I want to know what Iraqis feel about the West now. Of course, they didn’t want a war, but once it had happened Karim had hoped that the occupation would give something to the Iraqi people, and that it had to be better than what they lived through under Saddam. I am saddened but not shocked when he says, “Iraqi people hate Americans now because they destroyed our country. My friends say that they are worse off than under Saddam Hussein. We thought it would take a year for everything to get better, but now we are entering the fourth year since the war. Four years. I can’t believe it.”
“Do you still want to leave the country?” I ask Karim.
Our family has been discussing how to get them out, but to get an Iraqi into a Western country has become extremely difficult. As Iraq has an elected democratic government, the people can’t claim to be refugees or persecuted. The fact that they live in a war zone and in a country under foreign occupation isn’t considered reason enough for a visa.
“And go where?” Karim answers angrily. “The other day the Iraqi airport was attacked. The US doesn’t even know who did it. So they have closed the airport for a few days. The Jordanian border is closed now; they don’t let Iraqis in. We can still go to Syria, but the road is extremely dangerous. It would be very hard to leave our house, our car, our family. We would have nothing. Every day my wife and I talk about leaving, but we are always saying, ‘But where would we go?’ ”
As if he realizes how bleak his life sounds, Karim suddenly changes tack.
“You see, life here is very different from in the West. Don’t forget there are many good things as well. Family and relationships between people are very good and close. My cousin lives in Scotland and is married to a Scottish woman. At Christmas he told me that they had to send out over one hundred cards. It seems no one visits each other at Christmas in Scotland, they just send cards! Here at Christmas I visit thirty or forty friends, and my wife and children receive the men from the other families. At New Year’s I stay in and other people come to us. If we have more than four empty wine bottles we know it has been a good Christmas, if only one or two we say, oh it hasn’t been so good.”
Most Iraqis don’t drink very much, and when they do, they usually just have a small taste.
“And day to day, we have good relationships. Here, my wife drinks coffee with her neighbour every morning at ten o’clock for half an hour, either at her house or ours. My brother lives close by and I see his children every day. I love them, they are young kids, and if I don’t see them for a day then I feel very sad and say to myself, ‘I must go and see them.’ ”
The line suddenly gets cut off, and I am left listening to the emptiness. I walk out into my street and suddenly notice how many cars are parked there and how many drive by, one every few seconds. The engines are loud, I can’t ignore them. I imagine being afraid of every one of these cars. I pass other people in the street, men, women, children, and I am not afraid. Spring is coming slowly to Vancouver, the cherry trees are starting to blossom, the crocuses are out, orange and purple in the grass, and the snowdrops have almost finished blooming.
IRAQI EXILES IN DAMASCUS
PHOTO CREDIT: FARAH NOSH
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
New Baghdad in
Damascus
Yesterday I lost a country.
I was in a hurry,
and didn’t notice when it fell from me
like a broken branch from a forgetful tree.
—Dunya Mikhail, “I Was In A Hurry”
It is July 2006, and Farah is in Damascus to cover the Syrian reaction to another war on their borders, this time to the west. Israel is bombing Lebanon in “retaliation” for the kidnapping of two soldiers by Hezbollah, the Shia political organization, and Lebanese refugees are fleeing to Syria in the thousands. This time I can picture exactly where Farah is, recalling my trip to Damascus just one year ago.
Another country sheltering my Middle Eastern relatives—and the happy childhood memories of my father and aunts—is being bombed. Now Iraq and Lebanon, the two countries that they love, are in ruins. My aunts fear for Syria if the war spreads. Despairing and helpless, one minute they are watching the news constantly, the next they have decided not to watch it at all and are only listening to Arabic music on the Internet.
