi diplomat from the embassy, the one who had laughed at my naïveté, found al-Ani for me. “This is his number,” he told me. “I’ve been to his house and told him he can trust you. But don’t waste too much time. I’m sure you’re not the only one who’s looking for him.”

  I called the number the diplomat had given me. A woman answered. “Who are you?” she asked.

  I knew that the phones might be tapped, so I tried to be careful.

  “I’m Souad,” I told her. “I think your family member has heard about me.”

  “Wait,” she said in Arabic, and then I heard her whisper, “Souad?”

  “Yes, yes, give me the phone,” I heard a man say. “Yes, this is al-Ani. I’m the diplomat you’re looking for.”

  I wanted to stop him from saying too much over the phone, but he went on. “I know they will try to make me disappear, but I want you to know, it is all a lie. What they said about me is a lie. I never met any of these terrorists, nor have we had anything to do with these attacks.”

  “Please don’t say these things here,” I broke in. “Somebody might be listening.”

  “I want you to know, it is all a lie. They will come for me anyway, I know. But at least now you know and the world has to know.”

  He agreed to meet the next day, saying, “The person who gave you my number will bring you here.”

  I called the man from the embassy. His friend had invited us for tea the next day, I said. “Could we meet at the Hamra and go together?” He agreed.

  The next day, in a Washington Post car with an Iraqi driver, we reached al-Ani’s house to find the door broken. A man came outside. His gray hair still had some black in it, and his skin looked pale. He wore dark blue trousers and a mint-colored shirt. My diplomat friend got out of the car, introduced himself, and asked to speak to Mr. al-Ani.

  “You mean my brother?” the man answered. “He’s gone. They took him last night.”

  “Who took him?” I asked.

  The man looked at me. “Are you Souad the journalist? He told me about you.”

  He said that the previous night, six or seven men had stormed the house. They wore masks and carried guns, and they shouted al-Ani’s name. “They handcuffed my brother with plastic ties, blindfolded him, and took him away,” the brother reported. “We don’t know where he is.”

  “Who are ‘they’?” I asked.

  “We don’t know for sure, but we think the Americans. You know they used him as a scapegoat to create a reason for attacking Iraq.”

  With al-Ani gone, I knew that the story would be difficult to write. I asked if I could talk to his wife. Al-Ani’s brother told me that she and her sister had been at the house the previous night and were in shock; they had gone to stay with their parents.

  “I can understand that she might be in shock, but it is important I talk to her,” I said. “Can I talk to her tomorrow or the day after?”

  He shook his head.

  “You can’t. The men who took my brother told her not to talk to the media.”

  I was speechless. Why had this man and his family been silenced? Didn’t they have as much right as anyone to tell their story? I had his denial over the phone, but it wasn’t good enough. I’d never met al-Ani before that call, so I didn’t know his voice and couldn’t be sure it was really him I’d spoken to. If I’d met him, I would have asked for proof of his identity.

  We tried to locate al-Ani by calling military spokespeople; some colleagues tried to find him through sources in other agencies, but no one wanted to say anything on the record. Finally, we confirmed that the Americans had arrested him.

  Al-Ani was gone, but I stayed in Iraq. I got to know the Post’s Iraqi staff. One of the two older women who cooked for us said she had worked in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces and boasted that he loved her white beans and rice. One of our Iraqi stringers, Naseer, teased her: “Maybe because that’s the only dish you can truly cook.”

  I learned a lot from the staff, who included Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds. Their ethnicities and religious beliefs didn’t matter, they said, and they told me that these hadn’t mattered before, either. Most of the local stringers were highly educated. Some had been businessmen or engineers, while Naseer, whom we called Abu Sayf, had been a pilot for Iraqi Airways. He worked as a translator and stringer, and his son was a Post driver.

  I became part of the fast-paced metabolism of the bureau, chasing stories about what life in Iraq had been under Saddam as well as the continuing search for weapons of mass destruction. Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority that was running Iraq, had recently announced that the Iraqi army and police forces would be disbanded. During one press conference, Ahmad Chalabi, the Shia politician who led the Iraqi National Congress and had helped persuade the U.S. government to invade, said that honorable men in his organization would take care of security, but that the new Iraq could function only if those who had belonged to the Ba’ath Party were held responsible for their crimes. But de-Ba’athification would have serious consequences; the dissolution of the army and police left crowds of mostly Sunni men with security experience unemployed, armed, and angry. It turned into a recruitment bonanza for Al Qaeda in Iraq.

