The Assassins' Gate (39 page)

“
WE MUST GO OUT OF IRAQ
! We must travel! We must see America! Can you give us hope?”

A young woman named Aseel and one of her coworkers planted themselves in my path one day in a hallway on the campus of Baghdad University. Aseel was a pale, pretty twenty-eight-year-old computer programmer. Her cream-colored veil seemed incongruous with her vitality, and in fact it was just a prop: She wore it to keep from being killed by fundamentalists. “They speak in name of God,” she said. “Before, they spoke in name of Saddam.” There were many fears in Aseel's life. She was afraid of kidnappers: A group of them had snatched her friend as she got off the bus; Aseel had barely managed to run away. She was afraid of her neighbors, who threatened her with harm if she ever took another picture of American soldiers. She was afraid of the woman who ran her office, a former Baathist who used to wear a uniform and sidearm to work, and whose three framed photographs of Saddam were still propped up on the floor, facing the wall. Aseel complained that Dr. Sami Mudhafar, the new university president, was too weak to get rid of the Baathists. They still had the run of the place.

“Do you feel danger here? I feel danger,” Aseel said as we spoke in her office. “I feel a life in prison—after liberation! I want to see the world, I want to learn more, I want to feel I'm getting something important for my life. When you visit countries, that's a simple thing of having freedom. That's the thing I lost for my life. The danger is still in the streets. In this room. Especially in this room.”

The Baathist office manager walked in and glared. She told Aseel that I would have to leave.

“We are in prison here,” Aseel whispered. “I have no freedom.”

I offered to drive her home. She lived with her parents, her brother, and a maternal uncle who had gone mad after imprisonment and torture. Their modest house, on an empty street in an underbuilt new neighborhood of eastern Baghdad, stood baking in the relentless yellow light of midday. The power was out, and because the phone didn't work, Aseel had been unable to warn her mother, so the family served me a simple dish of rice and beans in the darkened room. On one wall Aseel's mother had written a Qur'anic verse in chalk during the war, a prayer for safety that the family recited together. On another wall hung a photograph of her mother's parents, from 1948—a man with a small mustache, a woman with bright lipstick.

“During royal times, the people were more modern than now,” Aseel's father said. He was an architect in the Ministry of Information, nearing retirement. In 1965, he had studied in Manchester, England, but the family now belonged to Iraq's beaten-down middle class, crushed by two decades of wars and sanctions. At one particularly desperate moment in 1993, her mother had sold most of her gold at a low price. Before the most recent war, Aseel's pay had been six dollars a month; it wasn't enough money to buy a shirt. The family had lived with her father's relatives in Adhamiya, the middle-class district on the Tigris that was Iraq's historic center of Arab nationalists, dating back to the officer class in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. A few months before the arrival of the Americans, her father's Baathist brother, knowing that Aseel's family didn't support the Saddam regime, threw them out of the house in Adhamiya. In their new home, Aseel wept watching the war on TV, urging the Third Infantry Division on to Baghdad; the bombs exploding outside gave her heart. Aseel said, “We thought everybody would be happy. But it was not like that.”

Aseel's family passionately supported the Americans. If this was colonialism, she was ready to be colonized. Every Saturday, the family sat down together and listened to Bremer's weekly address. “I feel him very close,” Aseel said. “Even his way, I like it—he's a simple man.” Her salary had been increased to one hundred twenty dollars a month, and her brother had just been hired as a translator, but the reason for Aseel's sympathies went much deeper. She showed me a copy of the letter that she had sent to President Bush by way of a surprised American soldier: “Mr. President you were honest with us and you did every thing you said. We are a nation suffered so much from bluffing, your policy we are seeing our country's future and it will be prosper,” she wrote. “I hope that things will be back to normal soon and you may visit Iraq with a great welcome party.”

“The Americans should change the region,” Aseel's father said. “Not by war, but by Iraq. Iranian people, if they saw what happened in Iraq, and we progress by liberation and wealthy life, they do the same.”

Her veil off, Aseel wore her hennaed hair in a long braid. She brought out her large collection of American movies—she had learned English from watching Nicole Kidman in
Moulin Rouge
and Sharon Stone in
The Quick and the Dead.
She said, “It needs time, I think, a very long time, to make connection between the two civilizations. To make us civilized, I mean.”

