Iqbal told her a story from the Quran about Ibrahim, or Abraham, as he is known in the Old Testament, being surrounded by fire and how God saved him by transforming the flames into water. But Ridha couldn't tell what her aunt was trying to convey. Was Saddam the conflagration? Or did the flames represent the U.S. troops?

Ridha also talked to her father's mother, who lives in a suburb outside of Baghdad with her other son and his family. Ridha's grandmother cried. "She's getting old," Ridha says. "She says she's had a good life, but she worries about her sons and daughters and grandkids. She's more worried about them than she is herself. She said, 'You know what we really want is peace.' But she couldn't articulate more than that without getting in trouble. I don't know if she meant, we want peace and we don't want war, or we want peace and we don't want Saddam."

Since the war started, Ridha hasn't been able to get through to her aunts in Baghdad or her grandmother. She's called dozens and dozens of times, but no one answered. But one of her cousins who lives in Amsterdam did reach a next-door neighbor. When her cousin spoke to Nawal, she told her that they could hear bomb explosions from their home. Her 3-year-old grandson asked her about the loud noise, but she decided to tell him that it was the TV. She didn't want her grandson to know that the U.S. "'with the strongest military in the world was dropping bombs on his family and his city. I don't think any 3-year-old has to know that.'"

Ridha is against the war. She wishes the U.S. and the British had tried to settle the matter through the United Nations, through diplomacy and pressure. She believes her family and the other Iraqis are paying the price, sometimes with their lives, for something beyond their control. "They talk about politics profusely among themselves," she says. "But ultimately it is politics that happen to them, not the politics they pick. It's almost as though politics are discussed in the abstract, almost as a completely independent bystander would talk about another country's politics."

No one is taking the Iraqis into consideration, she says -- not Bush, not Saddam, not the other Arab leaders. Ridha is especially disappointed to read that Arab radicals want to go to Iraq as suicide bombers to fight the American and British infidels. She fears that will only prolong the war and cost even more Iraqi lives. "Saddam is a tyrant and a dictator," she says. "It's trite, but it's true. And no one knows it better than the Iraqi people. Their interests have to be salient here and they're not. It's so frustrating. Sometimes I feel like screaming."

Saad Al-Khafagi

Saddam Hussein was rising through the ranks of the Baath party in 1975, still four years from seizing control; Al-Khafagi, then 23, left the country that same year to study and to escape the Baathist crackdown on political dissidents. Al-Khafagi's family stayed in Iraq. Two brothers would later die in the Iran-Iraq War. Two now live in Samara, near Nasiriya. Another, Sammy, lives in Baghdad. Sammy and his wife, their four grown children and two young grandchildren live in the same house in a neighborhood called Jihad not far from the city's center.

During the Gulf War, Al-Khafagi's father took his family to a home in the desert to escape the bombing. But their father is dead and Sammy, now 58, doesn't have enough money to take his family there.

In New York, Al-Khafagi helps Iraqi immigrants get the proper documents for their green cards; he also heads the Iraqi-American Antiwar Coalition. In early March, he accompanied a delegation of American Muslim and Christian religious leaders to Iraq. The group visited schools, hospitals, mosques and churches in Baghdad. They asked for a meeting with Saddam, but he didn't have time. They did, however, meet Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. Nothing came of it.

Before he left, he visited Sammy and his family. Sammy told his brother that he wouldn't want to leave Baghdad even if he could. He wants to stay and defend his country -- not Saddam's rule, but his country. To prepare for the battle in Baghdad, Sammy dug a well in his backyard for water and bought enough canned food, sugar and flour to last his family two months.

"They are frustrated both ways: with the government and with the Americans," Al-Khafagi says. "They are in the middle."

Saad Al-Khafagi left Iraq on March 11, eight days before the start of war. It was a bittersweet return to New York. "I feel guilty to be here, knowing that they are going to be bombed," he says, looking off in the distance. "You know what is coming. You know the capabilities of the United States Army. But, on the other hand, I have my children here, I have three boys, and my job."

Al-Khafagi spoke out against the war at a recent peace convocation at Riverside Church in Manhattan. He wrote a speech on a legal pad for his presentation before 2,400 gathered at the church to commemorate Martin Luther King's famous speech linking civil rights with the peace movement during the Vietnam War. There was so much he wanted to say. He wanted to talk about a clipping from the New York Post that quoted an American soldier, 28-year-old Sgt. Mike Brady, saying that all Iraqis should be killed. "What we should do is go in there and kill every last soul," Brady said in the Post report. "If they realize that we are going to kill them like that, they'll be like 'OK, OK, we surrender.'"

But Al-Khafagi never delivered that speech. After dozens of speakers and several musical performances that lasted four and a half hours, he decided that he should leave the audience with a simple message: Stop the war and save the lives of Iraqis and the lives of his young nieces and nephews in Baghdad. "They hope you to say no to war, not just be marches and rallies, but with actions," he said. "We need actions. If we are going to stop the war, we need to stop it now."

Al-Khafagi is now working for a cease-fire. He's trying to meet with U.S. congressmen, Iraqi diplomats and U.N. officials to negotiate a plan calling for the exchange of prisoners, the withdrawal of U.S. and British troops from Iraq, the U.N. presence to work out a more free and democratic Iraqi government and the lifting of sanctions. "It's the only thing that makes sense to save Iraqi lives and American and British lives," he says. "It'll save Iraq from major destruction and from being divided into pieces."

The brothers have not spoken since since two days before the war began.

Haeder Muhammed

Haeder Muhammed is 32, and dates are important to him. He has lived in the United States since 1997 -- Nov. 17, 1997 to be exact. He emigrated from Syria where he lived after fleeing Iraq on April 17, 1992. He had to leave his homeland because he refused to participate in the military's invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990. He spent a year and eight months in hiding before escaping to Syria. "I have a history of resisting in me," he says. "Before the war, I decided I wasn't going to serve Saddam Hussein. I knew the army serves Saddam Hussein and not the country."

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