Barefoot in Baghdad (16 page)

Without hesitation he snapped back, “Either you take them or I’m going to pack them into a Land Cruiser, drive them down to Baqubah, and boot them out into the desert where they came from.”

His arrogance was amazing. I thought to myself,
This is not my problem, and I will not get involved.
I kept saying that in my head, trying to convince myself, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t walk away from these girls and leave them at the army’s mercy. This was about the girls, not the colonel. Yes, they had done a very stupid thing, but didn’t we all do stupid things without fully realizing the consequences? In the end, this would be about life or death.

I took a deep breath and looked up at the colonel. “I will try again,” I said. “They have it stuck in their mind that you can help them and I’m ruining everything. You need to make sure they know they are out of options, so they will take a bit more seriously whatever alternative I provide. In the end, it is not my decision to make. It will be the decision of the women’s shelter. The director’s name is Khanim. I will arrange for her to come and interview the girls.”

“Is she with an Iraqi organization? If she is, she cannot interview the girls. I made a promise they would not have to meet an Iraqi organization.”

“It is not up to you,” I said a bit abruptly, and then softened my tone. “Khanim is a Kurdish Iraqi, and she is the only one who can accept the girls at this point.” I added for extra softness, “Sir.”

I was half lying. I knew Khanim would accept them based on my referral, but she would never forgive me if I didn’t give her fair warning that these girls were being moved involuntarily. I suspected they might run away as soon as they arrived.

“It’s not going to happen. Do you have any other recommendations?” the colonel asked.

“I can have one of my local staff do the intake interview on Khanim’s behalf. I cannot do it myself because my Arabic writing skills are not strong enough to write the intake report, and I would not be able to complete the forms needed,” I said, thinking of Muna. “But just for the record, I am doing this for the girls, not for you.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t really give a rat’s ass why you’re doing this,” he said. “Just get them out of here.”

***

I left the Green Zone furious at the incompetent soldiers who had brought in these girls without giving a second thought to the implications of their actions. I felt particularly angry that it was left for me to clean up the blasted colonel’s mess. But I tried to think less about his motives and to focus on the girls themselves.

Yusuf had a serious expression on his face when I returned to the office. “You may want that lip at some point,” he said. It took me a second to realize that I was alternating between chewing my lower lip and pulling it back and forth like bubble gum—my trademark tic when I was lost in thought.

He had a message for me from Abdullah, the policeman I had contacted in Baqubah for information on the girls. He had come all the way to Baghdad and needed to see me as soon as possible. Abdullah would come back to the office that afternoon. It was already two o’clock, so I knew that he would probably show up at any minute.

Before he arrived, I decided to update Yusuf on the girls’ situation. As I poured out the details, along with a side dish of commentary, I realized how great it was to have someone to confide in, even if it meant getting one of Yusuf’s infamous lectures. A typical Yusuf lecture would often begin with: “Manal, the Koran tells us not to throw ourselves in the fire pit, and to take an easy route instead of a difficult one when the choice presents itself. Why are you hell-bent on jumping in, taking a swim, and floating around in the fire pit?”

A lecture was a small price to pay for the assurance of knowing Yusuf would be by my side. It would have been impossible to tackle such difficult cases without his ability to advise me on the Iraqi context. And he was adept at maneuvering around red tape, both official and informal. Although we often disagreed, I knew I could always trust him. I needed his counsel now more than ever.

Abdullah arrived twenty minutes later. He was middle-aged, about five feet three inches in height, with a muscular frame and perfect posture. Despite his small stature, he spoke and moved with such authority that he instantly filled the room with his presence. People would always gravitate toward him in our community meetings.

But today he arrived looking pale, with a worried look on his face. He slouched in the seat in front of my desk and fidgeted while trying to decide which way to cross his legs. Anxiety started to well up inside me. It wasn’t like Abdullah to make the trip to Baghdad unannounced. I was praying that he would tell me he was just dropping in because he was in the neighborhood—but how likely was that when your neighborhood was in Baghdad?

The moment we received our chai, he asked, “How did you know about the boys’ case?”

I lowered my tea glass and looked at him. “What boys?”

Abdullah gave me a suspicious look. “The two brothers who were caught two days ago. They have been in interrogation. Even I did not know about them. How did you know?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about, Abdullah. What does this have to do with me?”

Annoyance crept into his voice: “The brothers who are responsible for kidnapping the Al Mitwakal girls?”

I looked at him in horror and disbelief as the dots began to connect. “I had no idea that the girls had been kidnapped,” I stuttered, completely confused as to what I could or should reveal. “I just heard there was a possibility of some girls from Baqubah that went missing, and I wanted to see if there was any truth in the rumors.”

Abdullah remained silent, perhaps not wanting to believe me, but also not able to dismiss the utter shock on my face. I was beginning to feel physically sick at the realization that two innocent men were being detained for five girls who had voluntarily run away. “How do they know these men kidnapped them?”

“Well, they apparently have confessed.”

The sick feeling worsened. What had been done to these men to extract such a confession? “Where are they being held?”

I was already mentally rehearsing my phone call with Captain Murphy, my main ally and the person who had initially called me about the case. She needed to know about this, and given her aversion to torture, I was sure I could persuade her to look into it.

Abdullah looked at me carefully. “Manal, you are very dear to me and many others in the community. The Al Mitwakal family is powerful and rich. Whoever decided to mess with these girls has made a big mistake. Nobody in Baqubah believes it was these brothers, and all the police officers are saying there were never any ransom requests. My advice to you would be not to ask about these girls anymore. There are things you can do, and things you can’t do. You need to become better at distinguishing between the two.”

My heart sank at these words. I didn’t need to look in Yusuf’s direction to see the look on his face. He had already seen me stubbornly forge ahead with other risky cases, and I knew he was dreading that I was going to do it again.

