He is the father of five, three daughters and two sons. Under the old regime he worked as a reporter for state television. After the U.S. invasion he became a producer for Fox News in Baghdad and sometimes worked on the side for an Iraqi channel. The family lived in Adhamiya, a mainly Sunni neighborhood in northern Baghdad that became home for a number of Sunni militant groups during the height of the sectarian violence.
IT ALL STARTED with a shooting incident at the school near our house in February of 2006. The country was in chaos then, but we kept sending our children to school each day in Adhamiya even so. Either my wife or I would drop the children off in the morning and pick them up ourselves in the afternoon. Occasionally Abdullah, my youngest, would get a ride home from one of the guards at his school. There were three altogether, but he was especially fond of two, Hayder and Uday. Abdullah kept pictures of Hayder and Uday in a photo album of his. He was six years old then.
I remember I was home the day of the killings. We got a call saying we should come to the school right away to get Abdullah and his older sister, Zahra, who was above him at the same school. They were not there when we arrived. What happened, we later learned, was that a car had pulled up to the school with four men in it. Two of the men emerged with guns and went to kill the guards, who were unarmed. It was not a sectarian killing. It was just insurgents targeting these guards because they were technically employees of the government. In any case, Abdullah had been eating a chocolate bar and having milk with Hayder and Uday when the attackers appeared. He apparently hid behind a door and overheard an exchange between the attackers and one of the guards, who urged the gunmen not to shoot, saying they were all Muslims. The attackers shot Uday and Hayder to death, and the third guard got away by jumping over the wall.
Abdullah ran from the school at the sound of the shots and made his way to a nearby house where a family friend lived. He banged on the door and asked to be let in, but the woman inside was too scared to open the door and told him to go away. You can imagine what this was like for a six-year-old. He had just run from the scene of the death of his friends at school and now this. Luckily his sister found him, and the two of them made their way home. My wife and I found them there.
Abdullah looked changed when I saw him. I had never seen my son like this. He was not the same boy who had gone off to school that morning. His face was pale, and he wore a dazed expression. He had cried his eyes dry, and he was shaking. I didn’t talk to him about what happened at the school in the days that followed. I was hoping he might calm down and begin to forget.
About a week after this, three Shi’ite men were murdered in our neighborhood. Their bodies were left very near our house, and they remained there for three days before anyone came to pick them up. Finally an Iraqi army patrol came to collect the remains, and a crowd from the neighborhood gathered outside to watch. Abdullah was among them.
It’s no secret that Adhamiya was an insurgent neighborhood in those days. There was a house very near ours they used. Everyone in the neighborhood knew quite well the place was a terrorist safe house run by an insurgent leader named Abu Zaynab. But we did not dare say anything about it to the army or the police, because we knew we’d be killed if we did. Abdullah decided he wouldn’t be silent anymore though. He had grown very angry about the death of his friends at school. He knew, like we all did, that the men who did the shooting at the school lived in that safe house, and he pointed it out to the Iraqi soldiers. He told them simply that the terrorists lived there, and the Iraqi soldiers immediately raided that house. They found a large cache of weapons and arrested a number of men.
I was taking a nap as all this was happening outside, because I had to work a night shift at Fox that evening. Suddenly a neighbor of mine burst into my room, a woman. She was frantic, telling me I had to hide Abdullah immediately. He’s created a disaster, she said. She had heard what Abdullah told the soldiers and knew what was coming. I did too as I began to wake up. I quickly gathered up some clothes, grabbed Abdullah, and headed to the hotel Fox was using as its bureau at the time. I took a room in the hotel for Abdullah and me. The hotel had good security, and I thought we would be safe there while I figured out what to do next. We slept for several nights there in the same bed together. At night he would use my arm as a pillow.
Initially Abdullah denied saying anything to the soldiers. Eventually he confessed what I already knew. I could not help being upset with him. I tried to explain that he had probably put the whole family in danger. I already knew we would likely have to flee, which meant I would lose my job and my home. He couldn’t understand how huge his act was, and he wasn’t sorry for it. He was like, So what? Those people killed my friends. Let them get what they deserve. He was just too young to understand. He was six, after all. Just six. Basically he was telling me to go to hell with all my worries. He would never use such language with his father, but that was his state of mind. My friends are dead, he reasoned. To hell with the people who did it and to hell with anyone who would protect them. To hell with us all, was his attitude.
