born 1976, political Scientist and freelance journalist
[02/03/2010]
Bilal Al Badry tells us how, in his neighborhood, a mad and unkempt tramp walked the streets dragging his feet and collecting garbage without bothering anyone. He received food from the neighbors and he slept in the street corners. He used to pretend to shoot the cars as they rushed past him at full speed. Until one day, one of those cars stopped and simply executed him. He tells me all this while we walk along Karrada, with his friend Assim, heading towards the Christmas mass in the Anglican Church. He is meeting Saif Sami Alsaig and his brother Fadi there. Christians in Baghdad. Survivors and resistants. The church is surrounded by barbed wire and barricades, and there is a dozen policemen protecting it. In July, 2009, five churches in Baghdad suffered bomb attacks, in what was only the last episode in the attacks against Christians in Baghdad. A displaced, frightened, decimated community that, despite all this, tries to continue with its public life. With bodyguards and limited opening timetables. The complain, they complain that it is impossible to open the churches any longer than the time required to complete the ceremonies. The pastor of the parish offers tea when the mass is finished. They are all in a hurry. They accept with forced education. Assim has enjoyed the ceremony. Music and dances. Color. In stark contrast with the blackness and the mourning, and the beatings that surround the Shiite Ashura, presently occupying the city. Bilal nods sadly, his family tried to convince him not to go to the Christian church. It is dangerous. Bilal is unwilling to change his friends or his visits due to danger. If he did, he could not continue living.
His cousin Roaaim Al Badry was with Bilal in the University one day when his father, Basil, called him on the phone, saying “do not come back to the neighborhood once you finish your classes”. The Mahdi Army had gone to his house to recruit him. He slept a couple of days at Bilal's house and he left straight for Damascus, where he waited for a year for things to calm down.
A few weeks later, three police cars with half a dozen agents in full uniform called at their door, and with the excuse of a routine search for arms, locked the family in a room. When, half and hour later, there was silence again, the father went out to check if they had gone. They had robbed the house clean.
Suada Ahmad, Rooaim's mother and Basil's wife, travels every day by taxi to her job in the Housing Ministry. One morning, at dawn, while they where approaching the building, without stopping the car, several hooded gunmen shot her usual driver. She came out unharmed. With a corpse in her arms. On the following day, she went back with a different taxi driver to her job in the Ministry. A few months later, she suffered the attack of a car bomb that, even if it did not manage to kill any of her workmates, left the building unworkable for a long period and it murdered several taxi drivers and people who were passing by the door at that unfortunate moment. Roaa, Roaaim's sister, the daughter of Basil and Suada, was engaged with Sameh, who owns a 70s Mercedes bought in an auction. It used to belong to Abdul Karim Qasem, Iraqi Prime Minister between 1958 and 1963. Sameh was kidnapped by foreign criminals. With a Syrian accent. They asked for an outrageous amount of dollars in ransom. A week after his capture, his father paid a tenth of their asking price. He was tortured relentlessly. He suspects it was his neighbor who gave them the information.
Assim Ameer is a friend and University companion of Bilal, Roaaim and Roaa. The Mahdi Army also came to recruit him at his home. He had to abandon the district, along with his father and his brother. They were saved by the intervention of a dozen of their neighbors. But he is still scared. Once you have heard the knocks on the door of your possible executioners, you never forget them. Sometimes, before killing their victims, they used hand-drills on them, before dumping their corpses in the river. Many have not yet appeared.
Saba Nadawi works in the IWPR (International War and Peace Reporting Institute). She coordinates the training programs for Iraqi journalists and the METRO magazine. Six months after marrying a workmate, in December 2008, they said goodbye. He was going to visit someone from his family in Fallujah. Someone stopped the car and executed him. They found his corpse in the driver's seat. He was traveling alone. He was a journalist. This past 25th of January, 2010, the office of Al Jadiriya in which I lunched and interviewed Saba was practically destroyed by the explosion caused by a suicide bomber who exploded in an hotel where foreign journalists often stay. The workers have hired a house near the office in order to sleep there when they consider that the journey home is too dangerous.
Ali Kareem is slightly older than his friends. He is 26. He started to study in the Baghdad Fine Arts Academy, with a demurral of a few years. (FRASE ELIMINADA) Zaid Al Wardi gave him a job in one of his clothes shops. In Zaid's house there is a room stuck back in time. Books upon a desk, fading posters on the walls, old but still unworn clothes and a calendar frozen in March 1982. His aunt, who was studying her last year of Medicine, received a warning from a fellow cell member of the illegal Communist Party of Iraq: “They are coming to get you”. She did not take the warning seriously. She went to the University and never came back.
25 years later, Zaid was sleeping with his wife and children in the roof of their house in order to avoid the Iraqi heat. In the nights when the militias were solving their differences with gunshots, he covered his son Osama, 12 years old, with his own body, in order to avoid any stray bullets from hitting him. His wife did likewise with Zeinab, their 15 year old daughter. Zaid started two years ago the paperwork that should allow them to move to Canada. His father, displaced out of fear of the militias, will remain alone when the rest of the family leaves.
Basil's brother, Abdullah, did not return either. In his case, from the war front against Iran. They do not know when, how or where he died. They lost hope long ago of him being a war prisoner in Iran two decades later.
All my friends, except Basil and his wife, who are nearly 60 years old, want to leave the country. Most of them will not vote in the oncoming elections of the 7th of March. Basil gets home from work in New Year's Eve. He is cross. He has tried to convince his younger nephews not to throw any fireworks to celebrate the New Year. The neighbors would be offended if they knew that we are going to celebrate anything. We are in the month of Muharram. It is sacred for the Shia, a month of mourning for the martyrdom of their Imam Hussein and someone might come along to demand explanations. The AbdelKarim family live in Al Alamah, in the south of Baghdad. It is one of the districts in the city that used to be, theoretically, mixed. The government would lease land to civil servants and they would build their new houses there. A district defined as mixed. Now, his house is the only one in several meters without a sectarian flag like the ones that have accompanied me since my arrival in Basra. He puts the Disdasha on, in order to walk around the house, he pours a glass of Chivas and he tells me, in the refuge of the darkness of his house - "I have lost any hope". Pour me one too, Basil.
Basil, Zaid, Bilal, Ali and Saba in Baghdad, Abdullah and Abu Faruk in Basra, Ali in Rumeitha, Inthissar and Thuwar in Najaf and various dozens of people more that I have met these last days in Erbil, Suleimanya or Kirkuk always talk about giving up, but they have not given in yet. In their own way, they are still (re)building Iraq. And I go through their stories in what is considered the best restaurant in Baghdad, a few hundred meters away from the Spanish Embassy in Al Mansur. It belongs to a Kurdish family, the Samads. It opened in Kirkuk years ago and it recently enlarged its business by opening a new restaurant in Baghdad. It has been bombed twice, in 2006 and 2007. Everyone should taste the one layer bread they cook here, with flour from eastern Iraq. With them. A way of resisting.