The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  AT THE END of March 2004, four American contractors were hauled from their SUV in Fallujah, hanged, burned and dismembered. The latent insurgency blew into open flame and warfare. The streets were empty, it was a holiday weekend to commemorate the one year anniversary of the liberation of Iraq. I drove out to the Western suburbs one day to get a sense of what was happening and saw a tank on fire on the highway, and two Black Hawk helicopters, like flies after carrion, circling above. Ahmed had stopped going to his religious university; Ali’s wife had been attending classes at the Ibn Haithem University, but a bomb had gone off on campus. Now everyone was home, coordinating rumor and news between friends and mobile phones and waiting.

  Ahmed had friends from the mosque who were taking supplies to the people. It was a siege. Fallujah had been surrounded by marines and the road to Jordan cut. The marines kept attacking, driving into the town in armor, getting rocketed and withdrawing again.

  “They’ve hit houses and mosques and hospitals.”

  Ahmed had spoken to a friend of his from the religious university who lived in Fallujah and who had told him what had happened when the four contractors were killed. The mujahideen hit them and then pulled back; it was the people of Fallujah who strung up the bodies. Ahmed shook his head and then related the gory details: there was a butcher among the crowd and he cut the bodies and distributed the meat.

  Ali and Ahmed were excited by the Resistance, there was a flash of pride and fire in their eyes. Ahmed told me, “They are not terrorists. They are defending their country.”

  “According to sharia,” Islamic law, Ali explained, “we cannot have a foreign force coming in and planning elections for us. In sharia it is said that each one called to jihad has to fight.”

  “The issue is the fighting now,” said Ahmed, determined and resolute. “Many innocents will die, but they will be replaced, when Americans die they will not be replaced. People who are killed are given a next life and those who are wounded can ask from God anything they wish. This raises morale. But if an infidel is killed what is his benefit? If I carry a gun and I am killed, I benefit both ways. If I am killed I benefit and if I am victorious I benefit. The other side has no compensation. They have no reward of heaven because they are sinners.”

  I protested: more death? I could no longer believe in its exigency.

  Ahmed, always patient, again explained: “The mujahid is protecting his country, his honor, his religion.”

  “But they are destroying your country and your religion is not under threat.”

  “In Iraq the Americans have taken all the names of those who perform the fajar prayer because they are mostly mujahideen.”

  “But you are free to practice your religion! No one is stopping you studying the Koran or preventing you from going to the mosque!”

  “I think they are pushing Muslims all over the world. Iraq is a Muslim country.”

  “But the Americans do not think they are fighting Muslims because they are Muslims.”

  Ali cut in to our debate: “The soldiers are just obeying orders. Their leaders understand very well what they are doing.”

  “So it’s war.”

  “We have been waiting for this day,” replied Ali, pulling his patriotism upright. “The Americans attacked us in 1991 and destroyed our army. They attacked us again in 1998. They attacked us from the air, with bombs, we could not see their faces. But now they are next to us in the streets; the people who were killing us are very close.”

  “With all their power and their planes and tanks and bombs, the worst they can do is kill you,” said Ahmed. “But we’re not afraid of death. It is a shameful thing for a Muslim to be afraid of death. God is on our side and Allah has promised us victory.”

  I understood that for Ali and Ahmed death was good: martyrdom, paradise and honor. But for an atheist like me it was the nihilistic severance of a future that might allow understanding, regret, forgiveness, compassion and solace.

  Ahmed addressed my dismay. “What you have is only the life you are living now and to lose it is very difficult. But we have a replacement, the next life. This life is cheap, inshallah. I would wish my brothers to die fighting, rather than at home and in their beds. They would die with honor. We do not believe that fighting can delay or hasten death. It is already written. It is called God’s will and it solves a lot of problems.”

  “Yes,” I answered, “Islam, submission.”

  Ahmed concurred: “If you choose to be a Muslim you should obey and not argue.”

