Children of War

by Deborah Ellis

  I love to go out into the streets and see what’s going on. I like to see people working and playing and doing different things, and I like to look at cars. Sometimes my father takes me out. The hills are very high, and it’s hard to push my chair up and down them. People look at me because I look different, and I don’t like that.

  My mother takes good care of me, and my father plays with me and helps me with my reading. I’d like to go to school, but there is no school for me.

  Widian, 14

  An article in USA Today reported that Iraqi psychiatrists are worried about how children there will cope with the long-term effects of being exposed to war and violence. A survey by the Iraqi Ministry of Health found that seventy percent of students in Baghdad are suffering from war trauma and are showing signs of stress like bedwetting and stuttering. Many have had to pass dead bodies on their way to school. Many have repeatedly heard explosions or seen acts of violence on others. There are not enough mental health professionals in Iraq to help them deal with this. “Some of these children are time-bombs,” Said al-Hashimi, an Iraqi psychiatrist, said.

  Widian and her brother are orphans living with their uncle and his family. They were in Iraq during the heavy bombing. The large extended family lives in three small rooms in the Jebel Amman section — another poverty-stricken area of the city. Mats line the walls of the main room, which are flaky and dark with mold. Their belongings are piled up under blankets.

  We live in Amman with my grandmother, two aunts, two uncles and five children, plus my brother and me. The rain comes in when it’s raining outside. But at least we are alive.

  My father and mother are dead, and so are two of my uncles.

  Before the First Gulf War, we were living in Kuwait. Then, when that happened, we moved to Basra, because Kuwait no longer wanted Iraqis in their country.

  I have damage in me from the First Gulf War. I wobble when I walk, and I fall down a lot. My muscles and nerves are damaged, they say from the weapons that were used to make Saddam leave Kuwait.

  My father was the first one to die. He was captured and murdered. He was tortured to death by electricity. That sort of death leaves marks on your body. When my mother saw him after he died, it was clear what had killed him.

  Still, she wanted to be sure, so she had people who knew about such things examine his body and give her papers to say that yes, he had been tortured. She had all these documents with her when she was kidnapped. We heard nothing about her for three months. Then my grandparents got a phone call telling them where to find my mother’s body.

  My older brother hasn’t gone to school for many years because he is afraid of also being kidnapped and killed.

  Sometimes I am afraid of that also, and there are other times when I don’t care if it happens or not.

  We left Iraq in 2004.

  When the Americans first came, we all hoped democracy would come, and everyone would be able to live together and be safe. But religious extremists and terrorists took over, and everything became very bad.

  We were in Iraq for the heavy bombing. I remember that there was no water or electricity. There were just bombs. It seemed that the big British and American forces were trying to squeeze through our small area. They dropped heavy bombs on us. Not just regular bombs. Heavy bombs. Why are any of us still alive?

  We tried to go to sleep early some evenings, thinking that if we managed to fall asleep, we would stay asleep through the bombing. It was foolish thinking. Who could sleep through such things? My head was always cloudy from being scared, and from headaches, and from never getting any rest.

  Before the bombing, the people around me, the adults, would talk about how worried they were about what would happen with Saddam no longer in control. They worried that all the tribes and religions would go to war against each other, and that’s exactly what happened.

  The thing that finally made us leave was when the uncle we were living with got beaten. Gunmen wearing masks over their heads and faces came right into my uncle’s house and beat him right there, in his own home. They ordered him to pay them ten thousand dollars or they would come back and kill him and also destroy the house and his shop so that the rest of the family would not be able to eat.

  My uncle promised to pay them if they would come back the next day, but before they came back, we gathered what we could carry and came to Jordan.

  My brother and I lost so many years of school because of the war, and because of coming to Jordan. This past September was the first time we could go to Jordanian public schools because someone is paying for us to go. But it’s not good. They put us into classes that we are way too old for. All the children are smaller than us. It’s embarrassing. They put me into the third class, and I am fourteen! I think the school is going to ask me to leave because it’s hard for them, too. Then I don’t know what I will do.

  I like studying and learning things, although it is hard for me. I don’t know what I want to be, or how I could ever be what I might want to be.

  The thing I most wish for is to have a close friend, a girl my age to play with and who likes to study, like I do. We could learn together and laugh and talk about things that are private between the two of us. That would make me so happy. It would make me feel less alone.

  But I am too shy and too weak to make such a friend. I have no chance.

  Laith, 11

  Kidnapping as a tool of terror became popular in Iraq soon after the fall of Saddam. When Saddam was in power, he would often kidnap and execute political opponents. The kidnappings that have happened since the invasion are sometimes for political purposes, but often are ways for rival gangs to collect money to keep their battles going. Sometimes the kidnappings are for ransom, and the person is returned once the money is paid. Sometimes the kidnapped person is never heard from again.

  After the invasion, the Iraqi police force was disbanded, and the American army had no orders to act like police in their place. Groups who wanted to were able to easily take advantage of the situation. Too often, children became the targets.

