Years of War
Yaghdan was born into a year of violence, and since 1977, there has been a year of war for each year of peace. Years of peace are used to prepare for more war. On September 8, 1977, his mother delivered him in the Elwia Hospital near their home in Adhamiya, a predominantly Sunni neighborhood on the west bank of the Tigris in central Baghdad.
He was an infant during one of the first major Shi’a uprisings in modern Iraq. The ruling Sunni Ba’ath Party was caught off guard when the Shi’a rioted during their annual Ashura procession from Najaf to Karbala’. Thirty thousand Shi’ites protested against their marginalization in the Iraqi government. The response was brutal: more than two thousand were arrested, including many senior Shi’a clerics. A special court sentenced eight clerics to death and imprisoned others. Remaining Shi’a leaders fled, not to return for twenty-five years, among them future prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.
As Yaghdan was learning to speak, Saddam Hussein, already the de facto leader of Iraq with President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr ailing, formalized his authority with a brutal flourish. On July 22, 1979, he assembled the Ba’ath Party leadership and ordered a camera to record the reading of a list of sixty-eight traitors. Soldiers dragged each man from the room after his name was read; it is rumored that the shots of execution were heard inside the hall. A year later, Hussein began an eight-year war with Iran, a conflict that ranks among the most blood-soaked offered up by the twentieth century. When Yaghdan was in first grade, the sirens wailed whenever Iranian fighter pilots raced in low and fast to bomb Baghdad.
His father hailed from Najaf, where most of the extended family still lived. He was a primary school teacher but took advanced degrees in child psychology and was eventually drafted into the Iraqi Ministry of Education in Baghdad to develop curricula. He was not an ideologue, and his coolness toward Ba’ath Party machinations was noticed by both his supervisors and subordinates. As the war intensified, when Yaghdan was seven and obsessed with English-language cartoons like Tom and Jerry and Casper the Friendly Ghost, party members regularly dropped by the home in search of his father, hoping to conscript him into the Jaysh al-Sha’abi, the Popular Army. They wanted to send him to the front lines, where bodies piled and lethal gas clouded, but his dad managed to evade them until the war’s end.
Mired in a resource-draining war, Iraq’s infrastructure—refineries, power plants, water treatment centers, dams, and roads—grew brittle, along with the public’s tolerance for Saddam Hussein’s rule. Saddam wanted new and better technology and reoriented Iraq away from the Soviet bloc and toward the West, particularly America. He invited US firms like Bechtel to carry out massive infrastructure projects to solidify relations with the West, which gladly threw its support behind him as a check against the Iranian revolutionary government.
And then there was no more war with Iran. Eight of the first ten years of Yaghdan’s life had been punctured by missile fire. On 8-8-88, the date of the cease-fire, Iraqis pooled into the streets to celebrate. He was in sixth grade. No longer would the futile war suck the youth from the cities and the men from their families. But the triumphant monuments to war that Saddam erected throughout the country were not enough to obscure the true cost: at least one hundred thousand dead, three hundred thousand wounded, and a material loss to the nation’s coffers of a staggering $435 billion, a significant portion of which was bankrolled by Kuwait.
Two years and a month passed before Saddam reignited the engine of war. The Kuwaiti government had refused to forgive the debt, so the Iraqis invaded and took more from them. Cars were driven north, gold seized, the nation looted, and, in twenty-four hours, Kuwait became Iraq’s nineteenth province. Though driven by economic desperation, the war—more an aftershock—was presented to the Iraqi people as a form of anticolonial justice. The British had carved out Kuwait from its rightful place in Iraq, and now Saddam aimed to take it back.
The West recoiled, and a coalition was formed. American troops were loaded onto airplanes and ships, and within six months more than half a million troops were positioned for war.
On January 16, 1991, America started a six-week program of bombardment in advance of ground troops. Once Iraqi military targets were destroyed, the United States targeted the nation’s infrastructure, hitting power plants, water, and roads, and setting back industrial production to levels last seen in the 1960s. Gone to rubble went the Bechtel projects and others carried out by the West only a few years earlier. One senior administration official admitted that the targeting of key infrastructure—bombing seven of Iraq’s eight dams to ruin access to clean water, for example—was a deliberate plan to increase “postwar leverage.” Potable water vanished with the power, and access to food became unreliable. Disease spread, and sewage flowed untreated.
