Children of War (2 page)

My mother is Sunni. My father was Shia. This is the way it used to
be, before we became divided. Sunni, Shia, no difference, no enemies.

We left Iraq in July of 2003, just a few months after the invasion.

Our father was working with the foreign ministry at the time, so he was
part of the government of Saddam Hussein. At the time of all the bombing, he was
stationed in Djbouti, at the Iraqi embassy there. We were living with just our mother. I
have two older brothers, Saed and Akmed, who are now twenty and nineteen.

The bombing was a terrible time. How would you feel?
We were all crowded together in one room. If anything hit our house, we wanted to know
where everyone was. We wanted to be able to get to each other. We huddled together and
waited to die. Overhead we heard the aircraft, felt the ground shake, heard the world
around us exploding.

People watch war in the movies and they think they know what it's
like. They don't know. If they knew, they wouldn't allow it to happen. Only
very sick, bad people would want to make war.

Paul Bremer came to Iraq and said, “We will make
deBa'athification.” So everyone who ran the country before the Americans
came was fired. The Americans didn't understand that people didn't have a
lot of choice about joining the Ba'ath Party. You joined if you wanted to get a
job in your profession. A lot of good people joined, like my parents.

We managed to stay a few more months in Baghdad until people started
making death threats against us. We heard rumors at first, then a group of men in masks
came to our house. They told us to get out or we would die.

Even then, we didn't want to leave. Iraq is our home. Why should we
leave our home? Then the men came again to our house, and yelled and shot guns at our
feet — not to shoot our feet but to scare us, to give us one final message to get
out.

This time we left. We joined our father in Amman.

I didn't like leaving Iraq, but at this time I was happy to be in
Amman because my father was with us. He was
away from us so much
with his work that I didn't often get to see him, so to be able to spend so much
time with him, even though we were in exile, was wonderful. I was very close to my
father. As the youngest of his children I was special in his heart.

In 2006, my father went alone back to Baghdad, leaving us behind in
Jordan. Time had passed, and he thought it would be safe. We were running out of money
where we were, and he went back to deal with some of our property so that we could pay
our bills and keep on eating. He also needed medical treatment, which was too expensive
in Jordan. He kept in touch with us by telephone as he moved from one relative's
house to another. He thought it was safe, but he wasn't taking any chances.

My oldest brother went back to Baghdad to be with our father, to look out
for him and help him.

It was not enough. Our father was kidnapped in May of 2006.

For a while we heard nothing. Then the kidnappers called our relatives and
said, “You will find him in the morgue.”

My brother went to look, but our father wasn't inside the morgue. He
was outside of it, lying on the ground on a rubbish heap on the street. He had a bullet
hole in his head.

My brother tried to get back into Jordan, but he wasn't allowed.
They said, “You have no legal residency here. You have no papers allowing you to
enter.” Even if he had papers, they probably still would have said no. Jordan
doesn't like to let in young Iraqi men in case they turn out to be terrorists.

Now my brother is in Egypt. We can't go there to
visit him because we will not be allowed back into Jordan. And he cannot come here and
visit us, so we are separate, and my mother wears widow's black.

My other brother earns a bit of money for the family by jumping from job
to job, helping people in the market, cleaning, hauling things, jobs like that. He never
works at one place for very long because he's afraid the immigration police will
catch him and deport him back to Iraq.

I'd like to be able to finish my schooling and do something about my
life, but I don't know how it will be possible to do that the way we live now. The
important thing is to try to get the family united again. That won't happen in
Jordan.

One of my dreams is to become very educated and very capable and to some
day establish some sort of organization to take care of children who have suffered in
war. Many have suffered much more than I have, but I have some understanding of what
they go through, how they feel their world is taken from them.

We have applied for asylum to the United States. They have accepted us, at
least to this stage, so now we have to just wait. It's possible that we may soon
be living in America. My mother hopes that my brother can join us there. She says,
“If my son is there and we are there and we are all together, that's all we
need to be happy,” but I don't know.

I don't know how I will feel about living in America, seeing the
American flag every day. These are the people
who destroyed my
country, and they are over there across the ocean living a good life. They destroy
things, then they forget about it and have a good supper and watch television. And I
will be among them, and will have to get along with them for the good of my family. I
don't know if I can do it.

I have nothing in common with American children. How could I? They are
raised up with peace and fun and security. They have nothing to worry about. We are
raised up with war and fear. It's a big difference. They won't know how to
talk to me, and I will have nothing to say to them. Except, maybe, that they should keep
their soldiers at home.

But I'll have to find some way to make it work, for the sake of my
family. To be together is the important thing, and if we can have that, the rest we will
figure out. I imagine we will feel very much like strangers, with a different language,
different religion. American soldiers have died in my country, and maybe the Americans
we meet will blame my family for those deaths. They won't see us as people. I
don't think they will like us, and I don't think we will like them. But at
least my family will be together.

To tell you the truth, I try not to think about it. Thinking about it
makes me anxious. The Americans cut down trees in my country, and we will be looking at
trees still standing in America. The Americans bombed our bridges, and we will be
walking across bridges still standing in America. They killed children in my country,
and we will be going to school with children who have never known troubles. I
don't like to think about it.

Some people think that if you are Iraqi and you are
still alive, that your troubles are over. They don't see the other kind of damage.
For example, this whole building is full of Iraqis, but we don't talk to each
other. There is no trust. The war destroyed that, too.