We had been in the hotel for less than a week when I got a call from a neighbor of mine. He had a message from Abu Zaynab. Word had spread through the neighborhood that Abdullah was the one who tipped off the Iraqi soldiers about the safe house, and Abu Zaynab’s men knew I was Abdullah’s father and that we had fled. Abu Zaynab, in asking around about me, told this neighbor of mine to tell me that Abdullah and I would be safe if we came home. And Abu Zaynab wanted to meet me.
I went back to my house the next day, and I took Abdullah with me. I had to go. My wife and the rest of my children were still there, and I was afraid something would happen to them if I didn’t show for Abu Zaynab. I got the house ready for his arrival by taking out all the copies of the Koran I had and setting them around on the tables. I got rid of all the beer in the refrigerator. I turned on the television to a religious channel, and I had my wife and daughters put on abayas as we waited.
Abu Zaynab is a redhead, medium build, maybe 45 years old. I used to see the guy riding around the neighborhood on a motorcycle wearing blue jeans and sandals, but I didn’t know who he was until he showed up at my house that day. He came in with about eight men, bodyguards. They were all men from the neighborhood. They carried pistols. They didn’t act like bodyguards, however. They acted like they were just joining him for a friendly neighborhood visit. But we all knew who they were and why they were there. Nothing needed explaining. We were at their mercy. They made that clear to us without saying a word, and we made it clear we understood. We knew very well that Abu Zaynab could do whatever he wanted to us with a single word. We were entirely in his hands.
When he came in, I greeted him with a big smile and offered him a seat. He sat on a couch, and I took a chair off to his left. We served tea as we would with any guest. After a moment he asked where Abdullah was. I called Abdullah into the room, and Abu Zaynab motioned for him to come over. He put Abdullah on his knee and gave him a kiss on the cheek. And then he said, Why, my son, did you bring the military to my men? Don’t you know that they are holy warriors fighting for the sake of the country? Abdullah said nothing. Then Abu Zaynab turned to me and said, Look, men I can replace. There are a lot of fighters. But what about the weapons we lost? We need those. I told him he could take whatever of mine he wanted. I offered my car. I offered my house and all its possessions. Abdullah remained sitting silently on his knee as I spoke.
Abu Zaynab waived away my offers almost as if they annoyed him, and after a moment he got up to go, saying he had other matters to attend to. He was in the house for maybe ten minutes. Before going he told me to consider the matter closed. But I could tell by his attitude toward us that he was unhappy, and I knew it would be only a matter of time before someone from his bunch came for us. We could never feel safe in that place again.
Khail Ibrahim al-Nasir fled with his family to Damascus, Syria, shortly after the visit from Abu Zaynab. Fox gave al-Nasir $5,000 upon departure as a kind of severance pay, but otherwise offered no help, he said, as he joined the throngs of Iraqi refugees moving across the border to Syria. Al-Nasir had returned to Baghdad alone as of May 2009 to try to find work and perhaps lay plans to bring his family back, but he was not having luck finding employment. Abu Zaynab had disappeared from Adhamiya, al-Nasir said. Conflicting rumors in the neighborhood put Abu Zaynab either in prison or living in Syria.
She comes to the interview wearing a black abaya and carrying all her important documents, which amount to a clutch of tattered papers stuffed into a plastic grocery bag. Born in 1952, she is a mother of eight and the matriarch of a large, very poor Sunni family who found themselves under threat in their predominately Shi’ite neighborhood of Huriya as sectarian violence swept across Baghdad in 2006. She speaks in a trembling, raspy voice as she recalls the days when she was forced to flee.
I DID NOT HEAR THE BREAK-IN or the beating. I did not even know about it until the morning after the night it happened. I was in the house but sleeping with a daughter-in-law of mine who was recovering from the birth of one of my grandchildren. She had not been feeling well, so I had stayed with her through that night. When I woke up, I found my husband on his feet covered in blood. He had blood coming from his nose. He had blood on his nightclothes. There was blood on the floor. All he told me was that men in masks had come into the house during the night and threatened to kill the family if we did not leave. Outside, on the door, we found a threat letter saying the same.
That day we rented a small truck and packed up everything we could. There were fourteen of us living in a rented house together then. We took everything we could manage and drove to the house of one of my daughters, who was living with her husband in Bayaa, a neighborhood by the airport. We stayed there for about a month. Some in the family fled to Syria or went to stay with other relatives. The rest of us had to find a new place to live. Finally one of my sons found another rental house for us in Abu Ghuraib.