***

A difficult situation had just become even more complicated. The girls’ foolish behavior had not only put their lives at risk but had also resulted in the wrongful torture and imprisonment of two innocent brothers. Yusuf’s sources confirmed Abdullah’s statement that nobody believed the two brothers had kidnapped the girls. They were from a poor family well known in their village for their piety. They were among a handful of villagers who spent every dawn praying in the local mosque. Somehow they had managed to become the perfect scapegoats.

Yusuf had done his homework about the Al Mitwakal family as well. They were a powerful tribal family that made its wealth from numerous chicken farms in several governorates south of Baghdad. They were well known in Baqubah as being among the handful of families who had managed to benefit from both the previous regime and the present situation. Their connections reached deep within the Iraqi police and local district councils. At the same time the Al Mitwakal family was also very close to the U.S. military base and had many contracts with the U.S. Army to support the reconstruction work. The family would not rest until they knew for sure what had happened to their girls. If not for love, then for honor. Abdullah’s advice that this wasn’t a family to be messed with was the understatement of the year.

All of Baqubah was up in arms about the girls’ kidnapping, and the women’s center that we worked with there was reporting an increase of young girls being pulled out of school for fear of kidnappings. My head hurt just thinking about the string of events that had been unleashed by these girls’ actions.

Despite the chain of consequences, I still had sympathy for the girls. I had spent enough time in the central governorates surrounding Baghdad to know the difficulties girls like them faced. I knew many teenage girls who had been forced into marriage. The lucky ones managed to make their marriage work, but many of them would end up divorced and returned to their parents. Of course there were also the widows, the other pariahs in Iraqi society, right after the divorcees. The fact that these women were no longer virgins somehow meant that they were permanently in heat. Iraqi men labeled them as easy prey, and parents often kept their widowed or divorced daughters under lock and key. If a chastity belt had been marketed in Iraq, it would have become the nation’s best-selling item.

Zeena and Rasha had approached the marriageable age, and I could easily imagine that they had panicked at the thought of falling into these circumstances. The fact that they were from a successful and powerful family would only seal their fate.

I had also spent enough time in people’s homes to know how naive some girls were. Within Baghdad (with the exception of the ghettos), the girls were known as
Baghdadiyaat.
They were much more cosmopolitan and sophisticated; they enjoyed the same personal freedoms I had when I was growing up. The girls of the governorates—or
Muhafaazaat
(slang for an uncouth woman), as some
Baghdadiyaat
called them—led sheltered lives. With a few exceptions, girls living in the governorates were kept inside the home. If they weren’t married, they were only permitted to leave the house for school or errands, and only with a male escort. Even the most liberal families forced the women in the household to keep themselves covered in public. In most cases, the head scarf was not enough. It was often expected that the woman would cover herself completely in a black abaya. Yet with the introduction of the Internet, satellite television, and mobile phones, the girls never needed to leave the house to be exposed to a whole new world.

For example, I once stayed with a family in Najaf, one of the most holy cities for Shias. It is home to the tomb of Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, the nephew of the prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) and the person whom Shias consider to be the first Islamic caliph. It is also the place where I was first introduced to
Star Academy,
an Arab-language version of
American Idol.
The family had six girls and a boy. The boy was considered the king of the castle, and to his credit, he played his role quite well. The girls spent the entire night watching
Star Academy
and stressing out as to who would be chosen to continue to the next level of the competition. During commercial breaks they would beg their mother to buy them posters of the latest Arabic pop idol, none of whom I recognized or cared to remember. They spent the rest of the night watching the Middle East Broadcast Channel (MBC), channel 2, which was playing back-to-back American action films.

This was the opposite extreme of what you could have seen on television before the U.S. invasion. Under Saddam, there were only official Iraqi channels. Schools commonly questioned young children about their favorite cartoons. Their answers were used as an indication of whether their parents had illegal access to satellite television, a crime punishable by death.

Given the shift from complete censorship to nonstop pop stars and car chases, I could understand how Zeena and the other girls could have had delusions of grandeur. In my heart I knew they were not to blame for the situation they had created. Still, they had managed to dig themselves into a pit and dragged the two innocent brothers from Baqubah with them.

***

I was glad I had confided in Yusuf. He proved to be indispensable in his support for helping me to work out the details of the case. Women for Women International focused on improving women’s access to earning a livelihood in postconflict areas. There were few resources for dealing with cases involving violence, runaways, and the usual range of dramas that seemed to find their way to me. I could only get involved in such cases in a personal capacity. With everything that was going on inside Iraq, I wound up working around the clock. There were only a couple of Iraqi staff members, headed by Yusuf, who were willing to go the extra mile when it came to controversial cases.

After Abdullah briefed us, Yusuf took control of the logistics between the shelter in Sulaymaniyah and the colonel in the Green Zone. I was happy that things were progressing with the girls’ case so I could follow up with Captain Murphy regarding to the two brothers in Baqubah.

When I told Anne Murphy what Abdullah had told us about the brothers, she refused to believe me.

“There’s no way,” she said. “I admit that we can be dumb, but we’re not that dumb. We have the girls in our custody.”

“Anne, trust me on this one,” I said. “I wish I were wrong. You didn’t see the look on my friend’s face. Just make a few phone calls and check out the story for me.”

She called me back in less than an hour. “Okay, I checked and double-checked. It seems like what you said may be true. There are two brothers being held, but the Iraqi and U.S. Military Police in Baqubah are not saying why. I’m all over this. If they really got false confessions out of them, I promise you I’m gonna raise hell.”

I hung up and breathed a deep sigh of relief. With the combined efforts of Anne and Yusuf, it looked like we were going to make it through this mess.