  Laith and his family left Iraq in 2005, after a boy at his school was kidnapped.

  My father was a taxi driver in Baghdad. My mother was an agricultural engineer. Neither of them have jobs now. For a while, my father worked at a small booth in the market selling vegetables, but it became too dangerous. The immigration police would show up at the market looking for Iraqis to send back to Iraq. So he stopped working there.

  My mother found a way to do a bit of work from home. She makes things like pickles and baskets and candles, then finds a way to sell them. It brings in a bit of money, and that is how we live.

  Something happened in Baghdad that made my parents decide to leave.

  A child at my school was kidnapped.

  It was during the school day. Lots of people were around. The kidnappers wore dark masks over their heads and faces, so it didn’t matter that people could see them. They couldn’t tell who they were.

  They drove up really fast and got out of the car. First they grabbed a girl and tried to stuff her into a car, but she screamed so loud and fought them so much that they dropped her and went after a smaller child, a little boy who was too scared to scream or fight. They put him in the car and drove away. They had these guns and no one could stop them.

  Maybe they would have grabbed me or one of my sisters. They didn’t really care which child they grabbed. One was the same as another to them. Even now, here in Jordan, when a car pulls up near me on the street, I worry that men with guns will get out and drag me inside, and no one will ever see me again.

  The kidnappers went to the boy’s family and demanded a lot of money for them to let the boy go. My parents were afraid that if any of us were kidnapped, they would not be able to afford to pay the ransom. So they decided we had all better leave.

  I don’t know what happened to the boy the kidnappers took. Maybe his parents found the money to pay and he’s all right. Maybe he’s dead. We left without fi
nding out.

  The bombing time was terrible. I was young and didn’t understand why the Americans were bombing us. I thought that maybe they didn’t know we were there, that we should tell them so that they could drop their bombs where they wouldn’t kill anybody.

  Those nights were awful. We were stuck in one room with a hundred other people in a place where everyone would go to try to be safe from the explosions. We could hear glass breaking, things blowing up. The whole world would shake. I thought we would all die, and I didn’t want to die in that awful room with all those screaming people around.

  The bombing ended — the bombing from the sky, that is. Then we saw the American soldiers in the street.

  At first they were friendly. They said hello, especially to kids, and we would be friendly back, because kids are friendly people. And sometimes the soldiers gave us sweets, and who doesn’t like sweets?

  Then they would ask, “Does anyone in your neighborhood have a gun? Tell us who, and we’ll give you a whole lot of sweets.” Then they would go into the neighborhood and arrest a lot of the people, and the child would get a real bad feeling, a sour feeling. This didn’t happen to me, but to kids I know. We would talk about it.

  People think children are stupid, that we don’t know what’s going on. Sometimes we get fooled for a while, when adults lie and pretend to like us, but eventually we figure it out.

  Soldiers would sometimes encourage children to surround them, thinking the militias wouldn’t attack if it meant killing children, too.

  The soldiers being nice didn’t last too long. They started being afraid of us. I’d go to or from school, and I’d see the soldiers beating kids, yelling at them and shoving them. Someone told me that they thought the children might be helping the terrorists. Once there was a big explosion near a tank, and soldiers said children had distracted them so they couldn’t pay attention to the dangerous people around them. After that they stayed away from us, and we stayed away from them.

  The American soldiers did good things, too, though. They didn’t just ride around in tanks. They brought supplies to us at school — books and notebooks and pens. And a lot of them did try to be friendly. I want them to see Iraqis as people, so I have to see the Americans as people, too.

  After the fall of Saddam, things were quiet for a little while. Then it started to get dangerous again. People started hating each other, Iraqis hating Iraqis, and lots of killing. Our school was far from our house, and if we were even a little late coming home, my mother would be out looking for us, thinking we had been killed.

  I don’t like any of my life here in Jordan, except being away from the killing. I want to go home.

  I have friends here in school, and they are great, but Jordanian teachers are mean to Iraqi children. They insult us and bully us and don’t treat us fairly. There are only two other Iraqis in my class, both girls. One day the teacher said, in front of everyone, “The best Iraqi was Saddam Hussein, and why did you have to come here to make trouble for Jordan? You should all go home.”

  I’ve had good teachers here in Jordan, but some of them are just mean.

  I try to keep in touch with my friends in Iraq. They called me for a while, but now they’ve stopped. I think they’ve forgotten me. I miss them, though. I miss my home, too, and my things. I had to leave nearly all my belongings behind when we came to Jordan.

  It’s very hard here for my parents. They worry about money and what will happen to us. In Iraq they both had good jobs and made enough money to take care of us. Now they have to beg for everything. They have to go to charities and ask for things. One charity promised us blankets and a heater, but they haven’t arrived yet. The weather here is changing. Soon it will be winter, and cold.

  If I could talk to American children, I’d say, “Take your soldiers out of my country. I want to go home.”

  Abinminak, 8

  Iraq has a rich history of artists, poets and musicians. Many Iraqi writers and artists have had to continue their work in exile, driven from Iraq by persecution during Saddam’s regime, or by the violence of post-Saddam Iraq.

