Site Presented By
Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Iraqis tell their American relatives of the daily horror of being caught between Saddam's death squads and the ferocious firepower of the U.S. military.
Apr 3, 2003 | After a prayer meeting Friday at the Al-Khoei Islamic Center, a blocky gray building with a stubby minaret overlooking an expressway in Queens, N.Y., Sheikh Fadhel Al-Sahlani offered a visitor a piece of sticky sweet baklava before sitting down in his wood-paneled office lined with religious books. These days Al-Sahlani, a soft-spoken man with graceful manners, finds himself an unlikely pundit on the latest war in Iraq. For those willing to listen, Al-Sahlani has a sobering analysis on Operation Iraqi Freedom: The Iraqi people are Saddam's terrified hostages and America's unwilling enemies.
Al-Sahlani, imam of the Al-Khoei mosque since 1989, knows this because he grew up in Basra and has family and friends who still live in the Shiite-dominated southern city of 1.3 million. Over the years, the 50-year-old religious leader has heard how Saddam has gradually tightened his stranglehold over the populace, so no one dares rise up against him. That's why he isn't surprised civilians haven't rebelled and embraced American and British troops as their liberators. They can't.
Piecing together the situation in Basra from Arab news reports and dispatches from Iraqis, Al-Sahlani says conditions in the city are more dire than the lack of drinking water and electricity, and far darker than Americans were led to believe. The Saddam Fedayeen, an elite paramilitary force, and the Republican Guard have Basra's residents under house arrest. Each family is given one identification card. If anyone is caught in the streets without it after curfew, he or she is shot. The Fedayeen also forces men, some as young as 15 or 16, to join their ranks. If new recruits refuse to fight, they're shot. And if they do fight, they risk death at the hands of Anglo-American forces.
"Saddam doesn't care about the Iraqis -- maybe he's even glad when there are more causalities, so he can blame them on the coalition forces. And the coalition forces aren't intentionally trying to kill civilians, but when they fight the Fedayeen, who are between houses, mosques and schools, they will be hurt," Al-Sahlani says. "The Iraqi civilians are between the two fires."
A similar sentiment is heard over and over wherever Iraqi expatriates gather, and with allied troops now moving against the capital city of Baghdad, and transcontinental communications difficult or impossible, it is more acute than ever. In a series of interviews, Iraqi Americans who live in New York paint a disturbing picture of their family and friends at home: They are trapped between a Stalinist dictator willing to sacrifice his own people as he fights for his life and the Bush administration's unprecedented military might. The risks are enormous, and the future completely unknown.
"They are frustrated both ways: with the government and with the Americans," says Saad Al-Khafagi, who accompanied a delegation of religious leaders who visited Baghdad on a peace mission in the days before the first bombs fell. "They are in the middle."
After the end of the Gulf War in 1991, an estimated 4 million Iraqis left the country; 50,000 of them came to the United States and most of them found their way to Detroit, according to a recent New York Times article. A little more than 1,200 settled in New York, but there could be more, says Louis Abdellatif Cristillo, project coordinator for the Muslims in New York City Project, sponsored by the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. As nationalities go, "Iraqi" is a modern construct, he says, and many Iraqis choose to identify themselves through their ethnicity: Chaldean, Assyrian, Armenian, Turkmen or Kurdish. "Iraqis have integrated pretty well in the U.S. economy," Cristillo says. "They're working in offices and have white-collar jobs."
Though many Iraqis in this country left their homeland because of political and religious persecution, they still have strong ties and affection for Iraq and close relations with families and friends who are among the 24 million people still living there. Often bonds have been maintained through telephone calls, but in the first days of war, those calls were both reassuring and deeply frustrating. Words were warm and heartfelt, but somehow mundane. Iraqi Americans told their relatives to be safe. Stay inside. Stay away from windows. Store enough food and water. Iraqis at home reassured their American relatives that they will take precautions. Inshallah -- God willing -- they'll see each other after war.
As for the deeper questions of repression, bombs and liberation -- questions of life and death -- there was remarkably little in those conversations. There were variations on a familiar story: Those who have suffered so much under Saddam were braced for even more hardship. But after living in a violently repressive authoritarian state for more than 30 years, Iraqis fear saying anything about politics, much less speaking out against Saddam, especially on the phone. Sometimes Iraqis try to express their thoughts in code or metaphors, but it's difficult for loved ones on this side of the Atlantic to decipher them. Everyone is forced to read between the lines.
Now that phone service has been disrupted, Iraqi Americans watch TV and read the newspaper for stories of their loved ones. And like them, other Americans are left to read between the lines of the disaster unfolding in ancient Mesopotamia. Do the Iraqis want the U.S. and the British to overthrow Saddam? Will civilian deaths turn Iraqis against the allied forces? Will other Arabs fight alongside the Iraqis? The human component of the story is squeezed between reports on military actions. We may not know the human story until the war is over. In the meantime, we can get a glimpse into the minds of ordinary Iraqis through their conversations with their American relatives.
Jennifer Ridha
Jennifer Ridha, a 26-year-old lawyer, has never visited her Iraqi relatives. Her father moved to the United States in the 1960s after receiving a scholarship to study engineering at the University of Illinois. Her mother moved here later to marry him. Their families knew each other in Karbala, a town Americans may now recognize because it's on the allied forces' northern route to Baghdad. While Jennifer was born in Ohio, most of her parents' families have stayed in Iraq. Her father, in fact, has never been back.
There was a brief time between the Iran-Iraq War in the early 1980s and the Kuwaiti invasion when travel was possible. But after the Gulf War, it was too much of a hassle. With no-fly zones around Baghdad, Ridha's mother had to fly to Amman, Jordan, and then drive 16 hours through the desert to the city. "It was a tedious and uncertain trip to take," she says.
Over the years, the family has stayed in touch by phone. Before the bombing began, Ridha spoke to two of her mother's sisters who live in Baghdad. Nawal, a gynecologist, lives with her husband and children in a house in a fairly affluent neighborhood. Iqbal, an engineering professor, and her family live in an apartment building. Nawal decided Iqbal's family would be safer in the house during the bombing, so everyone moved in with her.
Ridha asked her Aunt Nawal about the preparations she made to survive the impending siege. Nawal's husband, who owns a pharmaceutical company, bought a generator in case electricity is disrupted, but he complained that it wouldn't provide much power. Ridha's uncle also had helped neighbors dig a well. The aunts, Ridha says, were in better spirits than she. Nawal sounded as though their hardships would soon be over. "My aunt said, 'I can't wait to see you and your mother again.'"