The tide of Iraqi soldiers receded from Kuwait nearly as quickly as it had flooded in. On February 15, George H. W. Bush addressed the Iraqi public on Voice of America: “There is another way for the bloodshed to stop: and that is, for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside, and then comply with the United Nations’s resolutions and rejoin the family of peace-loving nations.” A CIA-funded radio station in Saudi Arabia, Voice of Free Iraq, reinforced this message by broadcasting a speech from a high-ranking defector in the Iraqi military: “Rise to save the homeland from the clutches of dictatorship so that you can devote yourself to avoid the dangers of the continuation of the war and destruction. Honorable sons of the Tigris and Euphrates, at these decisive moments of your life, and while facing the danger of death at the hands of foreign forces, you have no option in order to survive and defend the homeland but to put an end to the dictator and his criminal gang.”
The Shi’a community again rose up, believing that the American president would support it. Cities throughout the south—Najaf, Karbala’, Basrah—soon fell to local rebels, but Saddam was prepared, maintaining his Republican Guard for such scenarios. “La shi’a ba’d al-yawm”—“No more Shi’a after today”—was spray-painted onto the side of their tanks.
Within weeks, the rebels were crushed. Fifty thousand Shi’a refugees fled to Saudi Arabia, others to Iran, and still others to the swampy marshlands in the south of Iraq. In the north, the Kurds also revolted, but retaliation was swift and complete. Hundreds of thousands fled across the border into Turkey and Iran, blistering with a feeling that the American president had just turned his back on the uprising he had encouraged.
After the rebels had been turned into refugees, the UN passed a Security Council resolution creating no-fly zones in the north and south, but tens of thousands were already dead.
Sanctions were imposed in order to extract good behavior from Saddam. Before Iraq would be permitted to import freely, Saddam would have to repay the Kuwaitis, give up his missile capacity and weapons of mass destruction, and cease the repression of his citizens.
And so the economic siege of Iraq began, when Yaghdan was thirteen.
Following his previous wars, Saddam had drilled money from the deep pools of oil below Iraq’s blood-soaked crust to clear the rubble and repair infrastructure. After the Gulf War, though, the international community declared Iraqi oil off-limits and banned the importation of chlorine, vaccines, tractors, fertilizer, and anything else that could be converted to military ends. Pepsi was banned, wheat and sugar imports cut. The sanctions committee found danger in the most quotidian needs: a pencil has lead, lead can be used for war, and so pencils were banned. In one of the more ostentatious breaches of the embargo, a convoy of Jordanian trucks sped across the border to ferry millions of pencils into Iraq.
If Saddam could be prevented from rebuilding, the Americans argued, his country would turn on him. The more that Iraqi civilians were deprived of basic services, the greater the loss to the legitimacy of his rule, and the more leverage the United States would have in its dealings with him. It was a simple equation.
The drop in oil production—85 percent, by most accounts—meant that the Iraqi government had less money to import food. Although Iraq was the land of two rivers, it could not feed itself, unable to coax enough food from its soil when its tractors were broken and pesticides and fertilizer were illegal.
A humanitarian crisis developed. The infant mortality rate doubled, due in large part to the proliferation of disease caused by untreated water, a result of the ban on chlorine (which could be used to make explosives). When, in the mid-1990s, the New York Times reported that as many as five hundred thousand Iraqi children had died as a result of the harsh sanctions, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told 60 Minutes, “The price is worth it.”
He had known Haifa only as a friend and classmate from the Physics Department at Baghdad’s Mustansiriyah University. Yaghdan hadn’t seen her since their graduation two years earlier, but when he bumped into her at a mutual friend’s lecture in the summer of 2002, he saw the woman he wanted to marry. He was twenty-five.
Yaghdan had opened a small shop on Sina’a Street with a partner. They sold computers, monitors, and software and repaired broken computers brought into the store, which was just across the street from Al-Technologia University in eastern Baghdad. Business was good, despite the economic throes of his country.
Yaghdan hired Haifa at the shop so that they would have an excuse to be near each other, and their love unfolded steadily over the fall and into the winter, oblivious to the revving sounds of war. They saw no pictures of troops massing at their border and heard no speeches from George W. Bush. The United States had threatened Iraq with war on countless occasions, Yaghdan figured, so if a war came at all, it would probably start and end with a couple cruise missiles and another bombed-out military installation.
Two days before the invasion, they were in the store, taking coffee breaks, making dinner plans with friends. Haifa’s father had heard enough rumors down south in Karbala’ to be convinced, though, and pleaded with his daughter to leave Baghdad. She laughed and said, “There is no war! Are you kidding?”
But Haifa decided to oblige her father and made plans to spend that last afternoon with Yaghdan. They strode around the Mansour district. He bought her ice cream, and the Egyptian pop singer Amr Diab’s song “Ana ‘Aish” warbled from the window of a passing car. They joked about her anxious father. There was no gravity to their good-bye that night; Yaghdan knew he’d see her in a couple days, after the war had come and gone.