Six of us settled into the house in Abu Ghuraib. We were completely wiped out financially by then. My husband had a heart attack during the collapse of the old government and had not worked since then. We had to sell almost all of our furniture just to eat even before we were displaced. By the time we were moving into the new house we didn’t even have bread. Our new neighbors were so good to us. They knew what had happened and welcomed us. They brought rice, bread, and blankets. They offered us money. We lived off their charity.
My husband’s health began to get worse very quickly around then. We took him to the doctor, who said he had an advanced case of liver cancer. The doctor said there was nothing to be done and that I should take my husband home, make him comfortable, and wait for him to die.
His last days came soon after. By the end he got so weak he could no longer eat on his own. I had to feed him by hand myself. On his last day he asked if he could sleep in my lap. It was nice outside, so I helped him into the garden and let him put his head down in my lap. That is where he died.
I took him inside and put him on the bed and kneeled over him crying for some time. Then, suddenly, one of my daughters burst in shouting something about her uncle, my brother. He had been killed. Murdered. We don’t know exactly what happened. As best we could understand, he had been targeted by the Mahdi Army because they saw him helping us move that day in Huriya. After abducting him they had broken his neck and shot him several times in the chest before dumping his body.
My brother went to the morgue to get him. Since we were burying my husband that day, we decided to bury my brother with him. So they brought his body to my house, and on the same day under my roof lay my husband and brother dead.
She begins to sob heavily. After a moment she is able to speak again, through tears that have been flowing intermittently throughout the interview.
It’s all because we were Sunnis. Just because we were Sunnis.
Um Omar, who requested an alias for the safety of herself and her family, was still living in Abu Ghuraib as of February 2009 with no plans to return to Huriya. The family remained desperately poor. For a time, one of her sons was bringing in a little income by selling kerosene lamps, which sold well when Baghdad experienced regular, prolonged blackouts. But sales of the lamps were falling, she said, as power supplies in the city improved along with the security situation.
Before the invasion he made a good living installing and repairing air conditioners. A Sunni, he was living with his wife, five children, and elderly father in a predominately Shi’ite area of northwestern Baghdad, the city where he was born in 1964. He has a booming, raspy voice and chokes back tears throughout the interview, recalling how the months and years unfolded for him and his family after 2003.
THERE WAS AN ACCIDENT during the bombardment before the invasion. A man on a motorcycle was racing away from an area being bombed, and he struck one of my sons, Mohammed, who was about ten years old at the time. Mohammed’s head hit the curb, and his skull cracked. He was lucky to survive. It was a bad injury that left a visible scar on his head. But after that he was always getting fevers. The doctors we took him to said he had Red Wolf syndrome, which weakens the immune system. So he was always getting sick. I was constantly taking him to the hospital for treatment. The bills became so high. I had to sell everything I owned just to pay for his care. Almost all the things I had collected during my life I sold. I sold our two television sets. I sold our refrigerator and freezer. I sold the bedroom furniture I bought for my wife and me.
During this time the sectarian violence was rising. Three of my brothers were killed. One was strangled on the west side of the city. Two others who ran a generator shop together were shot to death when Mahdi Army men tried steal their generators. After the killing of my brothers, being a Sunni in a Shi’ite area, neighbors who meant well started coming to me and advising me. They told me there was no point in staying. They told me I should move for the safety of my family. Where should I go? The only thing left I owned was that house. We stayed because we had no place to go.
The neighborhood was becoming so unsafe then that we had to lock ourselves in our house. We almost never went out. The Mahdi Army was always on the street, gunmen dressed in black everywhere. One night in the fall of 2006 Baghdad was under curfew for some reason. I don’t remember why. Suddenly a very bad fever came over my son, worse than usual. I had to take him to the hospital. At this time the sectarian killings were at their peak, and I had to go out into the streets after dark, breaking curfew to try to save him. I carried him in my arms to the hospital. The police allowed me through the checkpoints after seeing how bad Mohammed’s condition was, and I was able to make it to the hospital along with my daughter, Wallah, who was a little younger than Mohammed at the time.
At the hospital, I saw three guys with guns roaming the halls. This was during the time when Shi’ite militiamen would kidnap visiting Sunnis from the hospital and murder them. The doctor treating Mohammed even told me that the men roaming the halls were asking about me. I had to run, right then. I left Wallah to stay with Mohammed, and I went out of the hospital, jumped the fence, and took off. Not far from the hospital I saw a guy I know on a bicycle. He took me part of the way home, and I walked the rest. I was scared, really scared, going through the streets after midnight. Sometimes I ran. Sometimes I walked. I remember it was very cold. My feet were killing me.
