It was then that my grandmother in Morocco went to a “letter writer” and dictated a message to be sent to my grandparents in Turkey. “We are honorable people,” she told them in Arabic. “You say you are descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. We are also descendants of the Prophet, and we’re not allowed to discriminate. We love your daughter, and we will do our best to make her part of our family.”
Perhaps her letter had some effect, because while my uncles remained angry, my grandfather began to soften. When my father, mother, and two sisters traveled to visit my mother’s family in Turkey for the first time, some of her brothers refused to shake my father’s hand and left the room when he entered. They told my mother they would never accept her marriage.
My grandfather put an end to that. “Enough is enough,” he told his sons. “He’s part of the family, and you have to accept it.” He welcomed my father and ordered my uncles to do the same. “I’m still the head of the family,” he said. “If you don’t do what I say, you’ll no longer be my sons.”
In the years that followed, my parents won further favor in the family because they cared for my grandparents so well. They sent money to Turkey every month, and when one of my mother’s brothers didn’t want to do his mandatory military service, my mother and father helped him pay to get out of it. This brother was part of a political student movement, and he ultimately had to leave the country. My parents helped him get a visa to come to Germany, and he lived with us for a few months. All this proved that my father had fully embraced my mother and her family.
When I was in Iraq, these stories poured out of my mother. As I told her about the growing hatred between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq, she started speaking in a way I’d never heard before.
“There has been a lot of suffering, because they were killing us,” she said one night.
“Who’re ‘they’?”
“The Sunnis.”
“Mom, your kids are Sunni!”
I could hear my father in the background, asking what she was talking about. I heard him say, “Don’t forget we left all this behind us.”
She told me about her upbringing in Turkey and how, when she was a child, Turks would come and say, “We’re going to kill you.”
“This was because you were Arab, not Shia,” I said. “If you’d been Sunni, they would have said the same.”
“Yes,” she said. “You’re right.”
I told her that militia fighters loyal to the Iraqi Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr were going into mixed neighborhoods and telling Sunnis they would be killed if they didn’t leave their houses. Sadr wanted to turn these places into pure Shia enclaves. “Why are these Shia doing this?” I asked my mother.
“They have also suffered,” she said. “You should look into what happened to them before.”
Sunnis and Shia had lived together in the same Baghdad neighborhoods for decades, I told her. The difference now was that fundamentalists were claiming those neighborhoods as their own. “You have no idea,” I said. “These people are criminals.”
The rise of Iraq’s Shia majority was aided by the return of powerful Iraqi exiles, politicians and religious figures alike, who had ties to Iran—and in many cases had lived there for years. One of these was Nouri al-Maliki, who would later become Iraq’s prime minister. A dissident under Saddam, he’d lived in Iran and Syria before returning to Iraq in 2003. Another was Ayatollah Mohammad Baqr al-Hakim, an important figure in U.S. efforts to build a new Iraqi government. After more than two decades of exile in Iran, he returned as head of what is now called the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a leading Shia political organization. The group’s militia, known as the Badr Brigades, had been recruited, trained, and armed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. After the fall of Saddam, Iran continued to provide political, financial, and military support to the Supreme Council and the Badr Brigades.
While some of my journalist friends attended pool parties at the Hamra Hotel, I spent my nights reading my politics books for school and writing reports for my professors. I had made a deal with three of them: they would allow me to miss lectures if I sent them weekly reports. It was surreal to be reading Marx or trying to understand the theory of complex interdependence at night after witnessing the collapse of a nation by day.
I wondered how the United States and Britain had allowed Iraq to fall into this trap. While we reporters could clearly see that sectarian tensions were rising and religious figures were gaining influence, no one in authority seemed particularly concerned, certainly not Paul Bremer. There were many things I didn’t understand. Why didn’t U.S. officials choose Iraqi engineers and architects, who were among the best in the Arab world, to rebuild the country? Instead, they gave the contracts to Jordanian, Lebanese, British, or U.S. firms, which then subcontracted the jobs to Iraqis. It didn’t make sense.
As a child in Frankfurt, I’d loved U.S. soldiers, but now I was seeing those troops—and America itself—from a different vantage point. My previous experience with Americans had come from growing up near a U.S. military base. When I was in kindergarten, my mother tells me, I liked to flirt with the soldiers. Whenever I saw them in the streets, they would smile and give me chewing gum or a lollipop. Most important, the Americans spent a lot of time working with the school for handicapped children that Fatma attended. Every year, they organized a Special Olympics. It was held on a grassy field, and there were hot dogs, soft drinks, and ice cream. One soldier would volunteer to take care of each child, and everyone got a medal.
But the American soldiers I saw in Iraq weren’t friendly. I began to understand that most American soldiers knew little or nothing about Iraq or about Arab culture. Once, when I wanted to go to a press conference in the Green Zone, I decided on purpose to stand in the line for Iraqis rather than the one for foreigners. As I waited, an American soldier walked past, gun in hand, grimacing and spitting on the ground. I could see that the Iraqis in the line were appalled.
“Excuse me,” I said to the soldier, in English. “Don’t do that. It’s very rude. It’s as if you’re spitting on their country.”
I didn’t spend much time with American soldiers in Iraq. But one day in July 2003, I got a call from an Iraqi source who urged me to come to Mosul as fast as I could. “There’s a shoot-out going on here,” he said. “American soldiers are involved as well. I cannot say more. The phones might be tapped.”
We confirmed that there was shooting, and we heard that American soldiers were conducting an operation. But against whom? I called my source back and asked an adviser to drag him out of a meeting.
“Do you know what is going on?”
“Yes,” he answered. “The U.S. soldiers are having a heavy battle with people who were hiding in a house.”
“Who are these people?”
“I can’t give you details now, but you should come. This is big.”
I told him it was too risky to come without knowing who was involved. The road to Mosul wasn’t safe, and the bureau chief would want to know why we were going.