To Be a Friend Is Fatal (29 page)

She figured it would be another short war, maybe a month of bombing before the Americans left. Even if they knocked out Saddam, he would regroup and take over again. They all slept on the floor the night of the invasion. When it came, it turned the floor into an ocean, the blasts sending tides and waves beneath her. Her mom screamed at them to stand with their backs against the wall, but Zina was so scared that her knees started to sag. She tried to recite the verse from the Quran that one says right before dying, but she couldn't remember the words.

There was silence for a few hours. Then more attacks. Then silence.

Within a year, Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army had taken over her campus, setting up a checkpoint at the university's gate, where they searched the cars and backpacks of every student. Zina flipped through an outdated Academy Awards issue of
People
magazine while waiting in line at the checkpoint one morning. When a militiaman saw the glossy pages of red carpet gowns and tuxedos, he yanked it from her in a rage and dragged her to his supervisor. “She's reading a magazine with naked infidels!” he shrieked. “She has crossed the line so badly that she should be kidnapped!” Shaken, Zina was allowed to enter her campus with a warning.

The thrill of learning faded for Zina as the social pressures grew more caustic. Another militia member stopped her in a hallway because he felt her clothing was too tight. He cursed at her, called her things in front of passing students that nobody had ever called her, insulting her parents for raising her poorly. He demanded to know if she was Sunni or Shi'a.

She stopped going to campus unless it was absolutely essential. All she wanted was the piece of paper conferring a degree so that she could get out of Iraq. She filled her free time by frequenting a nearby Internet café called the Farahidi Institute, which offered classes in computer programming and Photoshop.

One afternoon at the Internet café, Zina received a chat invitation from a stranger through her Hotmail account. His name was Wael, he told her, and he was a foreigner working in Basrah. He was Jordanian by nationality, but his bloodline hailed from the Caucasus. “By the way,” he said, “I'm just a few computers down from you, in booth nine.” Zina walked over, slipped past the booth's privacy curtain, and found a handsome man with gaunt, almost Germanic features. She had seen him before in the café, she realized, as he grinned through a wreath of cigarette smoke. Two walkie-talkies, a cell phone, and a pistol rested next to the computer.

They started dating, but their meetings were confined to the Internet café. Zina did not want people to talk and didn't want to make any mistakes. Wael worked for the British, managing a security firm that guarded the ports of Basrah. His British boss was too frightened to come to Iraq, so Wael was promoted. His deputy, a young and armed Iraqi, followed him like a shadow and waited outside the café while he talked with Zina.

He was ten years older, thirty-one, and madly in love with her. She arranged for him to meet her mother for coffee. Zina loved Wael but acknowledged that marriage would be a way out of Iraq. All of her relatives came over to the house to celebrate their engagement on the first Friday in April 2004.

In the evenings after the engagement, Wael came over to sit in the garden with his new fiancée. When it was time for him to return to his room at the Rasheed Hotel, Zina would walk with him past the pomegranate tree to the gate, where his deputy stood guard. After a week, though, his mood darkened. He was much quieter than usual. After seeing a black cat wander past, he groaned, “Oh God, we're going to hear some really bad news.” Zina laughed, but she didn't understand what was weighing on her fiancé.

Ten nights after their engagement party, Zina and Wael had a fight. She wanted to know why he was so distant. He wanted her to be more affectionate with him. Though she pushed against other social pressures, she was still nervous about others speaking ill of her or her family. At the end of the evening, he begged her to let him spend the night on the couch in their home, but she said no, knowing that the neighbors would surely notice. When she began to walk with him as usual toward the front gate, he told her not to walk with him all the way, so she turned back to the front door with bruised feelings.

She didn't call him the next day. She was hoping for him to take the first step after their fight, but after two days, he still hadn't called. She called the hotel and asked to be patched through to his room.

“Who are you?” demanded the receptionist.

“I'm his fiancée. I call over here all the time.”

“Are you sure you're his fiancée? How do you not know?!” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Wael was taken.”

She thought the man might have been joking, but this frail hope was soon dismantled as he continued. A group of seven men in Iraqi police uniforms had entered the hotel at eleven o'clock three nights earlier, the night of Zina and Wael's fight. They disconnected all the phones from the receptionist's desk, raised their rifles, and asked, “Do you have any foreigners staying here?” He gave them the number of Wael's room. They dragged him out through the lobby of the hotel without saying another word.

Zina and her family raced over to the hotel, but there was nothing to be found. British forces conducted a cursory investigation. They went to the morgue. Zina's mom told her to wait in the car while she
went inside. She examined each face but did not find her daughter's fiancé.

Zina hoped that someone had just kidnapped Wael for the ransom payment. Most of those people were released after a few days, unharmed. Every time she heard a car pass the house, she thought it might be him. She answered her phone calls on the first ring, desperate to hear his voice.

Unknown Iraqis began to call, peddling a service that had emerged alongside the booming kidnapping industry: in exchange for thousands of dollars, they would find him or his body. Wael's family in Jordan gave $20,000 to a man who promised to deliver their son. The man vanished.

Two weeks after the abduction, Zina's uncle saw Wael on the al-‘Alam television channel. The station ran a video supplied by the Abu Abbas Islamic Group, a Shi'a militia in Basrah, in which Wael and twelve other hostages stood before the camera. A member of the militia declared that these men were British spies and would all be killed if British forces did not withdraw from Basrah. But Zina had missed the broadcast, and nobody at the television station ever responded to her requests to see the clip.

After three months, the thread holding her together unraveled. She felt remorse for not having let him stay over that night. He must have known about the danger he was in and was asking her for help, but she had refused because of what her neighbors might have thought. Zina was furious with her fellow Iraqis for all the kidnapping and ransoming and killing that burned away in her country. She was mad at God, mad at Iraq. She worried that her family might now be at risk. After all, they had accepted Wael as a husband for their daughter: what did that say about them in the eyes of the men who abducted her fiancé?

