The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  “Bushra! What happened?” I asked her.

  She smiled and shrugged. She said that she had finally given in to the nagging of her husband and her daughter, Louisa, “the feminist.” Wearing the hijab in Europe, she said, was the opposite of comfortable, and here in Amman, well, in the nicer parts of the city, it was perfectly normal for a woman to be bareheaded.

  I asked for their news and how was their family?

  Louisa lived in Holland, “Oh, she is completely European now!” said her father, half proud, half lamenting. Another son was in Germany, working hard, and well, but their youngest! Dr. Laith looked unhappy. His youngest was supposed to be studying in Germany but he had taken up radical Islam, “It’s like we have completely lost him,” said his father.

  Shifting feelings, priorities, values, country, context: this was one family as microcosm. Somehow, the combination of Dr. Laith’s rueful wisdom, Bushra’s in-and-out of hijab and the juxtaposed irony of their feminist daughter and Islamicized son both living in Europe, made me realize that just as nothing is to be assumed, nothing is set in stone.

  Epilogue

  THE LAST TIME I SAW THE SACHET FAMILY WAS IN January 2005 when I went back to Baghdad for the first elections. I flew to Baghdad from Amman, braced myself against the sickening g-force of the spiral descent (to avoid insurgent missiles) as the earth spun around the windows and the ground came rushing up like a crash, filed through immigration (Iraqi officials asked “D o D?” Department of Defense, instead of for my passport), collected bags with the other somber travelers: a Washington Post reporter, two MPs, miserable to be home, and several beefy contractors wearing khaki trousers and gun holsters strapped to their thighs; rode the bus to the car park collection point, met with the driver who had brought an abaya for me to wear as disguise, sat in the back of the car looking out at a city that had become, in the previous six months, too dangerous for me to be in. There was plenty of traffic on the highway, tinny smashed-up orange-and-white-quartered taxis, second hand Hondas, pick-up trucks piled with bedding and small children. The palm trees and bougainvillea bushes in the median strip had all been torn up to deny cover for insurgent attacks, American tanks squatted like great toads amid the wasteland trash, high chain link cages had been erected on the highway bridges to stop people throwing rocks and IEDs at American patrols passing underneath. At one point the traffic slowed to a jam behind an American army convoy, keeping their distance, as mandated—“KEEP BACK FIFTY FEET” read the sign on the Humvee, “or we will be shot at” added the driver—like crawling supplicants.

  I had been away six months. When we drove across the Tigris into Jadriyeh, the upscale peninsula opposite the GreenZone where the Hamra hotel was located, I looked around to see what differences I could notice. The ice cream parlor was still open, but the alcohol shop was closed, the Australians were still garrisoning the upper floors of a building site on the main road, but the bridge to Dora (once a mixed neighborhood, Sunni, Shia, Christian, violent, random, lots of gunfire, and one of the new no-go areas) was almost empty of traffic. I saw that the big traffic circle by the bridge was now guarded by the black clad Badr brigade, the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the main Shia parties who had their headquarters nearby. The Babylon Hotel, where I used to go swimming, the vegetable stall man under a striped umbrella where I used to buy spinach, the entrance to the cul-de-sac where I used to live, the cordoned road past the old police station that had been refurbished into some kind of Interior Ministry bunker (later revealed as a torture prison), the heavily fortified American checkpoint that had got blown up the previous spring and since been hit again—I watched all these familiar landmarks go by outside the moving window, now overgrown with war detritus: concrete barriers, metal tank jacks, rolls of concertina razor wire, sandbags, plywood signposts crudely daubed with red paint arrows. The unseen fear hung low like the gray winter sky; the kidnap risk was so high I could not get out of the car to walk down the street.

