The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  These attacks are meant to pit Muslims against Christians, to divide the communities; instead, they seem to be uniting Iraqis. Mosques and Muslim holy places have been targeted by bombers already and various convents and Christian religious schools had been attacked, but this is the first time in living memory that a church has been attacked in Iraq. The Christians have never been persecuted before, despite the periodic resurgence of accusations that they are sympathetic to the West. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism since the invasion has had a major influence in reversing the previously good relationships between Muslims and Christians. Also, evangelical missionaries arrived with the occupying US forces and distributed bibles with food parcels, which made the situation worse by psychologically connecting Christianity with the invasion.

  Iraq has no history of religiously motivated violence between Muslims and Christians. Initially, after the invasion, a few small groups threw pamphlets into the churches, threatening priests, and as the occupation has turned uglier the threat has grown. Iraq’s Christians are among the oldest in the world, and the origins of their community date back to the earliest days of the faith. Westerners forget that Christianity is a Middle Eastern religion, that before the rise of Islam, it was the dominant religion in the region for over three hundred years. Many of the descendants of those first Christians still survive, although many more have emigrated to the West over the last century of upheaval in the Middle East. When my father was growing up, he lived in mixed neighbourhoods and went to mixed schools where religious differences were not an important issue. Muslims attended his school, which was run by American Jesuit priests.

  The pope has called on the United Nations to intervene to create peace in the Middle East, but I searched in vain for any comment or expression of sorrow from Tony Blair or George W. Bush, who both claim to be fervent Christians. No one knows who is responsible for the carnage, but Iraqi Christians are afraid that they might be caught in the middle. Islamists can point to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as proof of a new crusade against Islam, and Christians in the Middle East end up being targeted for their supposed Western leanings or their family connections abroad. This religious intolerance is new; it did not exist under the monarchy or the republic, when Iraq was primarily a secular dictatorship.

  Since the Gulf War, Christians have been fleeing Iraq to live abroad in Europe, Canada, the United States and Australia; forty thousand have left the country since the war began. The approximately seven hundred thousand that remain have become increasingly terrified for their lives. The American forces cannot guarantee anyone’s safety.

  Farah phones me a week later from New York; she is distraught. She has just found out that her cousin has been killed in a car accident in Baghdad. He was married and the father of four children, and Farah had become close to him over the year she’d spent in Iraq before and after the war. She had helped him get a job as a driver for a Western newspaper after the invasion. At first she was terrified that he had been targeted for being connected to the occupiers, but her family assured her that it was just a car accident, another tragedy in a country full of grief. Her heart was aching for her cousin’s wife; after everything they had been through, to lose her husband now was too devastating to comprehend.

  On November 2, 2004, despite all the lies that the Bush administration had told regarding the war, despite the slow realization that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that the evidence to go to war had been fabricated, and that it was not helping to bring democracy to Iraqis, fifty million Americans voted to re-elect George W. Bush.

  Later that month, Bush made his first official visit to Canada. My sister Rose attended a demonstration in Ottawa. The protest consisted of about fifteen thousand people, and lasted all day. The march ended at the Museum of Civilisation where Bush was having dinner with seven hundred guests. Ottawa was shut down and security was heavy, with thousands of police helicopters whirring overhead and snipers stationed around the city.

  At Bush’s press conference on November 30, a Globe and Mail reporter reminded the president that after September 11, 2001, Canadians staged demonstrations of solidarity with the American people. But now, there were large protests against Bush’s visit in every major Canadian city. The reporter asked Bush if he thought the protests had anything to do with him or his policies. Bush replied that he understood that some Canadians didn’t think that Iraqis could be free and live in democracy, but he had faith that they could. Apart from ignoring the question, Bush’s answer tried to deflect attention from the illegal invasion and occupation, to an accusation that “some” Canadians were racist and thought Iraqis were not capable of living in democracy.

