Children of War

by Deborah Ellis

  Eva, 17

  The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) did a trauma survey of Iraqi refugees in Syria that was published in January 2008. According to the survey, 77 percent of the refugees they talked to had been affected by air bombardment, shelling or rocket attacks; 80 percent had witnessed a shooting and 72 percent had witnessed a car bombing; 68 percent had experienced interrogation, harassment or death threats by militias and 16 percent had been tortured. The survey also found that 75 percent knew someone who had been killed, and 89 percent suffered from depression.

  Like many Iraqi families, Eva’s family has been living with war for generations. Eva and her family live in a small, dark apartment in Amman. They are Mandaean Sabians, followers of John the Baptist. The word sabia comes from an Aramaic word meaning to be baptized.

  The Sabians have had an up-and-down experience in Iraq, sometimes protected by the government and respected by others, sometimes having to hide from persecution. There have been times when certain professions were denied to them, so they took up what trades they could. Many have passed trades like goldsmithing and silversmithing down through generations.

  Since the overthrow of Saddam, many Sabian families have been targeted for political reasons, or by criminal gangs, and many have had to flee Iraq.

  We came to Jordan on May 5, 2005, after the killing of my father. He was a goldsmith.

  My whole life has been war. Really, from the moment I was born. My mother was giving birth to me when a missile hit the hospital. This was during the war with Iran. It was her first time to give birth, so you can imagine how scared she was anyway, and then the missile hitting.

  So I came here in war, and there is still war.

  We lived in Basra, in the south of Iraq, near the Iranian border, not too far from the sea. My memories of living there are not very good.

  We are Mandaean Sabians, and we were the only Sabian family in our area. It was mostly a Shiite community, and children would throw stones at me when I went outside. They also made fun of me because of my teeth. I have had too many health problems since I was born. I wasn’t strong like other children. They would laugh at me and the teachers would be mean, too, because it took me longer to learn. I liked to learn, but it took me longer.

  I went only as far as the third grade in Iraq. Then the health problems and the teasing got to be too bad. So I left school. I wish there was a way to learn new things here in Jordan, but there is no chance. My mother is a smart woman and could teach me, but she is too busy to spend the time. I try to help her by doing a lot of the cleaning and taking care of the younger children. When I have some quiet time, I like to write down my thoughts. I’m not good at it, but I like to do it.

  My mother says that all the bombing that happened while she was carrying me led to my sickness. My head did not look normal when I was born. The bombs brought many chemicals with them, and a lot of children were damaged, like me and even worse.

  After the war with Iran came the first war with the Americans. Then came all the years of sanctions, when it was not possible for me to get treatment.

  The sanctions meant there was no electricity, not enough food for many people. We were not a rich family. We had a very simple house, and my father worked in someone else’s shop. We had no extras to get us through. We were living like ghosts. We tried to stand on our own feet, because we are a proud family, but it was very hard. There was no good food available. Even the bread was bad and dark. The flour was mixed with wood dust and other things to make the wheat stretch farther.

  The bombing time was very loud. A bomb fell on our neighbor’s house and the whole earth shook. We were scared all the time. We trembled and shook even when the bombing had stopped. There was no time when we could relax because we were always afraid of the next bombing. When we slept, we had nightmares.

  The water supply went bad during the bombing. For three months we had no good water to drink. We drank the bad water anyway, because we needed to drink something, and we were always sick with bad stomachs.

  When the soldiers came, we didn’t talk to them. The younger children were scared of them because of their tanks and helmets and guns. My mother was always warning the younger ones to stay away, but she didn’t really need to. They would have stayed away anyway.

  Things fell apart soon after the soldiers came. People started turning on each other. We saw lots of people being killed, shot with pistols, dead bodies.

  Our father was killed on a trip to Baghdad to buy and sell gold. That was his job. My youngest brother was with him in the car.

  We think the killers were watching him in Basra, followed him to Baghdad, then followed him back home. He was killed on the road back to Basra.

  My little brother saw the whole thing. It was set up to look like an accident. The killers’ car hit my father’s car, right on the driver’s door. My father was bleeding, and the killers took all the gold out of his car, even the rings off my father’s fingers. My father died in the car.

  My little brother lost consciousness after the robbing, from fear, I think. The killers shouted at him, threatened him, and he passed out because he was so scared and from the shock of seeing our father killed. He was six years old at the time. Ever since then, he suffers from bad dreams. He keeps drawing the same pictures over and over again — a car full of blood with dead people in it. Even now he’ll have times when he’ll just cry and cry.

  My other brother, Laith, who is now fifteen, refused to believe that our father was dead until my uncles took him and made him look at the body. That’s the only way he would accept it. They made him watch the digging of the grave and watch our father be lowered into it. After he realized our father was really dead, he started to become very rough with the family, yelling and being angry all the time.

  We have a proverb that goes, “The walls of the house fall when the husband dies.” And that is true for us.

  The authorities called my mother and said, “There’s been an accident. Your husband has been injured in his legs.” My uncles went and saw that he was dead. I don’t know why the authorities needed to lie to my mother. The killers were never caught.