Zina turned inward. She stopped answering her phone. Her social circle contracted until she spent all of her time alone in her room.

After a summer of searching for Wael, she returned to her final year at Basrah Engineering College. The Mahdi Army was now in full control of the campus, and Zina tried to make herself invisible. Though she despised them, she also feared them; her confrontational spirit had fallen silent.

Zina received her degree in June 2005. As she expected, her Shi'a classmates used their connections to find jobs, but Zina's network didn't extend much beyond her sister, mother, and father. When she heard that the telecommunications company Asiacell had hired many of her classmates, she went down to its headquarters to ask for an interview but could not even make it past the security guard in the lobby. She waited for hours, hoping to recognize someone who might put in a good word for her, but eventually she gave up.

She went back to the café where she had met Wael and searched online for jobs. She found several openings with the Halliburton subsidiary KBR. In August she and her sister Tara walked through the Iraqi checkpoint at the outer edge of the sprawling compound of US and Western companies flanking the Basrah airport. They walked for one hundred yards until they reached the British-manned checkpoint, where a bomb dog sniffed at them for explosives. They cleared the KBR checkpoint and were hired within an hour.

The girls did not tell their father where they worked, but they kept no secrets from their mother, whose worry consumed the hours of each day until her daughters returned home safely. She sat by the window overlooking the front yard and the gate, which still bore the scars of Iranian mortars decades earlier. Through the largest opening, she could see parts of passing cars, the waists and chests of passersby.

Even though it was only a cluster of trailers in the desert, Zina loved the compound. Everything about it felt good to her: the cool air-conditioned rooms, the new computers, even the smell. Once she cleared the final checkpoint each morning, she sensed that she had stepped into a different country. Zina was assigned to the quality control office, where she worked closely with engineers who were fixing oil refineries throughout Iraq.

But after six months, the excitement of working at KBR faded and the logistics of entering the compound became increasingly perilous. Zina began wearing a hijab and a loose-fitting
abaya
over her clothes to placate the militants who idled in a pickup truck outside the checkpoint. She came to feel that her work was only helping people in Texas get
richer, which didn't seem to warrant the risks. The pros and cons were thrown into a bleaker contrast when two other young women working in the compound were assassinated. Zina and her sister decided to quit.

There was a problem, though. Even if she managed to find an opening in an Iraqi company, Zina knew that her work history would come up in the very first interview. Unless she took the risk of revealing her prior American employer, her work with KBR had locked her within the constellation of American contractors and agencies.

Tara had a friend who worked in Baghdad for the American company Titan, one of the largest contractors employing Iraqis as interpreters for the US military. If they were hired into Titan's pool of interpreters, they would live inside a military base, relieving them of the danger of clearing checkpoints each day. The sisters drove to the capital, where they sat in a row of school desks with twenty other young Iraqis applying for work. When the Titan recruiter posted the results at the end of the examination, Tara ranked first and Zina second. They were hired immediately, pending a background check.

They returned to Basrah to pack and to spend time with their parents. After a couple weeks, their clearance arrived along with a pair of plane tickets to Baghdad. They would be assigned to Camp Taji, a US military base twenty miles north of the capital.

At the airport, Zina and Tara stood on the other side of the security checkpoint, cheeks streaked with tears. Their mother walked a few steps, and then stopped and turned back to look at them. She couldn't bring herself to leave. A security guard at the airport came over and said, “Hey, auntie, are you okay? Why are you crying?” but she didn't answer. She took a few more steps and looked back at her sobbing daughters, and then left.

Her family wasn't rich, but Zina could have stayed at home and lived off their dad's salary. She could have become a schoolteacher like her cousin, but she wanted a job where she could be herself. She didn't want to rely on some well-placed cousin for promotions. The only place she thought she could excel through hard work alone was with the Americans.

That was how she felt on optimistic days, at least. During darker days, she knew that she was trying to escape her hometown and Wael's disappearance. She felt like an outcast, miserable and yet unable to adapt her
personality or opinions enough to fit in with her fellow Basrawis. With the Americans, she hoped to be more accepted and better understood.

Pod 23 was a run-down compound surrounded by barbed wire in a corner of Camp Taji, a military base constructed by Saddam Hussein. There was only one way in and out of the Pod, through a checkpoint manned by American soldiers. Like the other interpreters sent to live there, Zina and Tara were not permitted to leave its suffocating confines without an American escort, and yet there was no cafeteria in the Pod. The only food was on the other side of barbed wire.

Inside the Pod, there were a few rows of trailers for housing—six interpreters in each, sharing one bathroom—a larger trailer with showers and toilets, and a dilapidated one-story building that served as a common area for the interpreters, who were called “terps” by the soldiers. When Zina and Tara were deposited in their trailer the first night, they found bed frames with no mattresses. They were embarrassed to have to ask for them. Their experience with the Americans in KBR had been much more professional; they'd had their own desks and computers. They tried not to cry the first night in their strange new home.

Each morning, the Iraqi interpreters of Camp Taji would kill time in the common area until an army unit dropped by the Pod on its way out of the base. The room had sagging, stained couches, old magazines, and a TV. Some watched the television; others sat on a cot in the shade of the large tree outside, smoking.

A unit would announce that it needed one or two or three interpreters, and the sergeant in charge of the Pod would come into the common area and select Iraqis for the mission. As she stood there, waiting to be picked, Zina felt subhuman, on display like a slab of meat for sale at the butcher shop, the pride of her recently received university diploma deflated. This was the first time she had ever lived away from home, and it wasn't starting well.