We started driving and soon passed through the first bad area, a nondescript little town in the middle of nowhere. About an hour and a half later, Munther turned to us. “The last problematic area is Fallujah,” he said. “They’ve been shooting Americans there lately.” Then he asked me in Arabic, “Can you tell your colleague it might be safer for us if he would stay away from the windows? It’s best if he stays out of sight as we pass through here.”
The Times reporter understood and immediately got down on the floor in the back. I stayed where I was and looked straight ahead. In my black hijab, I could have passed for an Iraqi. “They have the best kebabs here,” Munther told me as we passed through Fallujah, “but these people feel their country was taken from them by the Americans and Iranians, so they are very aggressive. If you are in Fallujah, hold your breath and pray.”
*
I’D TOLD MY parents that I’d be gone for two weeks, but I ended up spending several months in Iraq. There was so much happening, and it felt vitally important to be there. My interest was also personal. The longer I stayed in Iraq, the more often people asked me whether I was Sunni or Shia. Sometimes the question came from people I was interviewing, sometimes from curious Iraqis who worked with us in the Washington Post bureau in Baghdad. My answers depended on the situation, but the real answer was: both.
My mother is Shia and my father Sunni, both descendants of the Prophet’s family. The distinction had never been made in our house, but when I arrived in Iraq in the late spring of 2003, tension between the Sunni and Shia communities was building.
The historic roots of the religious Sunni-Shia conflict lie in the question of the righteous succession of the Prophet Muhammad. His followers divided over the question of whether Ali, his son-in-law and cousin, or Abu Bakr, his father-in-law, should follow him as the leader of the Islamic ummah, or community. Abu Bakr prevailed and became the first caliph. The Shia, however, believe that only Ali had the right to succeed Muhammad. A minority in the worldwide Muslim community, the Shia developed their own religious practices and sources. And while the conflict between the sects has not always been violent, the Shia have suffered from oppression throughout their history. Some Iraqi Shia scholars had fled to Iran or Bahrain, where they could practice their religious traditions freely. In Saddam’s Iraq, anyone who opposed the Ba’ath Party became an enemy.
Under Islamic law, sectarian allegiance is patrilineal. When I was in Fallujah or speaking to conservative Sunnis, I would tell them that my father was Moroccan. There are no Shia in Morocco, so the implication was clear. But I also played with it. In Shia neighborhoods, I would tell people that my mother was Ahl al-Bayt, a member of the Prophet’s family, and they would nod knowingly. In Shia Islam, this term, which can be translated “people of the house,” traditionally includes only Muhammad; Muhammad’s daughter Fatima; her husband, Ali; their two sons; and their direct descendants, the imams. In Sunni areas, people also liked to hear about my heritage. While some share the common Shia interpretation, others also count the Prophet’s wives as members of the holy family. But both sects agree on the honorableness of Ahl al-Bayt.
The fact that both my parents are descendants opened doors, but it also showed me something terrifying: there were people who would refuse to talk to or associate with those who came from a different sect. For the first time, I was experiencing a dividing line within Islam that my parents, and especially my mother, had confronted years earlier, before I was born. I sensed that covering Iraq would be a turning point in my life, but I didn’t yet realize how much the war would teach me about my own family history.
I spent the first few months at a house in the Jadriya district with Peter Finn and other colleagues from the Post. I quickly grew friendly with the brilliant and humble Lebanese-American journalist Anthony Shadid. We talked about the Sunni-Shia divide, and I told him that it shocked me. “It’s been going on for hundreds of years,” he told me, and he predicted that things would get worse.
My task was still to find Ahmad al-Ani, the diplomat who had allegedly met with Mohamed Atta in Prague. I had phone numbers for two Iraqi diplomats in Baghdad—one that a contact in Germany had given me, the other from the man I’d met at the embassy in Berlin. I met with each of them separately at the Hamra Hotel, where the Post had booked a room to be used for interviews. For security, we never brought any of our sources to the house without discussing it with the bureau chief first.
The Iraqi diplomat from the embassy, the one who had laughed at my na?veté, found al-Ani for me. “This is his number,” he told me. “I’ve been to his house and told him he can trust you. But don’t waste too much time. I’m sure you’re not the only one who’s looking for him.”
I called the number the diplomat had given me. A woman answered. “Who are you?” she asked.
I knew that the phones might be tapped, so I tried to be careful.
“I’m Souad,” I told her. “I think your family member has heard about me.”
“Wait,” she said in Arabic, and then I heard her whisper, “Souad?”
“Yes, yes, give me the phone,” I heard a man say. “Yes, this is al-Ani. I’m the diplomat you’re looking for.”
I wanted to stop him from saying too much over the phone, but he went on. “I know they will try to make me disappear, but I want you to know, it is all a lie. What they said about me is a lie. I never met any of these terrorists, nor have we had anything to do with these attacks.”
“Please don’t say these things here,” I broke in. “Somebody might be listening.”
“I want you to know, it is all a lie. They will come for me anyway, I know. But at least now you know and the world has to know.”
He agreed to meet the next day, saying, “The person who gave you my number will bring you here.”
I called the man from the embassy. His friend had invited us for tea the next day, I said. “Could we meet at the Hamra and go together?” He agreed.
The next day, in a Washington Post car with an Iraqi driver, we reached al-Ani’s house to find the door broken. A man came outside. His gray hair still had some black in it, and his skin looked pale. He wore dark blue trousers and a mint-colored shirt. My diplomat friend got out of the car, introduced himself, and asked to speak to Mr. al-Ani.
“You mean my brother?” the man answered. “He’s gone. They took him last night.”
“Who took him?” I asked.
The man looked at me. “Are you Souad the journalist? He told me about you.”
He said that the previous night, six or seven men had stormed the house. They wore masks and carried guns, and they shouted al-Ani’s name. “They handcuffed my brother with plastic ties, blindfolded him, and took him away,” the brother reported. “We don’t know where he is.”
“Who are ‘they’?” I asked.
“We don’t know for sure, but we think the Americans. You know they used him as a scapegoat to create a reason for attacking Iraq.”