If I had the power to make the world better, first, there should be peace.
To make peace, I would not let anybody make money from selling tanks and guns. If no one
could make money that way, they'd have to find some other way to make money. Next,
I'd remove all the evil and hatred from the hearts of people, so no one would want
to hurt anyone else.

That's what I would do. If I had the power.

The area known as Kurdistan has corners in four different
countries: Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. It was carved up into today's
boundaries by the European powers after World War I. There is oil under the ground
in Kurdistan, which was known at the time, although it didn't start flowing
until later. The benefits of the oil have not yet managed to trickle down to the
Kurdish people.

The Kurds are a separate people from the Arabs or the Turks or the
Persians. They have their own language and customs. Traditionally nomadic and
tribal, they have had their identity, language and dress forbidden, and they have
been forcibly removed from their tribal lands.

Kurdish rebellions have provoked military
responses from all four countries. In Iraq, governments before and including that of
Saddam Hussein have waged war against Kurdish nationalist groups, assassinating
their leaders, destroying hundreds of Iraqi Kurdish villages and herding Kurds into
“strategic hamlets,” where the Iraqi army could watch over them and
control them more easily. Huge numbers of Kurds have been killed with conventional
weapons and then, in the late l980s, with poison gas.

R. is an Iraqi Kurdish teenager now living in Canada.

I am from Kurdistan, in northern Iraq. Terrible things have
happened there. I was young when I left, but I still remember, and what I don't
remember, my brothers and sisters do.

I'm the youngest in my family. We lived in a village. It was all
little villages up there in the mountains. Kurds are not rich people. Most have a few
goats or sheep, and they get by. My family lived in that same area for generations,
going way, way back.

My father was a soldier in the Iraqi army. He didn't want to be,
because he was a Kurd, and his loyalties were with the Kurds, but Iraq was in a war with
Iran, and they needed people to fight. The soldiers came in the night and they grabbed
my father and other men and said, “Now you are in the army.” He didn't
have a choice.

I was small, but I remember. We were all crying. I
remember that they let him say goodbye to us. He hugged me and said, “I'll
come back. I promise.”

We didn't see him again for six years. They kept him in the army all
that time. No furloughs. He was a prisoner. They don't give furloughs to
prisoners!

Things got really bad after he left. Things were bad before, the Iraqi
army shooting at us when they weren't shooting at the Iranians, and there were
Kurdish militias who were fighting the Iraqis. So that was a regular part of my
life.

But it got worse when Saddam stepped up his campaign against my people.
People would come flooding through our village on their way out of Iraq, and they would
tell stories of gas and of terrible gun battles and dead bodies. I didn't hear
those stories myself — or if I did, I didn't understand them — but my
older brothers and sister remember, and I know there were a lot of people walking along
the road, loaded down with bundles and things.

Pretty soon we joined that long line for the walk to Iran.

I still remember being carried by my mother, being in her arms, and seeing
nothing but a long line of people ahead of us with their bundles, and a long line of
people behind us. I remember how tired my mother was, and how she sweated from the
burden of carrying me. Sometimes I walked beside her, holding her hand, but my legs were
short and couldn't go very fast. Plus I think she was really scared that she would
lose me, you know, let go of my hand and I'd fall behind in that sea of moving
people,
and she'd never find me again. So she usually carried
me.

I don't know how long we walked. Days, probably, but I don't
remember. We crossed over into Iran and ended up in a refugee camp inside the Iranian
border.

There were people we knew there, like our neighbors from our home village.
We all slept in one tent. It was crowded at the camp, and noisy, and everyone getting
into everyone's business because there was no privacy.

My sister was the one who mostly looked after me in the camp because my
mother and older brothers were busy trying to find some way to bring in money or food,
or were just wandering around looking for things we could use, like wood or scraps to
burn. Everyone was cold, everyone was hungry. My mother sold her wedding ring, her extra
clothes, anything she could to get food for us.

I think I spent most of my time there trying to escape from my bossy
sister! She kept a tight rein on me, because it's dangerous for little kids to
wander around refugee camps on their own. They could get hurt, they could get used by a
bad crowd, they could pick up bad habits. My sister had a heavy burden. She was only a
few years older than me, but she worried about all of us and took care of us.
Mom's health was not good. Well, you can imagine.

We were in the refugee camp for four years. That was my life — the
tents and the dirt and all the people around. I remember being scared every night,
afraid of dying every single night, either from a violent death or from being hungry or
cold.

I didn't go to school in the camp. There was no
school. My brothers had gone to school when we lived in Iraq, and they have terrible
memories of being treated badly there because they were Kurds. They were not allowed to
speak Kurdish, only Arabic, and the teachers would beat them when they made mistakes. I
don't think they were unhappy at all about missing school while we were in Iran,
because school for them was always a violent place.

Finally we came to Canada. We were accepted here as refugees. It was
easier for me than the others, because I was still young and had a young brain, so the
new language flowed into it quite fast. The others had to struggle harder to learn
English, but they had to struggle harder with everything. They are all doing well now,
out working in good jobs or in college. But it was rough for a while. My mother still
cries about the family she had to leave behind.

We came first. Then my father joined us. He was arrested when he first got
here because the government was worried that he might be a terrorist, but they let him
go and now he's with us. We've moved around a lot here, trying to find the
right place to live where we can be happy.

I was in school the day the planes crashed in New York, on September 11.
Kids knew I was from Iraq, and they'd say things, insulting things. I still get
called a terrorist. Kids will say, “Don't get him mad or he'll blow up
your house.”