I finally reached home at four in the morning. I rested for just a little while and then got up for the morning prayer. As I was praying I had a vision of my son lying dead. The moment I finished praying, my daughter called me on the mobile. She said, Dad, come quickly, my brother is dead. Apparently the doctor had given Mohammed too strong a dose of medicine when trying to break the fever, and it killed him. When I heard that, I was on the verge of collapse. I was screaming and crying like a baby.
We had some good Shi’ite neighbors who helped us with the burial, since it was unsafe for us to move about. But the incident had drawn attention to us. Those men at the hospital had seen me. An ambulance brought Wallah back with Mohammed’s body to our house, so other people at the hospital knew who we were and where we lived. After that we were fairly sure the Mahdi Army knew we were a Sunni family living in their area, and we grew more afraid.
Seven days after my son died I decided to go out, even though everyone was telling me not to. I wanted to see the situation. I took a motorcycle I have and drove to the nearest police checkpoint. I was stopped, and the police asked where I was going. I told them I was out to do some shopping. They let me through without any other questions, but I saw that someone was following me in a car as I drove away. The police of course at that time were working with the Mahdi Army, and I knew whoever was following me would probably kill me if they could catch me. I kept riding trying to lose them, and thankfully I saw an American convoy. I went full speed toward it. They might have shot me. They usually did shoot people coming straight at them. But if I didn’t reach them, the men following me would kill me. So I went at them anyway, hoping the car would not follow me past if I made it. Somehow the Americans understood that I was being chased and they didn’t fire. They let me approach them, and the car following me fell away.
I did not dare go home after that and knew we had to move. I went that day to Ghazaliya, to try to find a house to rent. I managed to find one that day, actually, and stayed there for three nights before my family joined me. My father decided not to move with us to Ghazaliya and went to stay with another family in Baghdad. But my wife and children eventually brought what little we had left in the house to the rental I had found. The Mahdi Army watched over them as they packed up our things.
As my wife and children were arriving with our things in Ghazaliya, suddenly a group of armed men appeared. Sunni gunmen of the neighborhood. They asked who we were and what we were doing there. I explained to them the situation. I think they must have not believed I was a Sunni because I had come from a Shi’ite area. In any case they said we could not stay in the house I was renting. They made us leave, and we were just wandering the neighborhood as it got dark. We had nowhere to go. We could not go home. We could not go to the house I had paid for because of these men. We roamed around Ghazaliya until we found an abandoned place, a shack really. We put our things inside, and I told my wife we should stay there for the night and figure out what to do in the morning. It was dark, and we were settling in for the evening when two cars approached. The men who chased us from our rental must have followed us. Armed men in masks got out of the cars, ordered me into the back of one, and took me away to a house in the area.
I remember it was the fifth of December 2006 and very cold. I don’t remember much about the men who took me. They were always in masks. Two of them were very big, I know that. And I don’t remember much about the house where they were keeping me. Only the bathroom. When we got to the house, I was beaten, stripped down, tied up and placed in the bathtub. Then they filled it with freezing water and left me there. I was in the bathtub for three days like this. They kept telling me I was a Shi’ite and a spy. I told them over and over again I was a Sunni, but they would not believe me. During the three days in the bathtub I was given no food. The only water I had was the water I was in. Of course I had gone to the bathroom in it. Eventually I was so thirsty I began to drink it and it made me so sick that I vomited in the tub as well. Throughout the time I was in the bathtub, men would come in and use the toilet. After using the toilet, each one would dump more water in the tub to keep the level up.
After three days of this they took me out, and they poured salt all over me. You can imagine the pain of having salt put all over your skin after three days in water. I could not take it anymore. I told them, Look, if you’re going to kill me, please just do it. Don’t put me through this anymore. Just please let me pray before I die. They gave me some clothes and left me alive for three more days. The questions about whether I was Sunni or Shi’ite continued. And then, suddenly, they became convinced I was indeed a Sunni and decided to let me go. Without any explanation they put me in the back of a car and drove me toward the area where I had left my family. The car came to a stop, and one of them asked me if I could find my way from there. I said yes, and they released me and drove away.