They called their Iraqi friend Nebal whom I met on my visit to Beirut last year. She fled Iraq after the Gulf War and is now in her fifties. Since I met her, her husband, whom she had been nursing full-time, has passed away. She lives with her mother-in-law whom she now looks after. My aunts have spoken to her every night since the bombing began, and she is terrified. There is an army camp in her Beirut suburb, and tonight the Israelis have been attacking it all night long. She has barely slept. Her son is to be married in Sweden in two weeks, and before all this happened she had her ticket, her visa, her dress, her shoes—she was very excited about going. Now the trip is impossible because the airport has been bombed, and the only ways to leave Beirut are by car to Syria, which is very dangerous because Israeli aircraft fire rockets at “suspicious vehicles,” or by ship, which is only available to foreign nationals. Her other son was with her in Beirut when the bombing began, but managed to get evacuated by the Swedish embassy because he has a Swedish passport.
She cries to my aunts, saying the bombing has taken Lebanon back twenty years in just a few days. This year was the first year that tourists were back in droves. I had sensed for myself the tentative beginnings of a new optimism when I was there last year; the Lebanese were dressing up and going to cafés and bars. I felt the resurgence of the Beirut my parents had yearned to return to, when it was famous for being the Riviera of the Middle East. A week after a taxi took us out of Lebanon, in that hair-raising journey through a snowstorm over the mountains to Damascus, a huge bomb killed the ex–prime minister, Rafiq Hariri. After that, the Lebanese were terrified they would be drawn back into another war, and now they have been.
And what of Great-auntie Selma, now ninety-eight and still in the convent with the nuns taking care of her? We haven’t been able to find out if she is all right, but as far as we know, the Israelis have not yet bombed northern Beirut.
Nebal says to Siham, “Don’t worry, my mother-in-law is so deaf that she hardly notices the bombing. So probably all the old women in the convent don’t even know what is happening!”
I find myself thinking of Selma, another great-aunt in a different country, living out her last days too with the sound of aerial bombardment as a kind of dreadful musical accompaniment. I think of all the Lebanese people I met last year: my father’s namesake, Ammu Ibrahim, in his village outside Tripoli; Ibrahim’s family who cooked Scott and I that huge Lebanese feast and took us on a tour of the mountains around their home. One of his paintings still haunts me. It is of a mother clasping her young adult son in a fierce embrace. Ibrahim had titled it “A son going abroad.” He said this was the tragedy of Lebanon—that all the old people are left behind while the young emigrate to the West because there is no future for them at home. This is not just the tragedy of Lebanon, I think. This is the tragedy of the Middle East. I think of the destitute Palestinian refugees I met in Beirut’s southern suburbs, which have been bombed to apocalyptic extremes by Israeli warplanes. I think of the selfless women working for the non-profit organization that helps the refugees, and the Syrian taxi drivers and waiters I met along the way. I wonder if the American University of Beirut campus is full of displaced Shia from the south of Beirut, flocking into its beautiful park by the sea for safety, camping out under the palm trees.
Farah is in Damascus to cover the Syrian reaction to this new war, but she is also visiting all her Iraqi relatives who have fled Baghdad for the safety of Syria. So many Iraqis have arrived—some estimates put their number at one million in a city of five million—that there is now an entire suburb in Damascus, Qadissya, that everyone is calling New Baghdad or Little Baghdad. It is not only Sunnis who are fleeing, but Shia and Christians as well, and most of the newl
y exiled Iraqis are young families.
I call Farah and she is just getting out of a taxi. She says she has just returned from visiting her relatives in Qadissya. She sat in a room full of fifteen young Iraqi men, all of them her cousins or extended family, who are prime targets for assassination back home. Many have first-hand accounts of brutal killings of family members in 2006, and they have all arrived in the last few months. All felt that despite everything they had lived through since the war began, they now had no choice but to flee.
Their anxieties have shifted since they arrived in Syria. The women are relieved; they have stopped having to fear for their husbands’ or sons’ lives every time they leave the house, but are now facing new realities. It’s not easy getting on in a new country, trying to find work and creating stability for their children, but at least the day-to-day terror has been alleviated. However, they are still plagued with worries about family members they had to leave behind.
