To Be a Friend Is Fatal (30 page)

On her very first mission, Zina rode with a convoy into town to attend a meeting of the provincial council, where tribal leaders, Iraqi government officials, and high-ranking military officers discussed municipal affairs. The captain sat in the back row of the room, leaned
over to Zina, and said, “Okay, tell me what's going on.” She listened to the conversation, which was loaded with the acronyms and technical terms of local governance, and had no idea what was happening. She didn't know what some of the words were in Arabic, much less in English. She started to cry and looked over at the captain, who did little to mask his frustration with her. She went back to Pod 23 and between sobs wondered if she was good enough for the job. The other Iraqis consoled her, telling her she'd get better, and taught her the most commonly used phrases of the provincial council.

In time Zina and Tara found their stride and became the most sought-after interpreters in the Pod. Tara rode in different convoys on different missions, but the sisters spent evenings together. Whenever possible, they called their worried mom in Basrah. They were assigned to the civil affairs team, which led small-scale reconstruction projects throughout the province. The area receiving the most attention, Tarmiyah, was also the most violent.

Zina began to work with the major of the civil affairs team, an indefatigable leader who devoted meticulous attention to the projects under his command. He assigned Zina a desk in his office and placed a small mountain of forms in front of her. Each sheet was a complaint submitted by an Iraqi requesting reimbursement for damages incurred during military operations. After soldiers kicked in the door of a suspected insurgent, a request for $500 was submitted, parts and labor included. When a firefight on the edge of a farm resulted in a dead cow, a request for $5,000 appeared. Zina translated the forms and appended a summary opinion on each. When the major griped about the difficulty of tracking all of the disbursements, she spent days constructing an Excel worksheet that reflected each tiny change in his substantial budget. He was so ecstatic that he ran over and hugged her.

Zina and the major went everywhere together. His Humvee was easily identified by the 001 stenciled in black over the front doors. In the beginning, she wore sunglasses and a handkerchief over her mouth to disguise her identity but eventually stopped bothering. She was proud of the work they were doing, trusted the major, and didn't want to hide.

Several weeks into her assignment, an Iraqi called the major's cell phone and asked to speak with Zina. He didn't give his name but said that he had met Zina and the major during one of their many trips into Tarmiyah. There was something about her that he trusted. He told her that insurgents had laid five IEDs along the road emerging from Camp Taji. When the explosive ordnance disposal team was dispatched, it found five bombs. Zina called the informant, who told her that he would speak only to her from that point forward.

She nurtured the relationship with the man, who she believed was motivated partly by conscience and partly by self-interest: the informant needed surgery that Iraqi doctors were ill equipped to perform, and he wanted to know if the army might help him in exchange for his tips. The major told Zina to say yes, even though they both knew that the army was not likely to help. The intelligence continued to trickle in, and the major told her that her work was saving lives, both American and Iraqi.

The job was exciting, despite the risks, and Zina had figured out how to excel at it. Whenever she stood between an Iraqi and the major, she changed her posture to a slight slouch, making her appear less feminine; she wanted the men to forget that she was a woman so that they could focus on the discussion at hand.

A couple months into the job, during a site visit to one of the major's problematic projects in Mushahada—one of Tarmiyah's rougher neighborhoods—she translated the major's unhappiness with the quality of work. The Iraqi contractor angrily turned to her and called her a traitor and other slurs. Zina remained silent, choosing not to interpret his words, but the major sensed the tension.

“What did he say, Zina?”

“Nothing. What else would you like me to translate?”

“I want you to tell me what he said.”

Zina reluctantly voiced the offensive words in English, at which point the major grabbed the Iraqi by the throat and shoved him against a nearby wall. She felt happy that her boss was standing up for her, but she knew that his response had been an escalation and could easily come back to harm him or the reputation of the civil affairs team.

One day two IEDs went off, one after another, narrowly missing her convoy.

