Ahmed has a degree in languages from Baghdad University and worked as a translator for American reporters when the war got underway. She remembers being puzzled when they first told her to ask Iraqis whether they were Sunni or Shia. Why, she asked? As one of seven children in a Shiia family, she thought of herself as an Iraqi. She knew there were tensions, but nothing like what she sees today. “Maybe they didn’t want their children to marry (outside the faith), but they weren’t killing each other.” The sectarian divisions were ignited and inflamed by the U.S. invasion and its messy aftermath. Today Ahmed ducks questions about her ethnicity. “Iraqi Muslim,” she says, her dark eyes flashing. Then, later, after a vegetarian dinner and a tribute to her courage as a journalist, she offers up the hope framed as a joke that someday Sunnis and Shias will be known as one: “Sushi.”
Asked to identify the three biggest mistakes of the war, she easily rattles them off. Leaving the borders open so foreign fighters could come across at will; disbanding the Iraqi Army so soldiers had to beg for food (“the Iraqis are a dignified people,” she adds), and firing the Baathists, who ran the ministries. Without the Baathists, the ministries collapsed, and the Iraqi people lost basic services. Going without electricity for all but two hours a day is still a commonplace in Iraq, she says. “I don’t know what’s going to be left,” she says. “This is a country of two rivers—the Euphrates and the Tigris. If you saw them today, you will cry. There are bushes in the middle.” The two rivers flow from Turkey through Iraq, and the mud that accumulates must be dredged out. It’s one of the many things that have been neglected. “Nothing is rebuilt—no sewers, no electricity,” she says. “Where did all the money go? Your companies have sucked all the money.”
“What if we leave?” I asked her. “We will sort it out,” she replied. “We have been in war before. We’re not stupid. Things might get worse, but we would run out of excuses. We couldn’t blame the Americans anymore.” She wouldn’t want the Americans to leave right away—any exit should be gradual—but it’s time, she says.
Ahmed was working abroad as a translator in Libya before the U.S. invasion. She returned home in the fall of 2002 to help care for her ill father. Talk of war was in the air but she didn’t believe the U.S. government would liberate the Iraqi people. Everyday life was hard but there were no security worries. People could go to the markets and the cafes, and take their children to the park. “If you kept quiet about the government, you were OK. If you spoke out, you could disappear,” she said. When she learned in a phone call in the middle of the night that she had been awarded a fellowship in the United States, her mother cautioned her not to be overly enthusiastic “or you’ll get us all killed.” Ahmed was jumping up and down and shouting with joy, rousing her entire family who, because of the limited electricity, were all sleeping on the ground floor of their house in Baghdad.
It was a chance to get away from the violence and to try to understand the point of view of the American government toward Iraq and the Middle East beyond all the rhetoric about democracy. It took months to get her visa, but Ahmed is now in Boston taking courses at MIT and Harvard and doing an internship with WBUR, the public radio station. Her attitude toward the U.S. government has not changed, but her openness to American culture is boundless. She had just worked on a story about the ingredients of a Twinkie. She’d never heard of a Twinkie, but she tried it, and it reminded her of an Iranian sweet popular in Iraq. Loving American life will be easy for Ahmed; softening her views of U.S. political leaders is a harder sell.