  At the beginning of December, my great-uncle Clement died of leukemia in Baghdad. His disease might have been treatable under normal circumstances before two wars and sanctions, with functioning hospitals, good doctors (many of the best had already fled the country), peace and stability. Clement was the suave, handsome man who my father remembers as having had many girlfriends in his youth. Photographs prove that he was good-looking. When my father was a boy in the late 1950s, he’d watch Clement getting dressed to go out to parties. He viewed him with the natural awe that a young boy has for an uncle. Clement was the least studious of his uncles, the one who liked most in life to have a good time, to go to parties and cafés. He was the one who lived on an island in the Tigris during the summer, once in a while organizing a picnic for the family. He finally settled down and married and had a daughter, Maha, Karim’s wife.

  Now, if an organization was counting causes of death in Iraq, his death would probably be categorized as a natural one caused by leukemia. But we know that the incidence of leukemia in Iraq is extremely high, thought to be due to depleted uranium left behind from the weapons used against Iraq in the Gulf War and in the recent invasion. Nevertheless, Clement was in his seventies and had lived a decent life. On the other hand, what followed afterwards was caused by the unnatural circumstances created by the invasion.

  It was the family’s responsibility to take Clement’s body from the hospital to the morgue after he died. Uncle Clement had lived with Karim and Maha for many years, and since Maha was an only child, there were no sons to carry out the responsibilities. So Karim, his son-in-law, had to take on this task, which he did willingly. They couldn’t go to a funeral parlour and hire a hearse to take my great-uncle’s body to the morgue because there were none available to rent. With all the deaths in the country, hearses were much in demand. Instead, they borrowed a station wagon from a friend and bent the seats back to fit the coffin inside the car. They drove to the Baghdad morgue. It was overflowing with bodies; the number of people dying in Iraq every day was catastrophically high. Bombing raids, suicide bombs, car bombs, IEDS (improvised explosive devices) as well as random killings at checkpoints and other murders all contributed to the high death rate. Karim was told he was forbidden to leave the body of his father-in-law at the morgue because there was no room, but that he should take it straight to the cemetery for burial. When Karim got to the cemetery, he was told that the number of dead waiting to be buried exceeded capacity so he couldn’t bury Clement there.

  Karim was sent to Baqubah, a town sixty kilometres north of Baghdad where the church had recently purchased some land for a new cemetery. He was told he could bury Clement’s body there instead. As the journey to Baqubah would be very dangerous (roadside bombings targeting US forces and counterattacks by the US army were frequent on that road), only Karim and his brother could risk going. The rest of the family stayed at home and mourned privately. When the two men finally got to Baqubah, they hired some young men to dig the grave. Then they lowered the coffin into the ground, covered it up and left. There was no ceremony, no prayers, no eulogy, no celebration of Clement’s life, no hymns, no blessing by a priest, and none of my other relatives were able to pay their last respects.

  When they finally got back to Karim’s brother’s house in Baghdad, they were surprised to find
an American tank parked in the driveway. They drove slowly around the tank to park in the driveway themselves, but were afraid to be so close to the soldiers. As Karim entered the driveway, his side mirror accidentally brushed the side of the tank. A soldier leapt out and started shooting at the car. Karim and his brother jumped out of the car and ran into the house, dodging bullets to the front door. Karim tells me the story so casually, as if getting shot at were a normal occurrence. He doesn’t even question why the soldiers were parked there in the first place.

  Because of the bombing of the churches in August, there was no chance of even having a commemorative service for my great-uncle in the church that the family usually attended. The church had been ruined and was now closed. So Clement’s wife was not able to mourn her husband properly. And Maha cannot mourn her father.