Aseel sat on the couch between her sad-faced parents and talked excitedly about her future. “I'm always saying to my mother, ‘I lost my life.' And she says, ‘No, you're young, there's still time.' And I say, ‘Maybe.' Maybe now I'll catch the rest of my life to see the world.” She went on, “I want to leave Baghdad, I want to be free to do what I want. Just improving myself—my mind, my way of life. I'd like to meet people from different countries, know how they live, what they do, what they believe.”

Her mother was on the verge of tears; her parents were afraid for her to leave Iraq. Aseel put her arm around her mother and touched her father's hand. “He believes in me,” she said.

They were Shiite Muslims, but on the drive from the university Aseel had hinted about a secret in their background. After lunch, when she went into the narrow kitchen to make tea, I followed her and started to broach the topic. Aseel's eyes shifted away: Her father was standing in the doorway, watching us closely. “I can't talk of it,” she said. “My father says it's long ago, let it go. We've lived like this for so long.”

At the end of the afternoon, when I rose to leave, the family offered me their silver heirlooms. I declined by saying that the gifts would be confiscated at the Jordanian border. Outside, the mad uncle was pacing with a glass in his hand. I was thinking how isolated the family seemed. They had no political party or religious militia, no ayatollah or tribal sheikh; they had only the Americans, who didn't know of their existence. Aseel had never spoken to a foreigner before the morning we met. She wanted to travel, but she was too frightened to go into town and set up an e-mail account at an Internet café. The pressure of her yearning filled the small room.

At the door, Aseel smiled. “Do you think my dreams will come true?”

*   *   *

I RETURNED TO IRAQ
several times during the year of the occupation, and I always made a point of seeing Aseel. The status of her dreams became one index for me of the status of America's vision for Iraq. Aseel was one of its most ardent supporters, and she never lost her faith. Over time, the family's fortunes improved, and they began to reverse twenty years of decline and climb back up toward middle-class comfort. The brother's salary from a large contractor allowed them to begin building a new two-story house in the narrow space between their old one and the garden wall. The ceilings were high, the floors tiled, and Aseel chose the color green for her new bedroom. She threw away her
hijab
when she started to see more and more young women going unveiled on the street, and she wore trousers outside the house. The family acquired a satellite dish; although electricity was still four hours on and then four off, the home telephone was working again after being out of service for months due to war damage and looting; and once there was sporadic cellular coverage around Baghdad and a few other cities, Aseel carried a mobile phone. She opened an e-mail account and enjoyed going to the Internet café and logging on to chat rooms, where she would madden young men from across the Arab world whose chief purpose was to meet girls online and who instead got an earful of political taunts from this fiercely opinionated Iraqi. She once commented that Americans and Israelis seemed to care about Iraqis more than other Arabs did.

An Egyptian wrote back: “Aseel, the Arabs are like brothers with one blood like a wall of stone. No Arabs want to kill Muslims. The Arabs refuse what is happening in Iraq because we are brothers.”

“You are bad people,” she replied.

“Wait, Aseel. Iraqis are the best people.”

“You're a liar.”

“But you Iraqis are with America and Israel.”

“I'm proud of that. But Hosni is in Israel. Goodbye.”

“No, no, wait.”

But Aseel's life wasn't changing fast enough to suit her. It remained impossible to get a passport because there was no such office yet, and a scholarship for study abroad was just as out of reach. Iraq seemed as isolated as ever. The academic exchanges, the shipments of books, the visiting lecturers that Baghdad University had hoped for in the first months of the occupation never materialized; instead, the university campuses had been taken over by religious groups, with their ubiquitous banners and portraits of martyrs. The explosion at the UN, and then the steady rise in terror bombings and insurgent violence through the fall and winter, drove all but the bravest international organizations out of Iraq. On the morning of January 18, 2004, Aseel's brother was in a line of cars outside the Assassins' Gate, waiting to get into the Green Zone, when six cars ahead of him a thousand-pound bomb exploded with massive force, killing two Americans and twenty-three Iraqis who worked for the occupation authority. A minibus full of young women directly in front of Aseel's brother took the force of the blast, and he was able to drive home with cuts in his face from shattered glass. Six weeks later, on Ashura, the holiest day of the Shiite calendar, Aseel and her mother were standing in a throng of worshippers outside the shrine of Kadhimiya, Baghdad's old Shiite district. The sun beat down, Aseel felt hot, and they moved a hundred yards away into shade. Fifteen minutes later, a man detonated himself in exactly the spot they had left; several more explosions followed almost instantly as the panicked crowd began to stampede. The same thing was happening around the same time at the holy shrines of Karbala, south of Baghdad. At least 180 pilgrims died in the Ashura bombings.

