5
Khulood al-Zaidi
Iraq
BY THE VERY early morning hours of April 3, 2003, advance units of the United States I Marine Expeditionary Force had completed their encirclement of Kut al-Amara, a low-slung provincial city of some four hundred thousand located one hundred miles down the Tigris River from Baghdad. A message was then sent to the commander of Iraqi forces in Kut commanding him to surrender his forces by 7:00 A.M.
When no reply was forthcoming, American forces launched a devastating assault. Throughout that day, the Marines methodically destroyed one Iraqi redoubt after another, their tanks and artillery on the ground complemented by close air support. By afternoon, the fight for Kut was essentially over, marking it as just the latest one-sided affair that had typified the invasion of Iraq begun two weeks before; at the cost of one American soldier dead and about a dozen wounded, the First Marines had killed an estimated two hundred enemy combatants and captured some two thousand more.
Of this battle for her hometown, Khulood al-Zaidi, then twenty-three, heard a great deal, but saw nothing at all. There was a simple explanation for this. “Women weren’t allowed out of the house,” she said.
Civilians ducking for cover amid artillery attack near Basra, Iraq, March 2003
Before the invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney predicted that American troops would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq, and his prediction was borne out in the streets of Kut on April 4. As the Marines consolidated their hold on the city, they were happily swarmed by young men and children proffering trays of sweets and hot tea. Finally permitted to leave her home, Khulood, like most other women in Kut, observed the spectacle from a discreet distance. “The Americans were very relaxed, friendly, but mostly I was struck by how huge they seemed—and all their weapons and vehicles, too. Everything seemed out of scale, like we had been invaded by aliens.”
That sensation was no doubt reinforced by the extremely circumscribed life Khulood had led up until that time. As the second youngest of six children—three boys and three girls—born to a hospital radiologist and his stay-at-home wife, Khulood had a relatively comfortable middle-class childhood but, like most of the other girls in Kut, one that was both cloistered and highly regimented: off to school each day and then straight home to help with household chores, followed by more study. Save for school, about the only times Khulood ventured from the modest al-Zaidi home was for the occasional family outing or to help her mother and older sisters with the grocery shopping. In twenty-three years, she had left her hometown only once, a day trip to Baghdad chaperoned by her father.
Chaos in the streets during the fall of Basra, Iraq, April 2003
Yet, in the peculiar way that ambition can take root in the most inhospitable of settings, Khulood had always been determined to escape the confines of Kut, and she focused her energies on the one path that might allow for it: higher education. In this, she had an ally of sorts in her father. Ali al-Zaidi was insistent that all his children, including his three daughters, obtain college degrees, even if the ultimate purpose of the girls’ education bordered on the obscure.
“My father was very progressive in a lot of ways,” she explained, “but even with him, going to college was never about my having a professional career. Instead, it was always the idea of ‘Study hard, get a degree, but then find a husband and go into the house.’ ” She shrugged. “This was the Iraqi system.”
In the autumn of 1999, Khulood entered the University of Wasit in Kut to pursue a degree in English literature. The expectation in her family was that, degree in hand, she might teach English at a local school for a few years, then marry and start a family. Khulood had rather different plans, though: with her English proficiency, she would go to Baghdad and look for work as an interpreter for one of the few foreign companies then operating in Iraq.
That scheme was sidetracked when, just three months short of her graduation, the Americans invaded. But this proved only a temporary hitch. While there continued to be sporadic fighting elsewhere by remnants of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government—given the Orwellian label of “anti-Iraqi forces” by the Bush administration—the few coalition troops who remained in Kut that spring and early summer felt secure enough to mingle free of body armor with residents and to patrol its streets in unprotected trucks. Those soldiers also quickly returned the city to something close to normalcy. The university was reopened after just a two-month interruption, enabling Khulood to obtain her bachelor’s degree that August. The real work now was in rebuilding the nation’s shattered economy and reconstituting its government, and to that end, a small army of foreign engineers, accountants, and consultants descended on Iraq under the aegis of the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, the United States–led transitional administration that would stand down once a new Iraqi government was in place.
One of those who came was a thirty-three-year-old lawyer from Oklahoma named Fern Holland. A human rights adviser for the CPA, Holland had a special brief in the summer of 2003 that included developing projects to empower women in the Shiite heartland of southern Iraq. In September 2003, that mission took her to Kut and her first encounter with Khulood.
“I will always remember the first time I saw Fern,” Khulood said. “She brought a group of us women together to talk about the work she wanted to do in Iraq. She was surprisingly young—this is easy to forget, because her personality was so strong—with bright blond hair and a very open, friendly manner. I had never met a woman like her. I don’t think any of us in that room had.”
What Holland told the women in the Kut meeting hall was no less exotic to them than her appearance. With the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, she said, a new Iraq was being established, one in which democracy and respect for human rights would reign supreme. What’s more, to consolidate this new Iraq, everyone had a role to play, not least the women of Kut.
For Khulood, that talk struck with the force of epiphany. This was the moment she had been waiting for her entire life. Almost immediately, she began doing volunteer work on women’s rights projects for Holland. “I had thought about these issues before, but under Saddam Hussein, they were like fantasies,” Khulood said. “Now, I saw a future for myself.” For the young Iraqi woman, there was never a question of who had provided that future. “Fern Holland changed my life.”
For her part, Holland was perhaps less confident. From past experience working in conservative and male-dominated societies in Africa, she suspected that it would only be a matter of time—and probably a very short time—before the forces of tradition rose up in opposition to her work, so she had to set change in motion quickly. She also knew that, as an outsider, her role needed to be a limited one; what was required was dynamic local women to spearhead the effort, women like Khulood al-Zaidi.
The following month, Holland chose Khulood to be a representative at a national women’s leadership conference, held under the auspices of the CPA. At that conference, Khulood received even headier news: she had been selected as part of a women’s delegation that would soon travel to Washington to help draft the new Iraqi constitution. When word of this spread at the conference, it provoked a backlash. “A lot of the other women objected because I was so young,” Khulood said. “Even I thought it was maybe too much. But Fern insisted. She told the other women, ‘Khulood represents the youth of Iraq—she is going.’ She was my biggest supporter.”
On that November 2003 trip to Washington, the twenty-three-year-old fresh out of college met with a parade of dignitaries, including President George W. Bush. Upon her return, she was formally hired by the CPA to serve as an assistant manager of the Kut media office. It was a very long way for a young woman who, less than a year earlier, had imagined no greater future than finding interpreter work with a foreign company. “It was a very exciting time,” Khulood said. “Because you could feel everything changing so fast.”
But even as she entered the new world opened up to her by Fern Holland, Khulood was occasionally struck by a pang of doubt, a vague sense of bad premonition. It was rooted in a feeling she’d had on that day in November when she and the other women in the Iraqi delegation were ushered into the Oval Office to meet President Bush. “There was just something about his manner that I found odd. He seemed distracted, a bit cold, and would never really look any of us in the eye. I didn’t tell this to the other women because they were all so excited to meet the president, but I remember thinking to myself, ‘If this is the man who controls our future, I think we are in trouble.’ ”