  FARAH’S FAMILY ON THE STAIRS OF THEIR HOUSE, APRIL 9, 2003

  PHOTO CREDIT: FARAH NOSH

  CHAPTER TEN

  A Sugar Depression

  [Day 17 of 1991 Gulf War] Rocketing non-stop and the biggest and loudest explosion ever. It was apparently heard all over Baghdad but no one seems to know where it was. Not atomic anyway. We are still alive. I can understand the Kuwaitis hating us but what did we do to you, George Bush, that you should hate us with such venom? . . . Tonight we shall have music. Amal has an old crank-up Victrola gramophone and . . . a lot of 78 rpm records that we can now play on it. Who could have conceived of such a day when the rest of the world has CDs?—Nuha al-Radi, Baghdad Diaries, 2003

  It is the middle of December 2004, and Farah tells me that she is planning to go to Iraq again soon. We still don’t know how to get money to our family directly, and so we ask Farah if she would mind taking a Christmas gift for Great-aunt Lina. Even under these extreme circumstances, we know that Lina would not want us to give her money, but we want to help her and she wouldn’t refuse a gift. Farah agrees to take whatever we want to send. Once again, she is planning a trip to Baghdad while I stay at home. She wants to visit the wife of her cousin who was killed in the car accident. We send Farah a package of recent family photographs and wire her some money to take for Lina. Farah leaves a few days before Christmas and plans to meet Karim to give him the package.

  Christmas isn’t being celebrated quite so openly this year in Iraq. Since the church bombings, more people are afraid to attend mass, and big holidays like Christmas are obvious targets. I send Karim and the family an e-mail with Christmas greetings, but I don’t hear back. Later, Amal tells me that Karim was surprised to hear from me. In Iraq, when there is a death in the immediate family, the family doesn’t celebrate Christmas. They don’t send or receive Christmas wishes. I feel terrible about my faux pas.

  Great-aunt Lina has been bedridden now for many months; she has moved in with Karim and Maha because she is too ill to live alone. No one knows exactly what is wrong with her; perhaps her back pain that led to her operation was the beginning of the illness. But now her spine seems to be crumbling and disintegrating, and she has neurological problems and is starting to lose her ability to communicate.

  Just before Farah leaves for Iraq, she gets more bad news. Sima, wife of Shihab (the cousin who died in the car accident), was caught in the crossfire of a gun battle at the end of her street. Farah thinks that it was a fight between rival militias. Sima had gone out and walked a few blocks from her house to buy tomatoes at a nearby stall. On the way, she was hit by two stray bullets: one went straight through her and the other stayed lodged inside her body. She is in hospital, close to death, almost orphaning her four children, and Farah is distraught again, afraid of what might happen by the time she gets to Iraq.

  Before she leaves, she drops by and gives me the journal she kept while she was living with her family during the 2003 invasion. I’ve wanted to talk to her about that experience and find out what it was really like for her, but there is never enough time for us to catch up. She explains that she was working with all the other international journalists up until the war started, but then she moved in with her family, who are Muslim and lived near the airport. The regime forced many of the hundreds of foreign journalists to leave Iraq. Others left for Amman before the bombs starting falling because they were afraid for their safety, while others moved into the compound of the Palestine and Sheraton Hotels where the government was forcing media to stay. As the war began in the south, the regime organized school buses to ferry journalists to bombed sites, forcing all of them to cover the same events. Farah realized that she had access to a different reality, to be able to show what a normal Iraqi family was experiencing. Most Western journalists would have loved a similar opportunity but couldn’t stay with a family without putting those people in danger.

  Farah went from being in the heart of the Western media, saturated with news from many different channels and bombarded by conflicting information, to being with her family and starved of any facts other than what she was living directly. Like all Iraqis, she only heard the official news, which couldn’t be trusted. Instead, innuendo and rumour passed from one family to another by telephone or by neighbourhood gossip. Her perspective went from being global and complex to craving any morsel of information beyond the immediate happenings in the house she was confined to.

  As soon as she leaves for the airport, I make a cup of tea and sit down to read the journal. I am suddenly right with her, in her thoughts, as she “wears this war in one house crammed with fourteen people.”