  Before our father was killed, we were preparing to come to Jordan. We got our passports in October of 2004, and he was killed on November 2. We think our father was killed because the killers knew we were planning to leave and they wanted to steal from us before we left. Other Mandaean goldsmiths had been targeted. Muslim goldsmiths were left alone.

  With my father gone, people turned their attention to my whole family and started to pressure us to leave. We were threatened because we are Sabia. Under Saddam, we had freedom, all our rights, and our religion was protected. If we had any complaints, we just had to say them, and we would be protected. Before the war, Sunni, Shia, Sabia, Christian, we all lived together and got along. When my father was killed, many Muslim neighbors came to help us.

  But there were also many people who treated us badly — not because they were Muslim, but because they were uneducated. Also, the war made everyone a little crazy. Hating people is not part of our culture, but the war is sending people back to the dark ages. It is destroying who we are. Iraqis love sports and literature, and poetry and science, and gardens, all good things. Iraqis don’t like all this killing.

  Our religion is very important to us. Our prophet is John the Baptist. He was a good person who taught us to love other people. For so many years we lived in Iraq in peace, in our own communities. After the war, attacks came.

  My mother’s sister’s husband was forced to convert to Islam and be part of a terrorist group. After working with this group for a while, he wanted to convert his sons to Islam. Their mother, my aunt, wanted to keep them Mandaean, so she tried to leave the country with them, but he prevented her.

  My mother has lived through too many wars. She is an orphan from war, and still managed to get good marks in school, and get a college diploma in commerce. But all her life has been war, like all of my life, and
now she is a widow.

  Our house here in Amman is just two rooms, plus a hallway and a very poor kitchen. We have to bathe in the kitchen. Our toilet is very bad. The rooms smell all the time of bad things like the toilet. We all have rashes on our skin. The furniture is what we found in the trash along the street. The rugs on the floor are a gift, though. They came from a mosque. They know we are not Muslim but still they helped us, and the cushions are gifts from other Muslims. The American president says Muslims are bad, but so many of them have been good to us.

  I try not to think about tomorrow. I try to keep the house clean, and I try to do things that will make the young ones happy for a while, and when I can, I like to try to write and draw pictures that are beautiful. And that is my life.

  Bashar, 12

  According to the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, children have a right to play. Children can find a way to play no matter where they are, but the adult world can certainly make it easier for them by providing safe playgrounds and toys, and creating a world where play is encouraged.

  Children who are refugees are often afraid to play. They are afraid of being picked up by police if they lack documentation, being harassed by locals who do not want them in their country, and being in an unsafe place. Sometimes they have to work to help the family, and there is no time for play. Sometimes their homes are so crowded with people that there are not many places to play.

  Bashar and his family are from Kirkuk. They are refugees living in Amman.

  We have come here to Jordan because of all the killing.

  My grandmother lives here with us. She has a bullet in her leg. She was shot, and the bullet went in but it didn’t come out. It’s still there. She has an x-ray of her leg and you can see where the bullet is. It hurts her, and she complains about pain in her bones. But she doesn’t complain too much. She doesn’t want to make us sad.

  She was shot on her way to Jordan. She was with her brother and three of my uncles and my aunt. They were trying to get out of Iraq, and they were stopped along the road by men with masks who took all their money. That’s when she was shot, because she argued with them. She said, “Why should you take our money? It’s all we have! Get your own money!” They didn’t like that, and they shot her in the leg, and they also beat up my aunt. They beat my aunt’s face until it was all bruised and bloody.

  Four people were killed on that trip — my grandmother’s brother and three of my uncles.

  My grandfather was kidnapped in 2003. Some people took him from his home, and for many years my grandmother didn’t know what had happened. There was no news, so she was always waiting and wondering.

  A month ago, they found his body down in the valley near a Kurdish village. They recognized him from the clothes he was wearing and from the golden teeth in his mouth. They couldn’t recognize him from his face because he had been dead too long.

  Some good people in the village gave him a proper burial and got word to my grandmother. My grandmother cried when she heard the news. We all did.

  I told you about the bullet. She also has headaches a lot from the beating they gave her. My grandmother is a very kind woman who doesn’t hurt anyone. Why would someone do these things to her? Bad people can do what they want, and good people get punished. The world is wrong.

  My family has applied to go to Australia. I think I would like it there. I’ve seen pictures, and it’s very beautiful, with open spaces and rocks, and also with trees and gardens and ocean. I think there are a lot of different people in Australia, too, so if one group doesn’t like us, maybe another group will.

  Things are not good for us here. People don’t like us, maybe because we are Iraqis and we are living here without permission. Many people in Jordan are kind, but some are mean. It may be the same everywhere.

  When my brother and I were a bit younger, we were outside our house, walking in the neighborhood. We came across a big wedding celebration. I think it was a wedding. Maybe it was a religious celebration. We stood to watch because it was something to do. Also, there was a lot of food there, and who doesn’t like to look at food?