Ibrahim Ishmael Khalil reunited with his family and was still living in Ghazaliya as of February 2009. His life was gradually regaining a semblance of normalcy then, even though his father was murdered as the sectarian violence continued. After a period of desperate poverty, he managed to resume work installing and repairing air conditioners. He said business had gotten good enough for him to hire two laborers who helped him with various jobs.
YOUSEF ABOUD AHMED AND ANHAM MUHANA HASOON
They have been married nearly twenty years. He is a Sunni. She comes from a Shi’ite family. He drove a taxi to support her and their three children, two sons and one daughter. They were living in a rented house in Huriya, a mainly Shi’ite neighborhood of Baghdad where her family also lived. Theirs was a poor but largely untroubled life before the war. They sit close together on a couch for the interview. He touches her knee gently whenever he mentions her. She sometimes pauses to cry.
YOUSEF: Things started to change in our neighborhood as soon as 2004. People started to look at us in a strange way. Even before the bombing of the shrine in Samarra in 2006 we could feel suspicion and hostility toward us growing where we lived.
ANHAM: I noticed a change in the way people were toward me when I was out shopping day to day. The way people would say hello was a little bit different, a little colder than it was before. Neighbors who had visited us frequently came less often. Our children complained about harsh teasing. We stayed in more and more as we sensed these things. The few other Sunni families around us began moving away after the bombing of the shrine. They were getting threats, and eventually we got one too. Someone threw a grenade over our fence and into our yard.
YOUSEF: It was not a big grenade, and none of us were hurt. But it blew out the tires of my car and broke windows. We could not just move like some of the other Sunni families did, even after that. We had no money. I had been working less because driving was becoming more dangerous. In some areas around our neighborhood the Mahdi Army was burning down Sunni houses. They would strap a grenade to a can of gasoline and throw it into a Sunni house. With all this going on we were basically just hiding in our house waiting. Then one evening they came to kill me.
It was November of 2007. I was at home in an upstairs room. I looked out the window and noticed a number of men hanging around the gate of my house. They were armed. And elsewhere along my street I saw other armed men going around to the shops, telling them to close. There were about twenty-five armed men altogether.
ANHAM: I was visiting my parents who live just a few doors down from us. I went to go home, not knowing what was happening outside. As I walked into the street, someone pointed a gun at me and told me to go back inside. He said there was about to be shooting and that I should stay in the house. I thought there might be some fighting between the Mahdi Army and a Sunni group. Some Sunni militant groups had been coming into our area to attack Shi’ite families, and there had been such fighting between them and the Mahdi Army. But that’s not why these men were on the street. They were there to get us. I did not realize this at the time, and they did not know who I was coming out of my relative’s house. I begged them to please let me pass, saying I lived just there and would have time enough to get in my own house if they let me through. When I told them where I was going, they realized who I was. They let me walk toward my house, and as I went I began to understand why they were there.
At the gate of my house there were four armed men standing. They asked who I was, and I told them. They asked me where my husband was. And my son. I told them both were out, which was a lie. They were both inside. They told me we had two days to leave our house, or we would all be killed. We could not stay in the neighborhood any longer. I begged them not to evict us, but they would not listen.
YOUSEF: When she came in I stayed hidden and decided I would wait until they went away to try and leave the house. But they stayed there in the street waiting for me to arrive at home. They stood out there for hours and seemed ready to stay until dawn. I could hear them talking and clacking their guns. I hid inside for about four hours, listening to them on the street. I wanted to spare my family the scene of me getting killed right in front of them, so I decided to try and risk running away that night finally. Shortly before midnight I managed to slip out the back unnoticed, hop the fence into a neighbor’s yard, and make my way out of the neighborhood.
ANHAM: Somehow they figured out that he had been inside and ran away. I think one of the neighbors saw him leaving and told them, because shortly after he left they pounded on the door. They knew he was gone and not coming back, but they wanted to see Murad, our oldest son. He was twelve years old at the time. I think they had some misinformation that he was older, big enough to be a fighter. When they saw he was small, they didn’t say anything. They just left without taking him and went to stand in the street some more. They remained there through the night and left in the morning. I did not recognize any of those men who came. They were not from our neighborhood, but they must have known someone in our neighborhood. It was like they had spies watching us in the neighborhood before and after that night. Yousef called me the same night he escaped and told me to leave with the children the next morning, not to delay. I could not get everything together that quickly. It took me about three days to get ready, but then we were gone.
