With al-Ani gone, I knew that the story would be difficult to write. I asked if I could talk to his wife. Al-Ani’s brother told me that she and her sister had been at the house the previous night and were in shock; they had gone to stay with their parents.
“I can understand that she might be in shock, but it is important I talk to her,” I said. “Can I talk to her tomorrow or the day after?”
He shook his head.
“You can’t. The men who took my brother told her not to talk to the media.”
I was speechless. Why had this man and his family been silenced? Didn’t they have as much right as anyone to tell their story? I had his denial over the phone, but it wasn’t good enough. I’d never met al-Ani before that call, so I didn’t know his voice and couldn’t be sure it was really him I’d spoken to. If I’d met him, I would have asked for proof of his identity.
We tried to locate al-Ani by calling military spokespeople; some colleagues tried to find him through sources in other agencies, but no one wanted to say anything on the record. Finally, we confirmed that the Americans had arrested him.
Al-Ani was gone, but I stayed in Iraq. I got to know the Post’s Iraqi staff. One of the two older women who cooked for us said she had worked in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces and boasted that he loved her white beans and rice. One of our Iraqi stringers, Naseer, teased her: “Maybe because that’s the only dish you can truly cook.”
I learned a lot from the staff, who included Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds. Their ethnicities and religious beliefs didn’t matter, they said, and they told me that these hadn’t mattered before, either. Most of the local stringers were highly educated. Some had been businessmen or engineers, while Naseer, whom we called Abu Sayf, had been a pilot for Iraqi Airways. He worked as a translator and stringer, and his son was a Post driver.
I became part of the fast-paced metabolism of the bureau, chasing stories about what life in Iraq had been under Saddam as well as the continuing search for weapons of mass destruction. Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority that was running Iraq, had recently announced that the Iraqi army and police forces would be disbanded. During one press conference, Ahmad Chalabi, the Shia politician who led the Iraqi National Congress and had helped persuade the U.S. government to invade, said that honorable men in his organization would take care of security, but that the new Iraq could function only if those who had belonged to the Ba’ath Party were held responsible for their crimes. But de-Ba’athification would have serious consequences; the dissolution of the army and police left crowds of mostly Sunni men with security experience unemployed, armed, and angry. It turned into a recruitment bonanza for Al Qaeda in Iraq.
From what I could gather, Chalabi had a questionable reputation. Why would Bremer hold press conferences with such a man? Why would someone like Chalabi—who had spent many years outside Iraq—have more say in the future of this country than those who had lived here their whole lives? Was this really about building a better future for the Iraqis, or was it about the United States putting people in power who would be easy to handle?
“But doesn’t the United States think that a guy with such a track record will be more harm than help?” I asked Anthony Shadid one day, during a tea break in our garden.
“Souad, most of the people in the United States don’t think that far,” he responded. “Chalabi speaks English. He has studied in the United States. He knows how to crack the right jokes. He knows how to play the game in DC. Believe it or not, that’s what matters to some of these decision makers.”
*
EVERY NIGHT WHEN my colleagues called their loved ones, I dialed my parents in Germany. During those conversations, as I talked about what I was seeing, I began to learn more about the early years of my parents’ marriage, and how the Sunni-Shia rift that was deepening in Iraq had been a source of trouble for them, too.
The sectarian divide had been much more problematic on my mother’s side. My mother was born and grew up in Antakya, a Turkish city near the Syrian border. During the First World War, my great-grandfather had sheltered Armenians in his house and helped to smuggle them across the border to Syria in horse carriages. My family never talked about it much because even years later they feared the consequences. Some members of the family had been jailed for aiding Armenians. They didn’t share a faith, but they had something else in common: both were minorities in the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey.
My mother’s relatives are Turkish citizens, but of Arab descent, having come originally from Syria. When she was growing up, people of Arab descent in Turkey were often sent to do their compulsory military service in Kurdish areas, where there was active conflict. My mother’s father, a successful tire dealer, and her older brothers told stories about how, in the 1950s and ’60s, armed Turkish soldiers would show up and say, “We’ll rape all your girls. We’ll kill you. You’re not really Muslims.” As a result, people in the Arab-Turkish border regions began to resist the Turks. They built up their own local security forces and monitored their own neighborhoods, allowing only Christians and people of Arab descent to live there.
My mother told me that when she was a teenager, she had fallen in love with a Turkish policeman. They’d wanted to marry, but her brothers had said they would kill her if she married a Turk. My grandmother was sympathetic, but my mother’s brothers were firm: she was not going to marry a Turk or a Sunni.
My mother turned down the policeman’s proposal, but her heart was broken, and she was furious with her family. “I pray that God takes me away from you, to where there are seven seas between us,” she told them. That was part of the reason she went to work in Germany. When she and my father started seeing each other and decided to marry, she didn’t tell her family. She waited until after the wedding to share the news, for fear of what they’d do or say.
And she was right: the old wound hadn’t healed. My mother’s brothers flew into a rage. They had forbidden their sister to marry a Turk, and now she had gone and married a man who wasn’t even from their part of the world—and on top of that, he was a Sunni. Some of her brothers threatened to kill her. When my sister Fatma suffered brain damage at birth, they thought the worst. “You will see, he is going to leave you now that you’ve had a sick child,” one of them told her. My father stuck around, but when my sister Hannan was born a year later, some of my uncles still wouldn’t speak to him.