On March 19, 2003, Haifa drove an hour south to Karbala’ and teased her father about his “war.” Yaghdan and his parents passed a normal evening in their small home on Street Number 2 in the al-Jihad neighborhood in western Baghdad. They had a dinner of rice and fish and went to bed.
Hours later, bombs tore apart the city and burned the night sky in the early morning of the twentieth. At first Yaghdan hoped it was only a demonstration strike, but the bombs fell all night, and in the morning there were more. He felt his ears about to burst and worried that his parents would perish, if not by the bombs, then by heart attacks. At around ten o’clock, the bombers relented, but for how long, he didn’t know. He ran out to the driveway and checked their Volkswagen Passat. There was a half tank, more than enough to get them to Najaf if the roads were in one piece.
There was smoldering rubble everywhere, columns of smoke rising from Baghdad. The road out of the city was a mess, thronged with dazed Iraqis piled into cars and trucks and walking alongside the highway, heading anywhere away from the Shock and Awe. Yaghdan had grown accustomed to bombs: there was once a time when his country was not at war with the world, but all he knew was that every few years, the skies over Iraq opened up and showered ruin.
But now, just as he was starting to grasp the edges of a life for himself as a young man—a steady business and a woman who loved him—here it came again. The electricity vanished in an instant, followed by Iraq’s antiquated landline telephone network. He had no way of finding out what had happened to Haifa in Karbala’.
In Najaf, he braced for the second night, which passed without attack. He figured that the Americans would not bomb the holy city, but the ferocity of the first day gave him second thoughts. Najaf sits on a hill, so when Yaghdan climbed to the rooftop, he could see American troops, tanks, and Humvees gathering, churning up massive clouds of dust on the outskirts of the city. He heard the sound of a helicopter before he saw it bearing down on him. Alone on the roof, he waved with exaggerated movements at the chopper, which hovered, circled around, watched him. It flew on, over the city, in search of indications of resistance.
June approached. The Americans had taken Baghdad. Iraqi policemen and soldiers, once iron fixtures of his life in Baghdad, had melted away in the first hours of the war. Looting was rife. Government buildings were stripped of their veins of copper piping and any fixtures of value. Cars were stolen and shops emptied. Old feuds were settled.
Yaghdan wanted to return to Baghdad to protect his business. He drove back north, leaving his father in Najaf.
He and his business partner, Mohammad, reopened the computer store with zeal. Yes, there were looters and a breakdown of order in Baghdad, they reasoned, but the American troops would soon settle and take control. He found Americans everywhere in the streets and could tell when they were lost, offering them directions.
There were plenty of reasons to be optimistic in June 2003. He had heard through a mutual friend that Haifa was safe and would return to Baghdad soon. His shop hadn’t been looted, and the fall of the regime meant the end of sanctions, allowing him to import new technology and computers without submitting to a review board. He and Mohammad talked with excitement about the coming year, when American companies would surely return to Iraq. He heard that the Bechtel Corporation was returning to build power plants and repair their infrastructure. They’d have better electricity, cleaner water, and a free economy. The Americans would leave in a year, he thought, just as they had after rebuilding Kuwait.
On Sina’a Street, Baghdad’s high-tech boulevard, business was coming back. New technology flooded into Iraq, and suppliers ferried crates of computers and monitors down the street to vendors.
At the end of the workday on his third Thursday back in Baghdad, Yaghdan and Mohammad locked the outer door to the shop. Yaghdan carried a white plastic bag stuffed with the week’s receipts, which he intended to tally up over the weekend.
Mohammad started his car, a white Toyota Crown sedan, but it was sweltering inside, so he got back out and left the doors open to air it out. Yaghdan leaned against the hood of the car, the receipt bag around his wrist.
With a wail of engines and screeching tires, a black BMW and another Toyota skidded up onto the curb alongside them. Their doors flew open and six men poured out. They carried weapons: four AK-47s and two 9 millimeters.
Without exchanging a word, they began pummeling Mohammad, who lunged back into the car in a futile effort to escape. They dragged him out and told him to hand over the keys. Three men surrounded Yaghdan, who shouted, “Why are you doing this?” A gunman approached him. He was short, at least six inches shorter than Yaghdan. When he reached for the plastic bag, Yaghdan shoved him away.
Yaghdan fell to the ground. Someone had shot him in the leg, right through his kneecap. The short gunman yanked the bag of worthless receipts from around his wrist, jumped into Mohammad’s sedan, and sped off.
As he lay there, he thought he was a dead man. A bullet through the knee was not necessarily lethal, but everyone knew that the hospitals were in dire shape. In addition to being looted, they had run out of blood and medication from treating those wounded during the invasion. Doctors were scarce.