Aseel's attitude toward these near-death calamities was the same as that of other Iraqis: When it's your hour, there's nothing you can do. Meanwhile, she chafed at the constraints on her life.

“If the Americans want to do us a favor,” she said, “they can make us free to leave Iraq. The minds are locked here. It will take about twenty years, I think. And I don't want to lose my life here.”

Her mother suggested that I take her to New York and put her under glass for public display: “An Iraqi girl!”

Being an Iraqi girl was itself a kind of confinement. Aseel and I couldn't go alone to a restaurant, couldn't talk alone in her house, couldn't exchange the kisses on both cheeks that every other member of her family gave me. For all of her insistence on free thinking, free dressing, free reading, and free moving (she longed to ride a bicycle around the city, something no woman could do without drawing unwanted attention or worse), I had the sense that Aseel accepted these taboos as the way she had to live. When she was sixteen, an older cousin had danced with her at a wedding, and the touch of his hand on her back was like nothing she'd ever felt. Then he went away to school, and soon he was married, and that was the end of the first and last love affair of her life. She prayed infrequently, she went to the mosque only on special occasions like Ashura, and her attitude toward religion was more mystical than doctrinal. But she still wanted to be a good Iraqi girl.

*   *   *

IN THE WEST
, Iraq had a reputation for being the most secular country in the region; its people were thought to be educated, cosmopolitan, modern. The reputation turned out to be decades out of date. After the oil-rich, freewheeling 1970s, when women wore miniskirts and alcohol flowed liberally, the effect of endless war, steady immiseration, and the Islamic revolution next door in Iran made Iraq far more conservative than most people on the outside, including Iraqi exiles, realized. Especially among the poor Shia, women disappeared under the
hijab,
or veil, and the
abaya,
the full-length black robe. The Shiite clergy became Saddam's most serious internal opposition. To shore up his power with his own Sunni base after the disaster of the Gulf War, the newly pious dictator launched a campaign of Islamization: The words
“Allahu akbar”
were added to the Iraqi flag in Saddam's own script, a copy of the Qur'an was written in his own blood, and gigantic Sunni mosques began to go up around Baghdad, beginning with the Mother of All Battles mosque. Many of them remained unfinished when the Americans arrived, and across the city's horizon you could see the hulking shells of half-built domes encased in scaffolding, like the monuments of a warlike civilization that ended with some sudden catastrophe. In the ruins down below, the Shiite masses were coming out to claim the streets.

March 2004 roughly coincided with the first lunar month of the Muslim calendar, Muharram. For the Shia, it was a tragic month, an unlucky month, Sheikh Emad al-Din al-Awadi told me, when no religious Muslim would get married or make an important decision. The tenth day of Muharram was Ashura, the anniversary of the death in
A.D.
680 of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet, and the massacre of his followers at Karbala, where Hussein had come to stake his claim as leader of the faithful. Those who killed them immediately repented. They became the Shia, or “partisans” of Hussein's father, Ali, who believed that the caliphate passed down through his descendants, as opposed to the Sunnis, whose caliphs were chosen from within the circle of religious authority and who located the Abassid caliphate in Baghdad, where it remained until the city was sacked by Mongol invaders in 1256. Beginning with the death of Hussein and continuing down through the history of the Arab Muslim world, the Shia were the great losers of this schism, enduring under the religious yoke of the Sunni caliphate, until it was abolished by Atatürk in 1920, and then under the temporal power of Sunni kings and dictators in the new Arab nation-states. In the light of this history, the most significant result of the American invasion of Iraq, and the larger American project of bringing majority rule there, was that, for the first time in their history, the Shia were going to take power in an Arab country.