YOUSEF: Our life curse really started then. That night when I escaped I went to my cousin’s house in Adhamiya, a mainly Sunni neighborhood not far away. He was not in a position to take in me, much less my whole family. He advised me to go to the big Sunni mosque in the area, where a lot of Sunnis in the same position as me were seeking help. I went, and the men at the mosque arranged for me and my family to have two rooms in a dormitory building very near the mosque. It was meant to house the mosque’s religious students but had been empty for some time.
Initially we slept on the ground in those rooms. There was no furniture, and we had brought no possessions with us except our clothes and a few small things. At least we had a roof to sleep under. When we moved into that building, there were only two other families. We were the third. But day after day more displaced Sunni families came. The building had three floors with fourteen flats. Displaced Sunni families filled all of them in just a short time after we got there.
Gradually we began to gather some things. Some of the other displaced families in the building donated blankets and cushions. So did the mosque. We made some simple furniture from refrigerator crates we found. With what little money I had left I bought some plates that we could both eat off and cook with. It was a horrible time. In addition to all this suffering of ours, many of the people in the building were suspicious of us. I don’t blame them. We were strangers. There was a lot of sectarian killing going on at this time, and it was hard to know who to trust.
The neighborhood where the mosque and our building stood was not safe. There was a lot of fighting going on there from the time we arrived. The Mahdi Army was shooting mortars into the area in the hopes of hitting Sunnis they knew were gathering there. Sunni fighters calling themselves mujahideen were attacking the Americans and the Mahdi Army. There was gunfire, roadside bombs, car bombs, mortars. We faced trouble on all sides.
ANHAM: Most of the Iraqi security forces were Shi’ites. So, when they came to raid something in Adhamiya, they did not just raid. They attacked. They destroyed buildings instead of searching them for people to arrest. If they came to our area, they came as though they were going to war.
YOUSEF: The Mahdi Army tried many times to enter Adhamiya to kill all the Sunnis there. The Sunni fighters were tough, though, and managed to hold them back. So, the Mahdi Army hit again and again with mortars from their areas nearby instead. Mortars fell somewhere in our neighborhood almost daily. It was one of those mortars that killed my son.
It was about two months after we had moved into that building, and late one afternoon we asked Murad to go get some bread. There was a baker who had a place inside the building on the ground floor, and Murad often went to get bread for us because it was so close. This day he went with two of his little friends from the building. The baker told the kids that a new batch of bread was just about finished and to wait a few minutes. So the three of them sat on a curb just outside the building. The mortar fell right in the middle of them.
I was on the second floor in a room almost directly above them. I saw flames shoot up past the window as the glass shattered. When I looked down from the balcony I could not see because of the dust. Then my wife started shouting, My son, my son! She had seen him sitting there in the minutes before, but I had not.
I ran downstairs barefoot. There were a lot of injured all over the ground. Someone, I don’t know who, had picked up Murad. I took Murad from him. His head was split open. Most of his brain was outside his skull. A large piece of shrapnel had hit him in the cheek, and many other smaller fragments had gone into his chest. Both of his arms appeared broken. I knew he was dead as soon as I saw him. I knew I could do nothing, except bury him.
Yousef Aboud Ahmed and Anham Muhana Hasoon lived in the mosque dormitory for roughly eight months before they were able to find another home for themselves in Adhamiya. Yousef later joined the ranks of the Awakening, a movement of Sunni volunteer fighters who worked with U.S. forces against insurgents in western Iraq, parts of Baghdad, and areas just south of the capital.
He comes from a large, wealthy Sunni family who lived together in a house in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Ameriya. Ali was earning his master’s degree in political science at Baghdad University during the time of the U.S. invasion and went to apply for a job as a staffer with the newly formed Iraqi parliament in 2004.
SOMEONE MUST HAVE SEEN ME going into the Green Zone when I went to apply, because a friend of mine in Ameriya shortly afterward told me that people in the neighborhood were talking about how I had been there. He told me not to go the Green Zone anymore, because it could cause a lot of trouble for me and my family if I were involved in any work there. I made some excuse, saying I was just visiting a friend. After that I dropped the idea of going to work for the parliament. Even if I got the job, I would be under threat and maybe bring troubles to my family. I would have to leave my neighborhood. What kind of job would pay for me to rent another house and move? And even if I were safe, my family in Ameriya might not be if word got out that I was working in the Green Zone.
In our house in Ameriya at that time was me, my father and mother, and my five brothers. Two of my brothers were married then and had their wives living there as well. I was single. Our family has some business interests that kept me busy and brought in cash for us. We have a small cinderblock factory that’s belonged to us for a long time. We have a small car dealership. We trade in building materials, too. We were doing alright financially in the years after the invasion even while the situation grew worse.