  A FEW DAYS later I went south to Kufa, to see the Shia uprising under the “firebrand cleric” Moqtada al-Sadr and when I returned I told Ahmed about the RPGs in the mosque and how they had shot up an American Humvee patrol. I asked him how he felt about what was happening.

  “On one hand happy, because it’s intifada; on the other side sad because so many of them are dying.”

  Ali came in and sat down: “And now the Sunna are taking advantage. There was fighting in Adhamiya last night.”

  “So it’s beginning.”

  “Inshallah,” said Ahmed,

  “What will you do?”

  “What I can do I will do.”

  “Do you want to fight?”

  “What needs to be done, I will do it.”

  “Do you have a gun?”

  “Yes, from before the fall of Baghdad we have guns. And we’ve been taught how to use them.”

  “I know, your father taught you all.”

  “We used to have air guns.” Ahmed went back to his childhood with a smile. “I used to take it and go hunting, sometimes without my parents’ knowledge. I even injured myself in the stomach once—”

  I laughed, “How?”

  “I was pointing it at myself.”

  “How old were you?”

  “About nine.”

  “Well, that’s one lesson. Don’t point your gun at yourself.”

  Chapter 7

  “ARE YOU SURE IT’S NOT KUT?”

  THE SUMMER OF 1990: A LACUNA OF PEACE. DR. Hassan had just returned to Baghdad from a sabbatical in Munich (it took years of petitioning to get an exit visa), hopeful that things would now settle and relax and re-establish and that he could resume his practice. Kamel Sachet was writing training manuals for the Special Forces and winning intra-army shooting competitions. On July 25th Saddam Hussein received the American Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, who told him that the United States had no particular interest in a border dispute over slant oil drilling and debt repayments between Iraq and Kuwait. Meanwhile, oblivious to all these people and their concerns, Sgt. Mohammed Jobouri of the Special Forces Parachute Regiment, just another soldier in an army between wars, was locked in the stockade under penalty of death.

  Sgt. Mohammed Jobouri was then twenty, young and in love. He had been at home for two weeks, sneaking out at night to crawl into his love’s bedroom window and sleeping all day and not thinking about the consequences of desertion. “I am on leave!” he lied to his disapproving father who rolled his eyes at such youth and laziness. And what was there to get up for? Barking drills in the parched heat; the repetitive order of barrack life? Even in the retelling of the story, after ten years of exile in Syria (he had got out of Iraq in the mid-nineties), Mohammed Jobouri seemed unimpressed by the duty and discipline required by his regiment. He gave himself up to the long nights that eked toward dawn, absorbed in his love and his own sweet apathy; until a military patrol found him AWOL on the street and took him to the Military Prison No. 1 where he was beaten with extra ferocity by military policemen happy to exercise their schadenfreude at a Special Forces paratrooper stripped of his stripes.

  He stretched out his index finger and I saw that it still trembled with old traumas. He rubbed his wrists in memory of wire and raw tendon and touched his jaw where it had been whacked with rifle butts. “In the cold weather it aches and hurts so that I cannot eat sometimes.”

  He told me that he had been sure he would be executed. He had been missing from dut
y for fifteen days. He was only a sergeant with no wasta, influence, to trade or intervene and he expected to be hanged. One day he was being transferred along with several other prisoners. There were eight or ten of them in the back of a truck, they were not blindfolded or handcuffed and there were only two guards. The truck stopped at a red light, the driver was lost in the streets around Adhamiya, and one of the guards got out to help him look at a map. Mohammed thought quickly, punched the remaining guard in the face, grabbed his rifle clip and threw it into the traffic and leaped out of the truck shouting at the other prisoners: “Run! Split up!” But the rest of the prisoners were struck dumb and paralyzed by the authority of the system in which they found themselves shackled (although unshackled) and did not move.

  Mohammed ran as fast as he could until his lungs burned but the neighborhood was full of villas surrounded by high walls and after several blocks a police car cut him off and he was tackled, kicked a little for good measure and sent back to Military Prison No. 1.

