Children of War (3 page)

I keep it together by reminding myself that my mother brought us all here
to give us a better life. She would
rather have stayed in Kurdistan.
Of course, that's her home, that was her parents' home and their
parents' home, and back and back. But she brought us here, and I have to prove to
her that it was worth it.

I hope I can go back to Kurdistan one day without getting killed. One
reason Bush gave for invading Iraq was to stop the killing of the Kurdish people, but
Kurds are still being killed. The Americans want oil, and Kurdistan is where the oil
is.

If I could talk to American kids, I'd tell them to ask their parents
if they believe the war is good, if what they are doing is right. It's one thing
if they really believe it, but most people just go along with things without
thinking.

When Canadian kids — the ones who have always been here and have had
a good life — start complaining to me about the little things that bother them, I
just think, “You have no idea.”

The Christian community in Iraq is two thousand years old,
and it was about one million strong at the start of the current war.

The chaos that took the place of government after the fall of
Saddam brought forward leaders who equated attacks on Christians with attacks on the
foreign occupiers, forcing many Christians to flee to Jordan, Syria or wherever they
could. Churches have been burned, and Christians have been kidnapped as part of a
larger struggle to control areas of the country.

Michael's family belongs to one of the ancient Christian
sects of Iraq. They were forced to flee their home and now live in Zarqa, a city
northeast of
Amman. Rents are reportedly cheaper in Zarqa than
in much of Amman, which is why many Iraqis without means have chosen to settle
there. With a population of 700,000, it's the second-largest city in Jordan,
and home to a large Palestinian refugee camp.

Michael lives with his mother and younger brother in a few small,
tidy rooms, carefully decorated with the few mementos they were able to bring with
them from Iraq, and with religious pictures given to them by people in their local
church.

I live in Zarqa with my mother and two younger brothers. We came
to Jordan two years ago. My father is dead.

My father used to work as a reservations manager in the Sheraton Hotel in
Baghdad. I don't think the hotel is there any more. I think it got bombed. I
don't know for sure, but I think somebody told me it did.

We are Christian. There have always been Christians in Iraq. We're
not like foreigners there. We are a part of Iraq. At the hotel, my father kept a picture
of the Virgin Mary on his desk to remind him to think of holy things during his work
day. For years he did this, no problem. His manager was also a Christian, and it was
fine. Then the Christian manager was fired and a Muslim manager took his place. This new
one didn't like the Virgin Mary. He told my father to get rid of the picture. My
father didn't want to. I don't know if he was fired or if he quit, but
anyway, he was out of a job.

He didn't like to be out of work because he was
used to working, and he had to take care of all of us. He couldn't find another
job. He became sadder and sadder and sicker and sicker. His stomach hurt and he
couldn't eat. The doctor said it was stress, but finally they tested him somehow
and said it was cancer. But, like I said, it was too late.

Our home was in Baghdad. We had a very nice house. We weren't there
for the bombing, though. We went to Mosul, where my mother thought we would be safer.
The planes started attacking two hours after we left, so we just got out in time. Lots
of people left if they could, so that George Bush couldn't kill them.

The trip was very hard for my mother. She talks about how hard it was. My
father was very sick and he had a tube in his arm attached to a bag that had medicine in
it. And my grandmother was with us, but she was sick, too, mostly paralyzed. I am the
oldest, but still, I was young, maybe eight, and my two younger brothers had chicken
pox. It was a very bad trip.

Mosul wasn't safe, either. There was always gunfire, every night.
There were car bombs, too, and a car makes a lot of noise when it explodes.

We spent a lot of time in a church. Maybe we lived there. We were there a
lot, anyway, with many other families. At night we would sleep on the floor or on
benches, or try to sleep because there were guns all night. Sometimes I'd be so
tired I'd forget to be afraid of the guns and just fall asleep anyway.

Our father was getting sicker and sicker, so after a month or so we went
to Jordan, but he died in 2004.

My mother said he should be buried in Iraq, because
that is our home, and she didn't want his body to be forever in foreign soil. And
he was already dead, so George Bush couldn't kill him again. That's when we
made the trip with him, wrapped up in sheets in the back of the truck.

We buried him in a graveyard, and then we went back to our house.

There was nothing much left of it. Bombs had hit it. We couldn't
even find it at first because bombs had hit the whole neighborhood. Everything was gone.
Our house, my friend's house, the house of the people next door and down the
street.

Why did they do this? This was my house! This was my street! It
wasn't hurting anyone! It was just being a house. The place where I once slept was
now rocks and dust and chunks of roof and walls. My things were all broken.

Still, it was ours, so we tried to start living there again, cleaning up
the dust and trying to clear up just one room where we could do all our living in. But
there was no school, no water, no electricity. Whenever my mother went to the shop, she
had to wear hijab because otherwise people would know she was Christian and give her a
bad time.

Our lives didn't last like this for long. Very soon, a stranger left
a note at our house saying, “Get out or we will kill you.” I don't
know who left the note. I don't know who wanted us dead.

We left Iraq and came again to Jordan. Now we live in
Zarqa, and we are trying to make our lives here. But everything feels so broken. I
miss my father, and I miss my home.

My brothers and I go to school here. I'm the only Iraqi kid in my
class. The other students are okay, they're friendly. My best subject is science.
We're studying genetics now, and the properties of gas and liquid. It's very
interesting. Earlier today we went on a class trip to a park in Amman, with lots of
trees and fun things to do.