  The journal begins on Saturday April 5, 2003. I now know that the invading army had reached the outskirts of Baghdad by then, but Farah knew only what was happening around her. Intense fire behind their house, on the road to the airport, triggers the family to want to leave for a safer spot, northeast of Baghdad. But they don’t get beyond a relative’s house in the next neighbourhood, where there are thirty people all packed together, sleeping in the same room, terrified of what might happen next. The women stress about what to cook; the men sit in the garden sharing war rumours and yelling at the children to go inside each time a bomb explodes. The men have heard that the district they were planning to flee to has turned into a refugee camp of Baghdadis escaping the city. One of Farah’s cousins is a brigadier for Saddam Hussein’s military, and everyone is terrified the regime will discover her in the same house as him.

  Since it is too cramped in the relative’s house they go back home only to find Republican Guards resting on their street. The guards are hungry, and so the family feeds them. The two mothers, Luma and Sima (wives of Ehab and Shihab, Aunt Lamaan and Uncle Ahmed’s sons), have six children between them to think of as well. Luma feeds her youngest son with a bottle, not even realizing that he is finished drinking and milk is spilling all over his face. She cries constantly, afraid that she will be killed and her children orphaned. They are most terrified of cluster bombs (air-dropped bombs that eject up to two thousand smaller submunitions or bomblets), having heard stories of the latest neighbourhood casualties.

  Sima’s husband regrets that he didn’t evacuate his wife and four children out of Baghdad earlier. The day before, Sima threatened to walk out of the city with the children, but Shihab said he couldn’t leave his parents behind. Everyone is suddenly restless; they just want the fight for Baghdad to come and be over with. They dread the unknown.

  “My cousins, Shihab and Ehab, fear it’s all a bad joke, that once again the Americans will leave their business unfinished here,” Farah writes. “They don’t feel they have legitimate business here in the first place but if they come, they must finish. ‘Saddam is so bad already,’ they say, ‘imagine if the Americans don’t finish with Baghdad, if they don’t take him, he will think he was victorious, then do you know what that will do to him? Make him even worse.’ ”

  The family forbids Farah from using her camera outside of the house. She tries to find BBC or Voice of America on the radio in the yard, but keeps the volume down because her family doesn’t want the Republican Guard to hear English blasting from the radio. Before the
war, Aunt Lamaan told curious neighbours that Farah had returned to Canada, and her neighbours told Lamaan that they would never leave Baghdad. But then a few days ago they were piling into a pickup truck. The regime has made everyone suspicious of everyone else so everyone tells half-truths. Farah never does find English radio, leaving her famished for news, upset and with no idea what is going on. All she can do is listen to Arabic radio and filter rumours.

  The Republican Guard has been using the courtyard to wash themselves, wash their clothes and pray, and they love to come to the back door to politely return the tea trays. They wear red scarves, a reminder of their loyalty to Saddam Hussein. Farah wonders how loyal their hearts are. Are they wondering when it will be time to put their civilian clothes on and walk home? They’ve slapped a large antenna onto the side of the house; the men of the family think it is some sort of communications station. Farah asks her uncle what he thinks of it, and he replies that it’s the reason they are leaving the next morning, but he doesn’t know where they’ll go. Later that night, a few guards are sleeping in an empty lot beside the house. Everyone is asleep, and Farah enjoys the moment of calm, listening to the guards outside murmur, almost inaudibly, about what to eat.

  The next morning, as the family is packing and debating where to go, the son of a family friend, Thikra, arrives and starts yelling at them, telling them that he came back to see if they were still there and that they have to get out immediately. He insists that the whole family go to his house to wait out the war. On the way, Farah sees a few hundred Iraqi soldiers tucked under a bridge, some standing in military trucks and others crouching against the huge concrete pillars that hold up the bridge, just waiting. Her camera remains at her feet. Her uncle Ahmed sees her sit up in awe and stare. She is wearing local clothes and her hair is covered, so that no one will suspect who she really is.