Suhad, the mother of the twins who were assassinated, and her remaining son, Haider, have moved to Damascus as well. Farah spent two days walking the streets of the old city while Haider told her the whole story of what had happened to his brothers. I imagine them walking through the tiny alleys, talking and talking. Farah only knew the bare outline of the story, and now he was telling her the details. She promises to relate it to me when she got back. His heart is broken, his life over since his brothers were killed, she says. Even though he is in a new country, starting a new life, he is without hope and says that he will never be able to move on.
His mother is in complete denial. She tells Farah that she feels like all the other mothers who have been forced to send their sons away to Jordan or Syria to protect them. She doesn’t feel that her twins are dead, but rather that she has sent them away. So many Iraqi mothers are saying goodbye to their sons, the only difference is that once in a while they will hear from their sons. She does not, will not. That is the only difference, she says.
After Farah and I talk, I call my aunts in London. Amal answers the phone, and I ask if she has heard from Karim in Baghdad.
“Karim is deeply depressed, in despair,” she says. “The summer heat in Baghdad is always unbearable, but without running water or air conditioning, fans, refrigeration, it is excruciating.”
Usually, families sleep on the roof at night, but with all the helicopters flying low over them, they can’t even get proper rest. There is no security, and they don’t know when they will be touched by the violence that encroaches, ever closer. They say everyone they know is leaving Baghdad; their street is deserted. My aunts tell Karim to take his family to Jordan or Syria, and that they will help and send him money or even come and meet him there, but he is paralyzed. He and his wife are afraid to leave everything and become exiles. It is difficult to take the children away from all that is familiar, their family and friends. They’ve never left Iraq.
In the last month, there has been growing pressure on both Sunni and Shia in Karim’s neighbourhood. Both sides are threatened by militias who want them to move into separate neighbourhoods. They use kidnapping and blackmail as intimidation. This is reminiscent of what happened in Lebanon during the civil war. Karim is worried that they are going to have trouble in their neighbourhood now. More and more bombs have been going off near his house. Thankfully, the Christians have been left alone by both the Shia and the Sunni, but the violence is so random that no one is immune.
Then Amal tells me that they called Ammu Ibrahim in Lebanon to see how he was. His village has escaped Israeli bombing so far, but he said that Lebanon is wrecked. His wife is gravely ill and was in hospital when the war started. His son lives in the United States and was planning to visit his mother before the war began. Now he can’t come. Amal told Ibrahim that she and her sisters were thinking of going to Lebanon this September and had wanted to visit him. They haven’t seen him for forty-five years. But now that too is impossible. Ibrahim started crying, saying how much he would love to see them. Amal started crying as well.
I hang up the phone and pick up the newspaper, July 24, 2006. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki is saying that the breakup of Iraq along sectarian lines is now inevitable.
AERIAL VIEW OF BAGHDAD FROM AN AMERICAN HELICOPTER
PHOTO CREDIT: FARAH NOSH
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Iraq Comes to Me
Baghdad is an ancient city, and although it has never ceased to be the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate . . . most of its traces have gone, leaving only a famous name. In comparison with its former state, before misfortune struck it and the eyes of adversity turned towards it, it is like an effaced ruin, a remain washed out; or the statue of a ghost. It has no beauty that attracts the eye, or calls him who is restless to depart to neglect his business and to gaze. None but the Tigris which runs between its eastern and its western parts like a mirror shining between two frames. . . . The city drinks from it and does not thirst, and looks into a polished mirror that does not tarnish.—Ibn Jubayr, The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, 1184
A week before I am due to visit my aunts in London in August 2006, Siham telephones me excitedly. I expect that she is calling about the war in Lebanon, which is intensifying by the day, despite calls for a ceasefire.
“Maha and Reeta are going to try and get a visa to visit us. They are in Amman, Jordan.” I haven’t heard Siham so animated since before the war began over three years ago.
“Jordan? They left Baghdad?” It takes a moment for me to understand what she means.
“I told them they should get out of there. Their street is a ghost street. Empty. All the families, all their neighbours left the minute that school ended for the summer. Left for Syria or Jordan. I told them they needed to leave as well. Now they are applying for a UK visa there.”