  “Why did you think differently from them?” I asked him as he sat opposite me in his down-at-heel office off the main street in Seyda Zeinab, the suburb of Damascus where many Iraqi exiles and refugees had settled. “The others stayed sitting on the truck, perhaps waiting too for their own death sentences and dared not run; but you ran.”

  Mohammed Jobouri scratched his head and said he did not wish to seem as if he had left them there: “I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t like to do things for other people.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean,” I reassured him, “I mean you thought independently.”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t know whether you will take this as flattery or as an insult,” I said, “but you are the first Iraqi soldier I have talked to who has admitted disobedience.”

  He smiled a little at this.

  “Where did it come from?” I asked, “Was your family well educated?”

  His father had been a mechanic, his grandfather a simple farmer, his great-grandfather had died on the boat during Haj. He could see nothing special about his family background; but then he plumbed a little into his childhood and remembered that it was his grandfather that he had always revered and looked up to. When he was a child his grandfather had often taken him aside and led him through his fields and farm chores. There was something in his calm deliberation, his attention to his work, the careful way he tended to his crops and his cattle; he was a man who preferred listening to talking, but his words, when they came, held old wisdom. The example of his grandfather was buried deep inside him: common sense, arbitration—his grandfather was the great problem-solver of the family—and grace. Perhaps, he thought, that is why he behaved differently to most of the other soldiers.

  By the time he was delivered to his regimental brig at the barracks next to the airfield at Abu Ghraib, pending tribunal (Special Forces soldiers were dealt with in their own units) he had been beaten so badly his head was swollen like a watermelon, his ribs were broken and he could hardly move. He lay on a straw pallet chewing small handfuls of rice, passing in and out of the healing oblivion of a coma sleep. When he woke one morning and managed to sit up he asked his guards if he could be taken to the shower. The guards were men he had served with and knew, but he was marked as an escape risk and they dared not let him out, so instead they threw buckets of water through the top of the door while he sat on the other side rubbing his wet body clean.

  In the dark he suffered flashbacks from the beatings, shards of silver life and pain. He rubbed his wrists again; “There were times when I cried. I asked God to help me, not to free me, because I had brought this trouble on myself, but just to let me see my family one last time—”

  These last words were wrenched from his closing throat and he fished in his pocket for a pair of sunglasses, which he put on. He looked somewhat ridiculous, hiding his gathering tears so obviously—suddenly he found he could not hold himself back any longer, and acutely embarrassed, he rushed out of the room.

  When he returned, I told him he did not have to—

  He said no, he wanted to continue, he wanted people to know. His voice was hoarse, a torn cadence stretched thin and blocked by tears as his words returned to his cell and took up his prayer. While he prayed softly, unbelievably his small brother Raed, then just a boy of six, appeared beside him, smuggled into the camp by his friends and pushed through the bars of the window, “like an angel.” He crawled over to Mohammed and told him all about his adventure, wide-eyed, quite pleased with himself and without any fear or pity or reprimand.

  I let this miracle rest for several heartbeats. “What happened to the angel Raed?”

  Mohammed looked down and sighed, “Raed went in a different direction.”

  Raed had joined the Saddam Fedayeen units and become part of Uday’s murderous entourage. Gripped in the eye of the madness. “He was transformed into a ruthless Bedouin, like Saddam.” Mohammed was disgusted and sad. “He knew nothing but what they told him, he was indoctrinated.”

  One night, after the fall of Saddam, when Mohammed had returned to Baghdad for a visit, he sat up with Raed watching an American movie. Raed didn’t believe that the skyscrapers were real. He had never been outside of Iraq and for him they were legends of invented foreign propaganda.

  “An innocent child turned into a beast. I don’t blame him, it was his surroundings.”

  MOHAMMED’S TIME AWAITING the due process of sentence of death was helped by his friends who brought him fruit and bottles of frozen water. In his end days he felt the joy of his family’s love and he read the Koran straight through for the first time and began to feel as if God was testing him as he was testing God. He learned patience in prison, for what else was there to learn but inward strength and tropes of survival?