The sun was unforgiving. Cars and trucks drove by. A neighboring shop owner raced out and saw a puddle of blood forming around Yaghdan, who lay there quietly.
An ambulance arrived forty-five minutes later, and the pool of red had turned into a small pond. Medics hoisted him onto a stretcher and sped off. Soon someone came by with a bucket of water to wash his blood from the sidewalk.
Yaghdan found that he was not as patient as he liked to think. He still hadn’t seen Haifa, and wondered if she and her family were okay. Under strict orders from the surgeon not to move without his crutches, he sat in the corner of the living room in his home, tormented by boredom and heat, which made the skin under his cast itch.
He didn’t know who had shot him, but didn’t even bother calling the police. There were none to call. He could hobble out and locate some American soldiers, but what would he tell them? What could they do?
His impatience churned with frustration until he decided the surgeon must be wrong and it was okay for him to walk, just four weeks after his knee was shot to bits. He stood up without the crutch and felt something tear apart in his knee. He fell back into his chair and called an ambulance, which arrived after two hours to shuttle him back to the operating room.
Yaghdan’s cell phone rang loudly from the other room. Summer was easing into fall, and his knee was finally on the mend. He hobbled on his crutches to take the call from Mohammad, who updated him on business. He mentioned in passing that Haifa had come back to work, and Yaghdan’s mind raced happily. “I think I’ll try coming in soon,” he said, trying to mask the excitement in his voice.
In the three months since he was shot, Iraq had fallen quite ill, stricken by an insurgency that seemed to be equal parts criminal enterprise (kidnapping for ransom, hijacking cargo trucks) and anti-American uprising, fueled by a widening furor over America’s inability to restore order.
In the beginning of the war, he and his parents saw massive helicopters carrying tanks and Humvees—sometimes two Humvees suspended from a single helicopter. It was just a matter of time, they believed, before they would see generators hanging from the helicopters.
But the summer passed, and the electricity was weaker than ever. Sewage pooled in the streets, which teemed with US soldiers who never had any answers for the Iraqis who came up to ask about the power and water.
Even though it was September, the house was a furnace. He turned the faucet handle to splash some water on his face, but nothing came out. He didn’t care: today he would finally go back to work, to see her. He locked the house door behind him and hobbled past the garden that his mom once tended. There was little hope for the flowers this year, but still they sprouted, sickly but alive.
He lowered himself into the Passat. He could still drive with his good right leg. There were several checkpoints that had sprung up between his house and Sina’a Street, one run by American soldiers, the others by Iraqis. What was once a fifteen-minute drive now took over an hour, but he would not be fazed. He smiled as he handed his identity card to the American soldier and said, “How are you today?” Startled, the soldier smiled, handed back his papers, and waved him through.
He saw Haifa’s eyes flash with happiness when he walked into the shop. Yaghdan tried to make small talk with the other employees, but he spent most of his time with her. They made plans to see each other the next day.
As thrilled as he was to see her, he wrestled with the realization that between the checkpoints and the throbbing pain in his leg, he was not yet ready to return to work.
An American organization, Creative Associates International, was looking for Iraqi employees. The recipient of a $62 million contract to revitalize Iraq’s schools, the company was hiring Iraqis to help on a range of projects. Millions of schoolbooks needed to be drained of Saddam and Ba’ath Party ideology and reprinted. Over a million schoolbags were filled with pencils, pads of paper, and calculators and given to every Iraqi child. Tens of thousands of teachers were trained.
Suhair, a friend of Yaghdan’s from the university, had started working with Creative. She called Yaghdan and recruited him for a massive data-entry project compiling the results of a countrywide survey about the needs of Iraq’s schools. He planned to work for the Americans from home for a couple months until he could return to Sina’a Street to run the computer shop.
But he soon began to see how his work was impacting the lives of his fellow Iraqis. He felt that he could do more good with the Americans than with his computer business, so what started as a temporary job became full-time. When he was well enough to walk without crutches, he began commuting to work at the Creative Associates compound in the Karrada neighborhood of Baghdad, just across the Tigris from the Green Zone.
The well of Yaghdan’s optimism was filling once again. Although he walked with a slight limp, his knee had healed. Haifa was back in his life, and they had begun talking about marriage.
He went to Haifa’s father and asked for his blessing. The wedding took place in January 2004. Haifa moved into his home on Street Number 2, and the pair lived happily alongside his parents.
Eight months later, in the fall of 2004, officials at USAID, which oversaw the Creative Associates contract, noticed Yaghdan’s work. He accepted their offer of a job working directly for the US government at the agency’s compound in the heart of the Green Zone.