  From what I could gather, Chalabi had a questionable reputation. Why would Bremer hold press conferences with such a man? Why would someone like Chalabi—who had spent many years outside Iraq—have more say in the future of this country than those who had lived here their whole lives? Was this really about building a better future for the Iraqis, or was it about the United States putting people in power who would be easy to handle?

  “But doesn’t the United States think that a guy with such a track record will be more harm than help?” I asked Anthony Shadid one day, during a tea break in our garden.

  “Souad, most of the people in the United States don’t think that far,” he responded. “Chalabi speaks English. He
has studied in the United States. He knows how to crack the right jokes. He knows how to play the game in DC. Believe it or not, that’s what matters to some of these decision makers.”

  * * *

  EVERY NIGHT WHEN my colleagues called their loved ones, I dialed my parents in Germany. During those conversations, as I talked about what I was seeing, I began to learn more about the early years of my parents’ marriage, and how the Sunni-Shia rift that was deepening in Iraq had been a source of trouble for them, too.

  The sectarian divide had been much more problematic on my mother’s side. My mother was born and grew up in Antakya, a Turkish city near the Syrian border. During the First World War, my great-grandfather had sheltered Armenians in his house and helped to smuggle them across the border to Syria in horse carriages. My family never talked about it much because even years later they feared the consequences. Some members of the family had been jailed for aiding Armenians. They didn’t share a faith, but they had something else in common: both were minorities in the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey.

  My mother’s relatives are Turkish citizens, but of Arab descent, having come originally from Syria. When she was growing up, people of Arab descent in Turkey were often sent to do their compulsory military service in Kurdish areas, where there was active conflict. My mother’s father, a successful tire dealer, and her older brothers told stories about how, in the 1950s and ’60s, armed Turkish soldiers would show up and say, “We’ll rape all your girls. We’ll kill you. You’re not really Muslims.” As a result, people in the Arab-Turkish border regions began to resist the Turks. They built up their own local security forces and monitored their own neighborhoods, allowing only Christians and people of Arab descent to live there.

  My mother told me that when she was a teenager, she had fallen in love with a Turkish policeman. They’d wanted to marry, but her brothers had said they would kill her if she married a Turk. My grandmother was sympathetic, but my mother’s brothers were firm: she was not going to marry a Turk or a Sunni.

  My mother turned down the policeman’s proposal, but her heart was broken, and she was furious with her family. “I pray that God takes me away from you, to where there are seven seas between us,” she told them. That was part of the reason she went to work in Germany. When she and my father started seeing each other and decided to marry, she didn’t tell her family. She waited until after the wedding to share the news, for fear of what they’d do or say.

  And she was right: the old wound hadn’t healed. My mother’s brothers flew into a rage. They had forbidden their sister to marry a Turk, and now she had gone and married a man who wasn’t even from their part of the world—and on top of that, he was a Sunni. Some of her brothers threatened to kill her. When my sister Fatma suffered brain damage at birth, they thought the worst. “You will see, he is going to leave you now that you’ve had a sick child,” one of them told her. My father stuck around, but when my sister Hannan was born a year later, some of my uncles still wouldn’t speak to him.

  It was then that my grandmother in Morocco went to a “letter writer” and dictated a message to be sent to my grandparents in Turkey. “We are honorable people,” she told them in Arabic. “You say you are descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. We are also descendants of the Prophet, and we’re not allowed to discriminate. We love your daughter, and we will do our best to make her part of our family.”

  Perhaps her letter had some effect, because while my uncles remained angry, my grandfather began to soften. When my father, mother, and two sisters traveled to visit my mother’s family in Turkey for the first time, some of her brothers refused to shake my father’s hand and left the room when he entered. They told my mother they would never accept her marriage.

  My grandfather put an end to that. “Enough is enough,” he told his sons. “He’s part of the family, and you have to accept it.” He welcomed my father and ordered my uncles to do the same. “I’m still the head of the family,” he said. “If you don’t do what I say, you’ll no longer be my sons.”

  In the years that followed, my parents won further favor in the family because they cared for my grandparents so well. They sent money to Turkey every month, and when one of my mother’s brothers didn’t want to do his mandatory military service, my mother and father helped him pay to get out of it. This brother was part of a political student movement, and he ultimately had to leave the country. My parents helped him get a visa to come to Germany, and he lived with us for a few months. All this proved that my father had fully embraced my mother and her family.

  When I was in Iraq, these stories poured out of my mother. As I told her about the growing hatred between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq, she started speaking in a way I’d never heard before.