Things in our neighborhood started getting bad gradually. First came the bodies. We began finding unidentified corpses in the road periodically. Rumors surrounded the bodies. For example, people would say that dead guy was working for the police and this dead guy was in the army or working in some government office or was a member of a certain political party. But you never really knew who the victims were.
I personally saw killings in the neighborhood. I was in the house one day when I heard shots in the street. I ran out along with a bunch of others on the block who heard the commotion. And there were three gunmen who had just killed a shopkeeper and neighbor of ours, a Shi’ite named Sallah. He was a close friend to one of my brothers and had come by just earlier that day to invite us all to his upcoming wedding. The killers were wearing blue jeans and baseball caps. They looked like teenagers. The oldest of them could have only been twenty. They left casually, as if they had all the time in the world, and no one tried to stop them. We were all too afraid.
More bodies began to appear in the streets as time went on. For a while whenever you went out you were sure to see a body in the road, or in the garbage or sitting in a car still running after being shot through the windows. These became everyday sights. By 2006 it got so bad that all of us in our family were afraid to go on the main street in our neighborhood. There were no Iraqi security forces at all in our area in that time. They did not dare come, because the place was totally under the control of al-Qaeda. Only American troops would occasionally enter.
We never came under threat, but we were worried nonetheless. Our neighborhood was so overrun with al-Qaeda that we knew either the Americans or the Iraqi security forces would attempt a crackdown. We had a family meeting one day. My father said, Look, you are six men of fighting age. For sure some of you will wind up arrested if we stay here. We had a place to go. My family has roots in Hit, and we have a small house there that’s been in the family for years. My father figured we could all go there for a while until things cooled down. We knew our house in Ameriya would probably be looted once we left. We didn’t care. We all knew we had to go. Most other families in our area had already gone. On our street alone there were about thirty families. All but five wound up leaving.
In Hit, we were there for about a year. Of course, as you know, the place is mostly Sunni, and al-Qaeda was there too. The al-Qaeda fighters were very open in their presence around Hit. They distributed leaflets advising residents to stay away from American patrols, because they were targets likely to be attacked at any moment. These fighters made it clear the town belonged to them. They did whatever they wanted.
Hit is a very small place. There’s only one gas station in it. Twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, a tanker came to refill the station. Huge lines of cars would appear on those days to get gas because there was such a shortage. The al-Qaeda fighters needed gas too, and they would roll up in their trucks, cut into the line, and fill whole barrels while everyone watched. One day there was a guy refilling his car when al-Qaeda came. He had just started pouring gas into his tank when one of the fighters ripped the hose from his hand. The man said, Listen, please let me just finish before you begin filling your barrels because it will take you so much longer than it will me. The fighter who grabbed the hose slapped the man. The man began shouting in anger, and a moment later he was shoved into a car by other fighters and driven away. Two days later his dead body was dumped on his doorstep.
The al-Qaeda fighters were not the only ones we were afraid of in Hit, however. We worried about the Americans, too. There was a shop in front of our house. And there was a big hole in the road right next to the shop. One day a man came and dropped a huge sack in the hole. The shopkeeper asked what was going on, and the man told him flatly that it was a bomb meant for the Americans. The shopkeeper was advised to close up for a while until the fighters had a chance to set the bomb off. The shopkeeper did and came and told us what was going on. Of course we did not dare try to remove it in case someone was watching.
About three days later we heard the sound of American vehicles approaching. They were heavy vehicles on treads. When the convoy was very near, the bomb went off. The blast was big enough to blow out all the windows in the area. The Americans did not appear hurt in the explosion, but one of their vehicles was disabled. They went about trying to clear it off, taking about two hours to get the thing out of there. Those two hours passed like two years for us in the house just across the road. We were so scared. We knew the Americans had gone on a rampage in Haditha after a similar bombing against them. As far as we knew, they were capable of anything in that moment. Maybe they would come and arrest all of us in the houses around the area, knowing that we must have known about the bomb. Maybe they would kick in the door and kill us. Maybe they would take some women and rape them. In the end they didn’t do anything. They just left. But my blood pounded through my veins until they finally went.
Ali Ibrahim Baher and his family remained safe during their yearlong stay in Hit. They all eventually resettled in the family house in western Baghdad, where Ali remained living as of May 2009.