  The first morning I was woken up with a car bomb, four or five blocks away; boom, 8 a.m. alarm call. The second morning I was woken up with a car bomb two blocks away, aimed at the Australians. It blew the windows out of the hotel on one side and killed a boy who sold cigarettes on the corner. We all went out onto the main road to kick over the ashy debris and watch the firemen hose down the soot skeleton of the car. The bomb had scorched some of the raw concrete pillars, but the Australians on the floors above reported no casualties. We stood around watching the desultory scene, as a few photographers went closer in to capture the last tongues of flame against the wreckage, and remarked to each other how nice it was to get out of the hotel and walk around a bit, and what a funny irony it was that the deranged atmosphere of car bomb aftermath could provide respite from the usual unease—

  I RANG ALI Sachet when I first arrived. Saidiya was, like much of Baghdad, no-go for foreigners, under de facto insurgent control, IED alleys, the odd American patrol that ventured there was invariably shot at. Ali said they were happy to hear from me, that he would come and pick me up from the hotel the following afternoon.

  He and his younger brother Mustafa came to collect me. I remembered Mustafa from the previous summer as a skinny, lanky, diffident youth in awe of his older brothers. Now he looked like a bodybuilder, tall, rippling muscles, strong.

  “He has been working weights!” Ali told me laughing, cuffing his brother on the ear, “like a good bodyguard!” Mustafa grinned abashed and put his foot down like a kid in a video game, speeding, veering through the traffic as if he owned the road. Ali told him to calm down as we turned off the highway into Saidiya.

  There were plenty of people out on the street, shopping and going about their business. Did I imagine insurgent spotters on the corners? Men sitting in cafés with a mobile phone at their elbow, teenagers hanging around the intersections?

  “This area is ours now!” Ali told me, boisterous and boasting, “the Americans don’t come here anymore! They know we will kill them!”

  “What about the police?” I asked. I had seen, in my first few days, the nascent police units on the street in Jadriyeh and I even pretended to myself that this made me feel safer somehow.

  “The police?” Ali snorted. Mustafa giggled. We drove past the unfinished mosque, there was a pile of ragged razor wire balled up on the corner next to a heap of rubble. “That was the police station! Ha! Blew it up yesterday! They don’t dare to come here now!”

  We parked outside the house, inside everyone was waiting to say hello, except Omar, who was characteristically absent and busy. They all seemed pleased to see me and jolly. Um Omar gave me a hug and Shadwan poured me some tea and they said they were not surprised I had not come back earlier, yes, they had seen the footage of kidnapped journalists over the summer. Yes, hamdilullah, they were all well, everyone was well. Ali had a son now and they had called him Kamel! They had redecorated the reception room, pale yellow and blue—what did I think? Did I like it?

  “When the lights come on it is very nice,” said Um Omar, smiling, “but the electricity is very bad.”

  “It is cold in here now and we don’t have kerosene for a heater,” said Ali. Shadwan added they had no water for seven days. They used water from a well they dug in the garden during the war to wash the dishes with, for other water they go to different districts and fill up at taps or out of water tankers.

  Mohammed, the eldest toddling grandchild, was brought into the room by his mother. Shadwan said she was teaching at a teachers’ training college for women now; it was not far and it was a safer neighborhood than her last school, which was all Shia.

  “And the bombs and the violence? And all the kidnapping? Are you worried about Shadwan when she goes to work? Or the little ones when they play in the street?” I asked.

  Um Omar laughed, no no! Not at all, in their neighborhood they felt very safe; everyone knew them here and the Americans did not dare to come and the municipality office had been blown up so t
hey didn’t have to worry about police interference.

  “They come sometimes—the Americans arrested a friend of Abu Omar’s who lives in the neighborhood and they took all his sons; some of the sons they released. Yes, it’s true, a general’s son was kidnapped a few streets away, but we don’t worry.” Everyone knew the mujahideen and they took care of things. They felt safer with them.