“Will they be there when I am in London?” I say, alarmed that I might somehow miss them.
“Yes, they’ll be here for weeks. I promise you’ll see them when you are here,” Siham says.
“How did you convince them to leave Baghdad?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “In summer, the heat is unbearable. Really, you can’t imagine it. Without electricity, there is no air conditioning—it is absolutely stifling. They are bored, trapped inside all the time, and now they can’t go out because of the violence. I told them that maybe if they went to Amman, I could meet them there. But now they’re there, I told them to try and get a visa to come and see us here. It would be nicer for them to come here. But, of course, the whole family can’t come.”
“Why not?” I say, my voice rising, indignant.
“The British government would never grant a visa for the whole family. They’d be suspected of wanting to emigrate if they did. And of course wouldn’t you want to emigrate? Why not? Since this war, their lives are at risk every day,” Siham explains.
For so long, Karim and Maha hadn’t wanted to leave their house and belongings, or their elderly, dependent, family members. But now no one is left of the older generation, and they are free to leave. They were also anxious about the trip to Amman, as the road is very dangerous. But finally, they decided they couldn’t stand their living situation anymore and risked it all and left without even telling us.
“So just Maha and Reeta are coming?”
“Yes, Karim and Samir will have to stay in Jordan. I don’t want to get my hopes up that the visa will be granted, I know how difficult it is even to get a holiday visa. We have to pray,” Siham says. “Pray!”
When I hang up, I realize that Amal and Ibtisam haven’t seen any of their relatives or friends from Iraq since they left in 1990, and Siham hasn’t seen anyone since 1980. To see Maha will be like seeing a sister, not merely a cousin. Maha is an only child, but she spent all her childhood at my grandparents’ house, so my aunts are like her older sisters. She is almost twenty years younger than they are, so she is also like a daughter or niece. My aunts have only had snatched conversations with Maha in the last three years because her home phone has never wo
rked since the invasion, and conversations on the mobile are very expensive. But nearly all of those telephone calls contained horror stories or bad news about the family.
Within an incredibly swift two days, their visas are granted and Siham buys their flights to London. What had seemed impossible for weeks, months and years before, and improbable mere days ago, is actually going to happen—the aunties will see their cousin again and meet her fifteen-year-old daughter for the first time. I can’t believe that I am finally going to meet my Baghdadi relatives.
We meet in Amal’s living room; in all my fantasizing about meeting my family, I’d always imagined it would happen in their home in Baghdad. My aunts’ house was the last place I had ever envisioned seeing each other face-to-face for the first time. But now it seems inevitable that we should meet in London, halfway between my life in Canada and theirs in Iraq. I walk into the living room where they are sitting, waiting. I haven’t spoken to either of the women directly before since all my communication has been through Karim, and they don’t speak English. My youngest sister, Rose, arrived a few days earlier from Toronto. They all watch me as I walk over to my cousin Maha, who stands up, and we hug warmly, giving each other the traditional three Iraqi kisses on alternating cheeks.
I realize we are almost the same age; she is thirty-nine, four years older than me. But she is the mother of two teenagers, has lived through three wars and a decade of sanctions, and has been trapped in Iraq since she last visited Europe as a child. I am told we met during one of her trips to Europe, but I don’t remember it.
Maha is my blood cousin; we have the same great-grandmother, Samira, so Reeta is my second cousin. Maha is not very tall, but is round, heavier than she appeared in the first photographs Farah took in 2003. She has a beautiful face, prominent cheekbones and large dark eyes; she wears her hair short and is dressed in brown trousers and a pale cream blouse. She starts speaking to me in Arabic, but we are looking straight at each other in an intimate way that strangers don’t usually share. My Arabic is rudimentary and so we depend on Amal to translate. I am wearing my gold Iraqi-map necklace, and when I hold it up and thank her for sending it to me, Maha smiles.
The Orange Trees of Baghdad Page 23