He grew up an only child in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Saydiya, near the airport. Married in 2004, he and his wife began a family while still living with his parents, who kept a flat in Saydiya.
I GOT A CALL from my mother-in-law one day in July of 2005. She had gotten word that her husband had been shot near where I live and was down at the police station. My father-in-law was a former officer in the army, and he had gotten involved with the National Iraqi Accord party after the invasion. He worked as a liaison for the party to military men like himself, enlisting support where he could find it among his old colleagues. The role made him a target for Sunni insurgents. Anyone working in politics officially then was.
My wife and I got in the car and headed to the police station. Initially we all thought he had just been injured. I kept calling him on his cell phone as we drove but got no answer. Then about halfway to the police station I saw his car on the side of the road. He was inside, not moving, and there was a lot of blood. My wife of course became hysterical.
I pulled over, left my wife in the car, and went to check things out. He was finished for sure. There were at least nine bullet holes in the car, and I could see three wounds on him. There was one on the neck that must have killed him. He had one in his back and one in his shoulder. From what I could tell, a car must have pulled up alongside him as he was moving. Gunmen inside shot a burst with a Kalashnikov and then sped away. He appeared to have survived long enough to pull the car over but then passed away, probably only a short time before we got to him. There was no saving him. I called my mother-in-law right away and told her. A friend of hers quickly came. We decided it would be best for him to take my wife away in my car, while I dealt with the body. I managed to get him into the backseat, and I drove the car to the police station.
At the police station, I sat for questioning, and things began to get weird. Right away the police took note that I was a Sunni, and as you know at that time Shi’ite militias were working with the police in a lot of places. There were a lot of questions about where I was from and my family background, things that had nothing to do with the incident. They seemed to be growing hostile toward me the longer the questioning went on. At one point they asked me to wait outside. Things were getting busy at the police station, because American troops had just brought in two unidentified bodies found in the area. I went outside as they said, but I did not wait for them to call me in for more questioning. I ran. I had the feeling that if I stayed there any longer, something bad would happen to me. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was being paranoid. But I had heard so many stories about the police and the militias working together to kill Sunnis, and I was getting a really bad feeling from those guys at the station.
About two days later a threat came to my father-in-law’s house in Ghazaliya. One of their neighbors quietly passed on a message that the family should not hold a wake, because it might be dangerous. It was a subtle threat to the remaining sons of the family. My father-in-law had five boys of his own plus me after I married into the family. It was clear he was murdered by al-Qaeda, which was in complete control of Ghazaliya at that time. And it was clear that we his sons would be targeted as well eventually. We knew we could not be safe. It did not need to be spelled out in a letter dropped on our doorstep. We understood.
I had two uncles living in Egypt, and my parents urged me to go and stay with them. They were so worried, you know, because I am their only son. For the next two months I stayed mostly at home, afraid to go out as I waited on my visa application. It was a horrible time, just sitting all day and all night bored and fearful at the same time. I passed endless hours with games on Playstation, reading books. My mood was always dark. My mind began to fill with a kind of waking nightmare, a vision in which I would be killed the moment I set foot out the door after getting my visa for Egypt. My wife Noor was so brave through it all. She had every right to be in worse condition than me. She had lost her father, and she was caring for our newborn daughter. But Noor through those days was always telling me to be patient, that things could get better once we were out of Iraq, that God would provide.
I had never been to Egypt before. I had never even been outside Iraq except once as a child in Jordan. It was really hard to go, but by 2006 we had made it to Cairo. We found a flat to rent. We got some furniture. Through my uncles we began meeting a lot of Iraqis who had fled like us, and we began to get to know the city. In some ways it was nice at first. The newness of everything quickly wore off, though, and we fell into a bleak routine. We would sleep all day in our flat and drift around at night, afraid to spend money because we were running low. There was no aim in our life, no purpose for our being there except to be away from Iraq. Hope of returning home seemed to fade every day as the news from Iraq got worse all the time. Each day we heard on the television about how thirty bodies had been found in Baghdad, sometimes fifty bodies in a day. I got to the point where I could not sleep because of the stress of our situation and all the bad news we heard from home. I would close my eyes for only an hour or so at a time before waking up with my head filled with worry and images of dead bodies on streets I knew.
Khalid Adnan Khalid and his wife had another baby in 2007 while living in Cairo and eventually returned to Baghdad shortly thereafter. The family settled again in Saydiya. Khalid was looking for work without luck as of May 2009.