  They brought me tea and gave me holy zamzam water from Mecca (apparently Ali and Omar had gone to visit the Holy Places recently). They did not have any questions for me, they were not interested in my explanations of American policy and intentions like they had been a year and a half before when I had first met them; instead they had plenty of their own answers and opinions. Jihad, they maintained, was important for its own sake because it was a holy undertaking in front of God. The result of jihad, they said, its successes or failures or consequences were not so important. “The Resistance is winning now. At least it is stopping the Americans from running everything and imposing all their plans.”

  “In Samarra the Resistance held the streets for three months!” Ali told me with pride. “They even had traffic police! They occupied the police stations and kept order. They regulated prices in the vegetable market and distributed rations of kerosene. And now Salman Pak southeast of Baghdad is almost under control of the mujahideen and some people who suffered kidnapping there went to the mujahideen for help and the mujahideen executed four kidnappers and now it is one of the safest areas in Iraq!”

  The Sachets were an anomaly; they were the only people I talked to in Baghdad that winter who were not pale and tense and shocked by the general situation and talking worriedly about leaving Iraq and how they could find money, jobs, passports, visas. Schools were intermittently closed, people were afraid to send their kids to them, the University faculties were intimidated by Shia parties, refugees from Fallujah and Ramadi were camping in empty houses, electricity, water, sewage, hospitals were all terrible and groaning—it was a litany of collapse and the criminal banditry, often mixed up with the insurgency, car jacking, robbery, kidnapping was epidemic. The going rate for a kidnapped boy, the most common victims, was about $5,000; but the kidnappers, often neighbors, former colleagues, even extended cousins, knew their targeted families well and researched their means. If they thought the father had money stashed somewhere, or a rich brother overseas, the price could be $50,000 or more. But the Sachets did not seem perturbed. On the contrary, there was a strange ebullient confidence about them: they were fighting back and they thought they were winning.

  “Will you vote next week?” I asked them.

  “No. No!” they all shook their heads with emphatic distaste. The Association of Muslim Clerics had decreed that Sunnis should not vote and most of the Sunni population were boycotting what they saw as an American engineered Shia takeover.

  “It is written in the Constitution that you cannot have an election under occupation,” explained Ali.

  “We don’t want to give the election legitimacy,” put in Shadwan. “Our vote would be like adding a brick in the wall of that government.”

  So I drank my tea and admired their new décor and gave them the presents I had brought them from England and said my goodbyes. They told me to come back and visit soon! And Mustafa drove me breakneck back to the hotel, grinning maniacally all the way.

  A COUPLE OF years passed. I moved between London and Beirut, Damascus and Paris. The war in Iraq convulsed into different contortions. It was a Sunni insurgency against the Americans and then it was a civil war between Sunni and Shia for control of Baghdad and then the Americans realized they had spent too much time pandering and arming the Shia death squads attached to the Interior Ministry and it became a kind of American-Iranian proxy war and then the Sunni insurgents got fed up with their alliance with Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and joined with the Americans to push them out of their neighborhoods and then the Americans put in a new commander, David Petraeus, who upped the number of combat troops, “the surge,” and managed to mitigate some of the worst excesses of the violence in Anbar Province and Baghdad for a while and then the south turned out to be an internecine patchwork of rival Shia battles and Kirkuk rumbled violently in opposition to Kurdish ambition and the Turks periodically bombed the PKK over the border and there were massacres of sects in remote areas that no one could figure out.

  Or some approximation of the above. Reports narrowed. Western journalists could not move without being embedded and Iraqi journalists were being killed by the dozen. The fact of the violence, myriad and terrible, continued.