  “There has been a lot of suffering, because they were killing us,” she said one night.

  “Who’re ‘they’?”

  “The Sunnis.”

  “Mom, your kids are Sunni!”

  I could hear my father in the background, asking what she was talking about. I heard him say, “Don’t forget we left all this behind us.”

  She told me about her upbringing in Turkey and how, when she was a child, Turks would come and say, “We’re going to kill you.”

  “This was because you were Arab, not Shia,” I said. “If you’d been Sunni, they would have said the same.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You’re right.”

  I told her that militia fighters loyal to the Iraqi Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr were going into mixed neighborhoods and telling Sunnis they would be killed if they didn’t leave their houses. Sadr wanted to turn these places into pure Shia enclaves. “Why are these Shia doing this?” I asked my mother.

  “They have also suffered,” she said. “You should look into what happened to them before.”

  Sunnis and Shia had lived together in the same Baghdad neighborhoods for decades, I told her. The difference now was that fundamentalists were claiming those neighborhoods as their own. “You have no idea,” I said. “These people are criminals.”

  The rise of Iraq’s Shia majority was aided by the return of powerful Iraqi exiles, politicians and religious figures alike, who had ties to Iran—and in many cases had lived there for years. One of these was Nouri al-Maliki, who would later become Iraq’s prime minister. A dissident under Saddam, he’d lived in Iran and Syria before returning to Iraq in 2003. Another was Ayatollah Mohammad Baqr al-Hakim, an important figure in U.S. efforts to build a new Iraqi government. After more than two decades of exile in Iran, he returned as head of what is now called the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a leading Shia political organization. The group’s militia, known as the Badr Brigades, had been recruited, trained, and armed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. After the fall of Saddam, Iran continued to provide political, financial, and military support to the Supreme Council and the Badr Brigades.

  While some of my journalist friends attended pool parties at the Hamra Hotel, I spent my nights reading my politics books for school and writing reports for my professors. I had made a deal with three of them: they would allow me to miss lectures if I sent them weekly reports. It was surreal to be reading Marx or trying to understand the theory of complex interdependence at night after witnessing the collapse of a nation by day.

  I wondered how the United States and Britain had allowed Iraq to fall into this trap. While we reporters could clearly see that sectarian tensions were rising and religious figures were gaining influence, no one in authority seemed particularly concerned, certainly not Paul Bremer. There were many things I didn’t understand. Why didn’t U.S. officials choose Iraqi engineers and architects, who were among the best in the Arab world, to rebuild the country? Instead, they gave the contracts to Jordanian, Lebanese, British, or U.S. firms, which then subcontracted the jobs to Iraqis. It didn’t make sense.

  As a child in Frankfurt, I’d loved U.S. soldiers, but now I was seeing those troops—and America itself—from a different vantage point. My previous experience wi
th Americans had come from growing up near a U.S. military base. When I was in kindergarten, my mother tells me, I liked to flirt with the soldiers. Whenever I saw them in the streets, they would smile and give me chewing gum or a lollipop. Most important, the Americans spent a lot of time working with the school for handicapped children that Fatma attended. Every year, they organized a Special Olympics. It was held on a grassy field, and there were hot dogs, soft drinks, and ice cream. One soldier would volunteer to take care of each child, and everyone got a medal.

  But the American soldiers I saw in Iraq weren’t friendly. I began to understand that most American soldiers knew little or nothing about Iraq or about Arab culture. Once, when I wanted to go to a press conference in the Green Zone, I decided on purpose to stand in the line for Iraqis rather than the one for foreigners. As I waited, an American soldier walked past, gun in hand, grimacing and spitting on the ground. I could see that the Iraqis in the line were appalled.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the soldier, in English. “Don’t do that. It’s very rude. It’s as if you’re spitting on their country.”

  I didn’t spend much time with American soldiers in Iraq. But one day in July 2003, I got a call from an Iraqi source who urged me to come to Mosul as fast as I could. “There’s a shoot-out going on here,” he said. “American soldiers are involved as well. I cannot say more. The phones might be tapped.”

  We confirmed that there was shooting, and we heard that American soldiers were conducting an operation. But against whom? I called my source back and asked an adviser to drag him out of a meeting.

  “Do you know what is going on?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “The U.S. soldiers are having a heavy battle with people who were hiding in a house.”

  “Who are these people?”

  “I can’t give you details now, but you should come. This is big.”

  I told him it was too risky to come without knowing who was involved. The road to Mosul wasn’t safe, and the bureau chief would want to know why we were going.