  Abinminak’s mother is an artist who is hoping to sell her artwork to Americans who are against the war. In Mosul, their home in Iraq, his father taught at an art college. After he put on a play about Abu Ghraib prison and the torture and human rights violations by the Americans, two of the colleagues who worked with him on the play were assassinated. The dean of the college then asked Abinminak’s father to leave.

  My family and I came to Jordan two years ago, from Ramadi. We left so we would stay alive. I have one sister. She is two years younger than me.

  My mother is an artist. She paints beautiful pictures on glass, on ceramics, and on canvas for people to hang on their walls. She did a lot of pieces of art for a woman here in Jordan to sell in her shop, to earn money, but the woman gave them to friends instead of selling them. When my mother asked for her pay, the woman said, “I didn’t sell anything, so I have no money to give you.” That woman was not honest.

  Now my mother has money from CARE to put on an art show. She’s busy all the time, making paintings and taking care of us.

  I have learned how to paint from my mother. People say I’m very talented. I do a lot of paintings of soldiers shooting tanks and dropping bombs and shooting guns at people, but I also paint happy pictures. I did one I really like of children playing with a butterfly. They keep trying to catch the butterfly, and it keeps flying out of their reach.

  My father is an actor. We had to leave Iraq because of a play he was in. We went to Mufrak, in Jordan.

  I remember being in my grandparents’ house in Ramadi. We were just there, just living, regular life, and American soldiers came in. They just banged right in! They didn’t even knock! They were very angry and yelling about something, but they were not yelling in Arabic, so I couldn’t understand them. They arrested my uncles. The soldiers beat my uncles and nobody could stop them because they were big and loud and had all these guns.

  We had a DVD in the house of people resisting the US army. Someone had made a movie of people trying to attack the Americans. The Americans found it and this made them more angry. I was shaking all over, as if I was cold, but I wasn’t cold, and I couldn’t stop.

  The soldiers came a lot to our neighborhood, a lot to our house. Most of the time they would come in the middle of the night. I stopped sleeping at night so that I could be ready for them. I wouldn’t be ready to fight them, because I was too small, but it was less scary if I was already awake when they came. But sometimes they would come in the daytime, too, so I never knew when it was safe to go to sleep.

  At night we could hear them running across the rooftops, running from house to house in their big boots. We had a metal door that led from our house to the roof, and one time they broke it with a big crash and came running down our stairs.

  Another time we could hear a helicopter coming closer and closer. A helicopter makes a sound like thump-thump, thump-thump, and stirs up the air like a sand-storm. It landed on our roof or on a neighbor’s roof. I don’t remember for sure. We had put another lock on the metal door to replace the one they broke, but they broke this one, too. I remember the bang-bang-bang when they tried to break the lock.

  We all stayed together at night. My parents wanted me close. We wore all our clothes at night, our regular clothes, in case the soldiers came and took us away. We didn’t want to be taken away in our pajamas.

  I remember one time the soldiers came and they found my aunt praying. They didn’t know what she was doing. Maybe they don’t pray. They thought she was up to some trouble, so a soldier put a gun to her head. She finished her prayers, then told him to go away.

  They came so often that we stopped locking our yard gate, and we left the front door open, too, so they could come in without breaking anything. My father and uncles got tired of fixing things just to have them broken again.

  I’ve seen many people arrested, mostly men and boys — bigger boys than me.
I heard from my friends, too, and the friends of my parents, and they said the same things. The women and children would be shoved into one room like the kitchen, and the men would have to lie face down on the floor or the ground. I’d watch sometimes, if my mother or aunts didn’t pull me away. It looked like the soldiers were stepping on the men’s heads. Some soldiers had the job of yelling and arresting. Other soldiers had the job of breaking furniture and making a mess.

  Now we are in Jordan, and no one comes in the night. There are other problems. I hear the problems about money. One of my uncles worked installing satellite dishes for TVs, and his boss wouldn’t pay him. He was angry, but what could he do?

  I might want to be an actor like my father, but I’ll probably be a painter instead. I am also going to be an engineer, because I want to build my family a house that soldiers can’t get into.

  Things are starting to get a little better for us. My mother is doing an art show for CARE. My father is working on a play for CARE. These things bring in some money, so my parents are happier now and more relaxed. My mother is busy painting, my father is busy acting, and I am busy talking to you. We are a very busy family.

  Eman, 18

  Eman doesn’t talk.

  Her father died two weeks ago, from a long illness. She lives with her mother in a small, dark room. Her mother suffers from severe depression, and possibly other mental illnesses.

  Her mother collects stale pita bread from shops and restaurants and sells it to Bedouin shepherds, who feed it to their animals.

  Eman doesn’t go outside. There was no treatment for her in Iraq or in Jordan. Her mother thinks Eman’s difficulties are from all the chemicals in the bombs that have been used in the wars. She has no one to help her with Eman’s care.