  DURING THE SUMMER of 2007, when I was talking to Iraqis in Damascus and Amman I always asked for news of the Sachet family. There were various rumors. I had come to assume that Omar and Ali and Ahmed and probably Mustafa too had been involved in the Resistance. They were their father’s sons after all, religious, righteous, prideful and brave. An occupation would not stand. I remembered that Ali had once told me, for example, how he had brought food and water to Syrian Fedayeen (Syrians who had volunteered to fight an urban guerrilla war against the Americans) who were holed up in a Saidiya mosque as the Americans rolled their tanks along the highway during the invasion of 2003. The rumors and snippets of news confirmed my thoughts. Saidiya had become one of the worst front line battle grounds between Sunni and Shia in Baghdad. The area was virtually uninhabitable and I heard several times that the Sachets had left Saidiya, possibly because their house had been burnt; certainly Kamel Sachet’s Sadiq mosque, which had been a rallying place for the Resistance, was hit several times by Shia militias, bombed out and abandoned. From different directions, some cousins in Damascus, an old bodyguard of Kamel Sachet’s who came from Baghdad to Sulaimaniyeh to see me, ex-Mukhabarat Janabis, I heard that two of the Sachet brothers—no one knew which ones exactly—had been arrested by the Americans and then, variously, released after several months, or not, depending on the version. I heard that one of the younger daughters (who had married a member of the Iraqi archery team, I recalled) had gone to live in Dubai, that the rest of the family was still in Baghdad, but living in a different neighborhood, that they had moved to Damascus.

  The insurgency was a kaleidoscope of gangs: the 1920 Revolution Brigade, Islamic Conquest, Jihad Base Organization in Mesopotamia, Iraqi Hamas, Islamic State in Iraq, Knights of the Land of Two Rivers, Anbar Saviors, Mohammed’s Army, Salahuddin Bridges, Heroes of Iraq. Some had fought under an Al-Qaeda umbrella, some fought turf wars with Al-Qaeda groups, some turned against Al-Qaeda and began to work with the Americans to re-establish control in their own areas. The situation was fluid, mutable, clandestine. News filtered through of a big summer battle between Al-Qaeda elements and disenchanted local insurgents and Americans in the tribal areas of the Albu Hassoun. Whispers in the wind. Every time I got close to finding a Sachet relative—Kamel Sachet had several brothers at least two of whom were living in Damascus—the door slammed shut. People were wary and frightened. Inter-locutors hung up the phone and hurled insults at my translators and friends who made overtures on my behalf. Wherever they were, the Sachet family did not want to be found.

  During the following winter, the new American policy of arming local Sunni groups to defend their neighborhoods against Al-Qaeda groups spread from Anbar province, through the Western suburbs of Baghdad and down into the Janabi tribal lands south of Baghdad. But news remained sketchy: there were no phone connections with that region, rival checkpoints sprang up overnight as militias battled, enveloped and withdrew, travel was virtually impossible, a tribal leader that I had hoped to contact via an interlocutor in Baghdad who was going to and from the area regularly was besieged in his compound and in the middle of cutting ties with a local Al-Qaeda group and going over to an alliance with the Americans. Some of my Iraqi contacts in Damascus and Amman told me bits of this story, others didn’t want to tell me anything in case I was a spy. Of the Sachet women, of Um Omar and Shadwan and Amani, there was virtually no news at all; it was not seemly for men to ask
after the female members of a family.

  After the summer battles, a brave and determined Iraqi journalist friend of mine went down to Jurfa Sakr, the main town of the Albu Hassoun tribe, several times to check out the new developments and he asked after the Sachet brothers among insurgent commanders and tribal leaders that he talked to. According to one, a senior commander in the Islamic Army, one of the local former insurgent militias, Omar Sachet had joined the insurgency in 2004 and graduated to commander level the following year, running pitched ugly battles against the Shia on Saidiya’s border with Dora. The commander was contemptuous and angry.

  “Their father was a hero, but they desecrated his name.”

  A local Sheikh was more specific.

  “If I see Omar Sachet I will shoot him on the spot.”

  For a while it seemed that Omar and his brothers were on the run, but then came reports that Omar and another brother—which one was unknown—had been detained by the Iraqi government. Of Ali, news trickled through even later, third or fourth hand through the tribal grapevine: he was dead, apparently, maybe, killed fighting in Salahuddin.