Belonging and Loss
Yousef, Suha, and Ibrahim recalled living in neighborhoods with varying degrees of ethnoreligious diversity. None spoke of growing up in completely homogeneous Muslim or Christian, Sunni or Shi’a, neighborhoods. There may have been communal tensions brewing under the surface, but the different groups had achieved a more or less peaceful coexistence. Overwhelmingly, Muslims and Christians spoke of each other as “good people.” This relatively peaceful coexistence, however, changed after 2003.
The US invasion, achieving its goal of defeating and disbanding the Iraqi army and laying waste to the country’s infrastructure, created a political vacuum in what had been a Sunni-minority-ruled regime under Saddam Hussein. Along with civilian casualties, there was an increase in organized crime and an emerging Sunni insurgency. Clear targets were those who were associated in some way with the coalition forces and the Coalition Provisional Authority of the occupation. After the first elections, which brought a Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki into power, professionals such as doctors were seen as indirectly supporting the government and were targeted by insurgents.
After graduating from medical school, Ibrahim survived the economic sanctions (1990–2003) by scavenging the smoldering junkyards for car seats and other spare parts, with which he fashioned dental chairs and clinic equipment. The economic sanctions imposed on Iraq following the Gulf War had resulted in a shortage of medical equipment, and he did brisk business.4 He would have preferred to practice medicine at one of the government hospitals, but that would have left him vulnerable to conscription into the military. Ibrahim had seen this happen to other doctors who had died in one of Iraq’s wars since 1981. After the 2003 invasion, he felt it was safe to take a position at Al Kadhmiya Hospital for Children, and he also opened a private clinic with a dentist partner. One day, after buying some drugs at the pharmacy, he returned to the clinic to find that a group of thugs had just gunned down his friend. Ibrahim gave his brother the keys to the clinic and never returned. Police later claimed to have arrested the assassins and told Ibrahim that he had been on the same hit list as his dentist partner. Ibrahim believed that while the assassins were simply doing it for money, the people behind them had political motives, to destabilize the country and take power.
Even indirect associations with the coalition could be deadly. Yousef, an engineer who worked in wastewater treatment in the oil fields, owned a shop in Baghdad that sold women’s accessories, cosmetics, makeup, and jewelry. It was a mixed neighborhood of Sunnis, Shi’a, Kurds, and Christians. After the invasion, Yousef’s shop began to have a large clientele of US soldiers who bought items for family members back home:
So the American army used to come to the shop to see why the shop is crowded. And also they used to buy from me some gifts, or they would ask me, “How much is this? What is this? What is that?” So, as a shop in general, drew their attention. So the terrorists that were in Al-A’amiriya [a neighborhood of Baghdad], they imagined that I—how to say it—that I was helping the Americans. Meaning, they considered me that I’m letting the Americans inside, I’m helping them; therefore, and according to this, I received a threat to kill, so I left.
After the death threats, Yousef and his wife, Nuha, along with their three sons, moved in with his brother for several months while deciding what to do next.
Interethnic and religious divides substantively widened with the increase of attacks on symbols of collective identity, such as the bombings at the Al Kadhmiya mosque. Both mosque and hospital are located in an elite Shi’a section of Baghdad, near the sacred Shrine of Imam Musa al-Kadhmiya, the seventh of the twelve imams in Shi’a sacred history. Ibrahim was on duty that horrible day in 2004 when the hospital was overwhelmed with casualties from deadly bomb attacks on people gathered for the sacred event of Ashura at the Al Kadhmiya mosque: fifty-eight people died, according to official counts, but Ibrahim believed that the number was much higher, in the hundreds. He remembered the scene: “A big hell, body parts everywhere in the street, by the mosque.” The hospital was overwhelmed, there were no beds, and surgery was being done on the floors.5
Attacks on religious symbols were accompanied by the escalation of communal tensions at the neighborhood level. As the conflict in Iraq came to be drawn along communal boundaries, there was a deliberate strategy by warring parties to physically displace each other at the neighborhood level—Sunnis from Shi’a-majority areas, Shi’a from Sunni-majority areas, or religious and ethnic minorities from Sunni or Shi’a areas.6 Outside of Baghdad in Northern Iraq, the Turkoman (a Turkish-speaking minority), already oppressed by Saddam’s efforts to replace ethnic minorities with Arab populations, were squeezed between Kurds and Arabs for control of Kirkuk. The violence that displaced people was not random but intentional, argues Jan Gruiters of Amnesty International: “There lies more behind people being forced to flee than simply a consequence of violence: the violence is often deliberately intended to purge cities, neighborhoods and villages of people who belong to another political faction, a different religion or ethnic group, or those who are voices of dissent.”7 Yousef believes not only that was he targeted because of his hospitality to US forces in his shop but also that he was in danger because he was a Shi’i in a majority-Sunni neighborhood.
The same was also the case with Suha, who grew up on her father’s farm in the small village of Alanish in Kurdish Northern Iraq, a region where Assyrian Christians have lived for two thousand years.8 In 1975, Suha and her family moved to the Baghdad suburb of Al Jadeeda for work. It was a mixed community, Sunni, Shi’a, and Christian; according to her father, “They [Muslims] were very kind to us.” Suha managed to complete only third grade before the bombing raids during the Iraq-Iran War, which began in 1980 and prevented her from continuing at school. Suha eventually got married in Baghdad, but her husband died from illness several years later. To support herself, she went to work in a textile factory, where she stayed for seven years.
In 2006, the family’s church, St. Elias Chaldean Parish, was attacked. With the attack on the church and intensification of violence, Christian friends and relatives began to leave the area. In the post-2003 turmoil, already-vulnerable religious and ethnic minorities became even more susceptible to threats, kidnappings, and attacks. Before the major sectarian conflicts broke out, there had already been mass expulsions of Christians from Basra, despite the city being controlled by coalition forces. Suha and her family did not leave. Finally they were the only Christians left in the neighborhood. For many Christians, attacks on churches meant that they were being targeted as a whole group and that the government was unable to protect them. Many felt it was no longer safe for Christians anywhere in Iraq, even in their stronghold of Mosul.9
In 2006, a young man came to the grocery store of Suha’s brother Daoud and delivered a threat, that his sisters should wear hijab and stop attending their church or face the consequences. Daoud threw a can of tomato paste at the young man and told him to get out. The family feared that the young man would return with an armed group. At that point, they knew it was now too dangerous to stay in Iraq. In April, Suha and her father, mother, and older sister drove north through Iraqi Kurdistan and crossed the border into Syria. There they met up with other Iraqi-Assyrian and Chaldean refugees living in northeastern Syria, not far from the Iraqi border. Suha’s father, Aodish, stressed that they did not run away in the middle of the night: “It was six in the morning. We took our time. It was normal.” Daoud and two younger sisters followed soon after.
The diversity of people I interviewed spanned most religious and ethnic groups in Iraq. All left because they were threatened with violence. As one Muslim woman told me, “It didn’t matter which group, Christian or Muslim: they were trying to kill all of us.” The Dutch journalist Geert van Kesteren was told something nearly identical by a woman he interviewed: “There is no end to the list of civilians who are victims and