  Still he tested the system; somehow God was not the solace of fate to him, but will. He borrowed ink from a soldier who was a calligrapher and drew a picture of disembodied eyes looking toward a figure that had a crown like the Statue of Liberty and held a weighted balance in her hands. For that piece of sarcasm he spent the night standing outside as shifts of soldiers threw buckets of filthy water over him. When he was put back in the cell he took a nail and scratched on the wall a picture of the punishing officer as a devil being stabbed by an angel, like St. George with a sword. For this he was made to stand at attention outside all night under a glaring burning light bulb so that the mosquitoes came and ate him.

  As long as the Koran lasted, his patience held, but when he had finished it, he ran out of patience and prayed for his own skin. If this was a parable, salvation would have come the next day with a cracking bolt of lightning. But instead of God, it was Saddam who was omnipotent, and it was the fickleness of his whim, not God’s, that rescued Sgt. Jobouri.

  The next morning he was woken by the Red Alert trumpet and a commotion of frenzied activity as everyone hurried to muster. A friend of his ran up to his cell door, calling his name, “Mohammed,” out of breath with the news. “I remembered you, Mohammed!”

  “I hope that you remember me when you do good deeds so that God might save me!”

  “We were in the canteen last night, it was on the radio—it is a general amnesty!”

  All day the barracks were full of noise and clamor and scurry. A helicopter took off ferrying the Colonel to a meeting at the Republican Palace, leave was canceled, officers recalled, soldiers rushed to and fro, equipment was counted, checked and packed. Drill or exercise? No one knew, rumors flew about, but the Colonel’s summons to the Republican Palace and his agitation on his return kept the usual excitement of mobilization to a grimmer hum.

  In the late afternoon, a sergeant major of the regiment, a respected man, came across Mohammed in prison: “Are you still here? You should have been released!”

  “No one dares to ask the Colonel to countersign the order—”

  The sergeant major, braver than two lieutenants and a regimental secretary, got the order signed and told Mohammed to ga
ther some borrowed kit, double-time, because they were jumping that night.

  They were dropped after midnight, seventy-five paratroopers on the first drop and then the plane turned around and seventy-five were dropped on the second pass. Mohammed felt himself fall out of the large white noise of the plane into the pure dark of an unexpected night. He had missed two training jumps and was as nervous as if it was his first time. The lurching fall sucked his spirit upward from his toes to the tingling roots of his hair, the wind rushed in his ears and his eyes streamed tears because he had no goggles. When the canopy yanked open with a jolt and a split-second terror of tangle and malfunction, his heart stopped and then his spirit re-entered his body in reverse, as if he was returning to himself. He settled himself in midair and lit a cigarette, cradling the match flame in his shirt collar against the wind. Small spark in the middle of the hanging night, surrounded by a silence as dense as water.

  He floated for a few moments, inhaling the smoke and the quiet. He looked down at his feet—it was always hard to judge the distance to the ground at night, their parachutes were of an old Russian design and unsteerable and they carried no altimeters—the black earth flew up toward him unseen but some old instinct kicked in as he hit the ground and he managed to roll and gave quick thanks that he had not broken anything.

  He took stock: he was weak and thin from his injuries and his confinement, when he ran his hand over his face his cheekbones felt sharp and alien. But he had his uniform on again and he touched, a little in disbelief, the Special Forces badge on his shoulder, and felt the outline of a parachute suspended above an ox head with the words “Sacrifice Martyrdom Glory” embroidered beneath. His equipment was meager but weighed heavily enough: helmet, Kalashnikov, three extra clips of ammunition; a further seventy-five bullets and four grenades were strapped to his vest. Below that he carried a bed roll stuffed with food for two days, cans of cheese and stew (they used to open the cans with the sharp edge of an ammunition clip), tea bags and sugar, a razor, shoe polish, a gas mask, a roll of bandages, a change of underwear and dog tags. He carried no personal items, rings, jewelry and money were forbidden, but he had a tattoo on his inner forearm so that his body could be identified. It was the name of his love, “Sabrina.”