We don't play much with the neighborhood boys. They're all
Jordanian, and they tell us that they don't like Iraqis. My mother worries too
much when we leave her sight, like she's afraid we will disappear. So we mostly
stay inside, but that means we fight a lot. Especially, I fight with the brother right
next to me in age. I used to like him a lot but now he's always plowing into me
and throwing things at me.

He wets the bed every night, too. He didn't used to, and he's
ten, too old to be doing that. My mother gets him up a lot during the night to go to the
bathroom, which wakes me up, so none of us gets much sleep. I try not to tease him about
it, because I know he can't help it, but sometimes I do, and that makes me ashamed
of myself.

My mother even stopped taking us both to church because she's afraid
we'll start fighting in the middle of the service. She takes us one at a time now.
I promised myself I won't fight any more, then I do it. Like I said, it makes me
ashamed. Our fighting just adds to my mother's unhappiness, so I must find a way
to stop it. I see her sitting
and staring and looking very unhappy.
She used to make fatyr, meat pies, to sell for some money, but the oven broke so she
can't do that any more. She forgets all kinds of things, and just sits and
stares.

We've been accepted by the UNHCR, and we were supposed to go to
Australia, but Australia changed its mind and doesn't want us. So here we sit.

I have nothing in common with American children, except if there is maybe
an American child whose father has died, whose house is destroyed, and who is forced to
live in a foreign country that doesn't want them. Then he and I would have
something to talk about.

I think it would make the world better if people had to fix the things
they broke. Like, if someone bombs your house, they couldn't go away and do things
they wanted to do until they built you a new house and fixed what they broke.

In 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, sanctions were imposed on
Iraq by countries around the world. Food, medicine and other goods were prevented
from going into Iraq, and the country's economy and its people suffered from
being unable to engage in full trade with the rest of the world. Because
water-treatment plants had been damaged during the First Gulf War, half the Iraqi
population did not have access to clean drinking water. Inflation skyrocketed, the
education system collapsed and, as Hadani Ditmars wrote in
Dancing in the No-Fly
Zone: A Woman's Journey Through Iraq, “
almost overnight, the lives of
most Iraqi citizens went from comfortable to desperate.” The sanctions
continued until 2003, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths,
according to UNICEF.

Sara is old enough to remember those years under sanctions. She
lives in the Hashimi district of Amman, near the older downtown. There is a shiny
new shopping mall nearby. Behind the wide, bright streets of the commercial area are
houses full of small apartments that house many Iraqis, including Sara, her two
sisters, her mother and a cousin.

I have two sisters. Their names are Heinine, who is fourteen, and
Sabine, who is eleven. Our cousin Nahan is also with us. She is the same age as me.

We live now in a small apartment in Jordan. It's very bare, with
just mats along the walls, no good furniture. We burn incense a lot because it covers up
the smell of damp and worse things. None of us like it here. We are in the Hashimi
section of Amman, where a lot of Iraqis live, but we don't spend time with them.
It's hard to know who to trust. A lot of people left Iraq for a lot of reasons.
Just because we are all here now in Jordan doesn't mean we all like each
other.

Our father died seven years ago from sickness. It was harder to get good
health care in Iraq in the time of sanctions. I don't know if he would still be
alive or not if there were no sanctions. It's something I don't like to
think about.

Although we lost his salary when he died, my mother had a good job. Our
lives would have been much worse if
our mother didn't have a
job. She was an accountant in the educational system.

She was also a member of the Ba'ath Party and worked with the Iraqi
Women's Union, a non-governmental organization that helped make women's
lives easier day-to-day and also encouraged women to participate in the political life
of Iraq. It was a very old organization, around for many years.

After the fall of Saddam, militia groups targeted former Ba'ath
party members, killing a lot of them. We would hear about the killings, and we worried
that our mother might be targeted.

Eventually she did get a death threat, and that's when we left. We
were living in our grandparents' house at the time. We gathered together what we
could in a hurry, then left quickly and quietly.

For a while, our mother worked here as a housecleaner in the neighborhood,
but now she is sick and tired all the time. I'm not really sure how we are
surviving now. I think she borrowed money from someone.

We sold some jewelry and dishes, but a lot of Iraqis are trying to sell
things in order to live, so we didn't get a good price for them.

Our mother is thinking that if she can get a sewing machine, she can do
some tailoring and bring in some money that way. It would be good to see her busy. I
think she would be happier if she had something to do that she liked. She'd have
less time then to worry about me.

My sisters and I are back in school this year, because Jordan now lets
Iraqi children attend for free. My teachers
are good, very kind and
patient with us. We lost our school year last year because we couldn't afford to
pay the fees, so we are behind and have to work hard to catch up.

School feels safe. We can learn, and we have friends and can laugh and
have fun. During the war we saw dead bodies in the streets, explosions, terrible things.
It helps to be able to laugh and have a bit of a regular life. Both Heinine and I want
to be doctors. Sabine hasn't decided yet.

My mother and grandmother want us to wear hijab. They're afraid for
us because we have no father or older brother to protect us. They say, “You are
young girls, walking around the streets with your heads uncovered. What if you are
attacked by some bad Jordanian men? We cannot go to the police. They will send us back
to Iraq!” They talk and worry, and sometimes I just get tired of all their worry.
This is the one time I have in my life to be young. I don't want to spend it
hiding and worried and afraid.