Another day, as the civil affairs team was returning from handing out reimbursements to the residents of Tarmiyah, Tara was riding in the same convoy, a vehicle ahead of her sister. Zina was sitting behind the major in the rear right seat of the Humvee. As the convoy proceeded through sparsely populated farmland, the radio went dead. The driver, busy shaking the handset, took his foot off the accelerator just as a massive bomb erupted beneath the engine.

Zina was drilled back against her seat by the blast. The gunner, standing up through the opening of the Humvee's turret, was injured and medevaced to Germany but survived. Tara whirled around at the sound of the explosion but couldn't see if her little sister was okay.

Had the bomb exploded a second later, they wouldn't have survived, but Zina and the major were fine. They scrambled out of the smoldering Humvee and raced from the area. An investigation later determined that insurgents had spent days loading a drainage pipe running beneath the road with 1,400 pounds of explosives.

Tarmiyah erupted in the weeks that followed. While Zina sat with the major during a meeting in a small conference room downtown, a sniper's bullet pierced the window and thudded into a nearby wall. Not long after that, another bullet whizzed past her and grazed the major's arm.

She asked a straightforward question: “If they keep attacking us, why are we going there?”

He gave the reply of a believer: that no matter how many insurgents operated in Tarmiyah, there was at least one kid that would benefit from a repaired school or extended segment of water pipe.

On October 17, 2006, Zina's convoy eased to a halt in front of the building where the provincial council met. Before Zina and the major had even dismounted from their Humvee, an Iraqi sniper hidden in a nearby building shot a soldier in the mouth. While he was being loaded
into a medevac chopper, the major called off the meeting with the council and ordered a return to base.

The convoy turned onto a road where a captain had been killed by an IED the night before. As the convoy slowly passed, Zina noticed the dark sinkhole of the crater left by the blast.

Zina sat in the third Humvee. She saw the first IED flash, missing the lead vehicle. She saw the next bomb explode directly beneath the second vehicle, blasting open its doors. Two men leaped from their right side of the Humvee, which coasted forward until it collided with a transformer pole. The men were on fire, flames leaping from their shoulders and heads.

A firefight broke out as insurgents closed in, hoping to kill any survivors. White smoke billowed from the second Humvee. Zina remembered a recent tip from the informant: militants had stolen a large amount of chlorine from the nearby water treatment plant. She sat in the backseat of her Humvee, screaming at the soldier in the turret who unloaded gunfire upon the encroaching insurgents, begging him not to leave her alone. Even if she survived the attack, she worried that the chlorine gas would burn her lungs away.

Eva was a young Iraqi Christian from a poor family. She was gorgeous, with shiny black locks. She had taken a job as an interpreter out of financial desperation, hoping to support her family. The Christian community in Iraq had been devastated, sinking from a prewar population of 1.5 million in 2003 to several hundred thousand within years. Eva had become close friends with Zina and Tara. The three would stay up late together back at the Pod, talking about their families. On the afternoon of the sixteenth, before the attack, the sisters had brought Eva a care package from the major's family, filled with notepads and pencils and school supplies for her younger siblings. Later that night, Eva came over and said she couldn't fall asleep, so the sisters gave her issues of
Oprah
magazine to take back to her room.

Eva, twenty-two when the chlorine bomb went off, died instantly.

Another interpreter, a handsome young Iraqi nicknamed Snake, burned to death. The major tried to extract the gunner from the turret
of the second Humvee, but his body was scalding. After the firefight, Zina opened her door and walked toward the wreckage. The major told her not to look, so she turned away, but not before seeing one of the gunner's arms burning on the hood of the Humvee.

As she rode back to Camp Taji, the pendulum of each second swung like a wrecking ball. The vehicle, the road, the air—it could all explode in an instant. She looked out the small window of the Humvee's door and saw a bomb behind everything, inside everything, and said, “This is the end!”

She could no longer go on any missions. Nobody told her she had to leave, but when she stayed behind in Pod 23 while the others went out each day, she felt useless. Eva's few belongings and the major's care package still lay in her room in the adjacent trailer.