  “Go away,” some men shouted at us. We didn’t leave right away because we weren’t bothering anybody. We weren’t in the way. We were on the outside looking in.

  But they yelled again, “Go away! Get out of here!”

  I was smaller, and they were big and loud and angry. I held my brother’s hand and should have run away, but I guess I was surprised that they would be so angry at two little kids.

  Then two of the men grabbed a pot of very hot water and threw it at us.

  It hurt. I got burns on my legs from where it splashed me, and my brother got burns on his back. There are some scars on my face, too, where the water landed.

  We ran home, and my parents took us to the Italian hospital in downtown Amman, which is a very kind place for Iraqis.

  Something bad happened to my mother and sister, too, when they went out one day. My sister needed glasses for her eyes, to help her to see better. My mother and sister went out together to get the glasses. A group of young men blocked their way and decided to beat them. I don’t know why the men did that. Were they bored? I will never do such things when I am a man. I cannot even think of doing such things.

  So, from the beating and from the way we live, my mother has high blood pressure, and both she and my sister have nervous problems. They’re afraid to go out of the house, and they get very, very sad.

  There are eight of us living in two small rooms. We are too crowded, and because we don’t feel safe outside, we are in here together too much. We’re always on top of each other, and that’s fine when we’re all getting along, but terrible if we’re not. One person waking up in a bad mood soon means we are all in a bad mood, and then it’s terrible.

  It’s not a healthy house, either. My mother cleans and cleans, but it still smells bad from the sewer, and when it’s cold and rainy outside, it’s cold and damp in the house.

  At least I am back in school this year. I want to be an engineer. My sister wants to be a doctor. I don’t know if we’ll get what we want. Mostly I would like us to not feel so gloomy all the time.

  My brother and I have a small courtyard to play in, and there’s a wall that divides the courtyard from the street. We have contests to see who can climb over the wall the fastest. I’m bigger, but he’s pretty fast.

  And my mother likes things to be pretty. We have a sort of a shrub growing in the courtyard that she and my sister and grandmother have decorated with artificial flowers and fake fruit they found in the street. They like to make things look beautiful. My mother also puts pots of daisies and other flowers around to cheer us all up.

  I know my parents worry, about money, about what will happen to us, about how to keep us safe. We cannot go to the police when bad things happen to us because we are here illegally, and they could ship us all back to Iraq. We feel we are on our own.

  To make the world better, every town and city should have places where only children can go — all children. It doesn’t matter if they are Iraqi or Jordanian or what. They could go there and be safe and play all they wanted, and just be happy.

  Haythem, 8

  Depleted uranium is waste from nuclear power and from the manufacturing of atomic weapons. It is radioactive, and very dangerous. There are more than a million tonnes of this waste in the world, and it’s very expensive and difficult to store. It tends to eat through the containers where it is kept.

  One way to get rid of it — or at least get it out of our own backyard — is to sell it cheaply to arms manufacturers, who attach it to conventional weapons to make them stronger and more deadly. During the First Gulf War in 1991, US and British forces sent depleted uranium ammunition into Iraq — ammunition that was toxic not only to the Iraqis, but to the soldiers who fired the weapons as well. In November 2007 New Internationalist reported that between 1990 and 1997, cancer rates in a Basra hospital increased dramatically. Both the children of Americ
an soldiers and children in Iraq have been born with birth defects.

  Haythem was born with hydrocephalus, a condition that causes fluid to build up in the brain. His condition was made worse in 2005, when four masked gunmen stormed into his home in Baghdad, startling his mother and causing her to drop him. He hit his head on the hard floor. He has had surgery to try to repair the damage, but one side of his head is still badly swollen.

  The gunmen kidnapped his uncle and demanded a large sum of money for his release. The family scraped together what they could, paid the ransom and fled the country as soon as the uncle was returned to them.

  Haythem’s parents suspect that his initial illness came from the weapons that have been used in and against Iraq, but they are unable to prove it. His mother lost two other babies before they were born. When Haythem’s uncle was kidnapped, his mother chased the kidnappers out onto the street to try to rescue her brother, but they turned on her and beat her badly. She was seven months pregnant at the time and lost that baby as well.

  Haythem lives with his mother, father, uncle and grandmother in a small but sunny apartment on the side of one of Amman’s many hills. They have a magnificent view from their courtyard, where Haythem’s mother grows pots of herbs and flowers. His father was a soldier and suffers from the trauma of war and from not being able to properly provide for his family.

  Haythem likes to read, but he has trouble remembering things, and he has to read them over and over. He can’t control the movement of his arms and legs. His father is a silversmith, and he is sad that he will not be able to pass down the art of jewelry making to his son.

  The family have been accepted by the UNHCR as refugees, but so far no country has stepped forward to let them in.

  I like to play with little cars, and to play games with my father. We set the games up on my tray, and we play.

  Sometimes by cousins come over, and we play together. My cousins can understand me when I talk, and they don’t laugh at the way I look. The children in the neighborhood can’t understand me.