It was over. Zina and Tara called their mom in Basrah and told her they needed to leave Iraq for good. For several weeks, they struggled to find someone who could purchase their airplane tickets, since they were not permitted to leave the Pod without an escort. When the day finally came, the major arranged for a meeting with a ministry official down in Baghdad. As he loaded the sisters' bags into the Humvee, the other interpreters and soldiers from the civil affairs team gathered around to hug them good-bye. When he dropped them off at the airport on his way to the ministry building, she saw the major cry for the first time. On November 15, 2006, they boarded a plane for Egypt and became refugees.

Their father stayed behind in Basrah. Their mother probably would have been safe had she stayed in Iraq, but she could not bear the thought of being away from her daughters, so she left everything behind and became a refugee. They rented a small apartment in the Sixth of October City on the outskirts of Cairo. For tables, they flipped cardboard boxes and draped sheets over them. The trauma of their final weeks in Iraq—the chlorine bomb, Eva's death, the inability to say good-bye to their dad—was the uninvited fourth guest.

Zina applied for jobs as soon as they had arrived, unaware of the
work restrictions preventing refugees from taking jobs in Egypt. She was thrilled when she was called in for an interview in the Cairo branch of her old employer, KBR, but the excitement unraveled as soon as they realized that she was Iraqi and would therefore be unable to receive a work permit. The message to refugees from governments throughout the region was very clear: “feel free to burn through your life savings, but don't get too comfortable here.”

The line for refugee registrations outside the UNHCR building was long. Zina had never thought of herself as a refugee before: when she thought of the word, she pictured poor and uneducated Africans. As the line inched forward, though, she saw mostly Iraqis. By mid-2007, well over one hundred thousand Iraqis had fled to Egypt, making it the third-largest host of refugees from the civil war, behind Syria and Jordan.

Farther up the line, an Iraqi man started shouting as an American woman who worked at the UNHCR walked past. He cursed, telling her that her invasion destroyed his country, and now he had nothing. She apologized, saying she was not a politician and had nothing to do with the war. She was there to help them, she said, but the man was not placated. When the woman continued down the line, Tara whispered to her, “We know it wasn't your fault.” The American woman smiled and asked them to follow her back to her office.

As she registered their names, they told her about everything they had been through and the different army units under which they had worked. The American woman told them about an organization helping US-affiliated Iraqis, and wrote my name and email address on a slip of paper.

From: Zina

Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2007 10:18 AM

To: The List Project

Subject: hello

Hello,

I have been checking your website and I thought to send you asking for any kind of help you can offer.

I'm 25 years iraqi female, I worked for KBR in Iraq in 2005 and for the Coalition Forces- US army in camp Taji north of Baghdad in 2006 as interpreter, I was assigned to the Civil Affairs unit. You all know what kind of difficulties we (as interpreters) face at present and because of my affiliation with the army I and my family (my sister who worked with me for the army and my mother) were threatened and we had no option but quit the army and leave Iraq. I live now in Egypt which I don't considar as a safe place for me. I registered in the UNHCR as refugee and I had 3 interviews with them but still nothing about the resettlement. I was threatened in Iraq for 5 times so going back is impossible for me, I have been in Egypt for 7 months now, running out of time and money and despertly need help to get to a safe place. I tried to contact many people and many embassies here asking for asylum but no help. I have people in the states ready to help me but they don't know where to go.

I hope you take few minutes of your time to read this email because I despertly need help. I will be so thankful f you can offer any help or just tell me where to go. I will send you all the douments I have from the army if you can help me.

Thank you so much.

I
received Zina's email ten days after the birth of the List Project, in June 2007.

To my astonishment, within seven months of Yaghdan's first email to me, I had a staff, a budget of several hundred thousand dollars, and a small army of lawyers clocking thousands of hours of pro bono counsel to help those on my list.