Captivity (5 page)

Upon leaving the plant, we had to stop at the security gate. “
Ramallah wal day ik
,” Adib said to the guard.

“Hum d’Allah,”
the guard answered. Praise be to God.

Adib turned around in his seat as we drove away. “Do you know this saying?
Ramallah wal day ik?”
he asked. I shook my head. “We have many sayings like this. It is part of our custom. When someone does something good for you, you can honour them by saying
Ramallah wal day ik
. It means
May God bless your parents
. I like to say it for the work of the simple man, like that security guard. It tells them they are doing something good. But you can also say it to someone who is doing something bad. It is a way to say a reminder to them—‘You are doing the work of the bad man.’ ”

“
Ramallah wal day ik,”
I said. “Thank you, Adib.”

“You can use it any time,” he said.

I sent my letter on the morning of Friday, November 25, just before Greg, Norman, Harmeet and I left for our meeting with Father Douglas Al Bazi, a Chaldean priest who was the pastor of St. Mari Catholic Church, located in a northern Baghdad suburb. We parked on a quiet residential street and walked towards a leafy property surrounded by
concrete barriers and coils of concertina wire. The church itself was enclosed by eight-foot-high walls, and at the main gate there was a little hut that housed two armed guards.

Father Douglas, a hearty, big-bellied man in his mid-thirties, welcomed us with open arms and ushered us into his study. He left the room and returned with a nun, each of them carrying a tray laden with dishes of food. There was chicken, rice, salads, stuffed grape leaves, savoury pastries, grilled fish, lamb, things I’d never seen before. A feast of biblical proportions.

As we ate, Father Douglas talked. Under Saddam, the Christian community had numbered about two million and enjoyed full protection as a religious minority in a secular Iraq. In the turbulent “New Iraq,” Christians were in serious peril as forces within the society sought to forge a new national consensus based on the elimination of all differences and enforcing conformity to a narrow spectrum of values and behaviours. Christians selling alcohol had been killed or had their shops destroyed, Christian women experienced growing pressure to wear the hijab, churches had been bombed. St. Mari itself had successfully defended itself against a car bomb attack by the guards who were hired by the church and paid by the government. Father Douglas himself had run outside firing his Kalashnikov. The lack of security and miserable living conditions meant Christians were leaving Iraq in droves. The ones who remained were too poor, too old or too stubborn to leave and kept as low a profile as they possibly could. Of the three hundred families that Father Douglas once served, only a hundred remained.

When our meal was finished, Father Douglas introduced us to one of his parishioners. “This is Lawrence, one of my altar boys. He’s going to university now.” Lawrence smiled shyly. “Lawrence was kidnapped last year. This is happening every day to Iraqis.”

Shocked, we responded with questions. Avoiding our eyes, Lawrence explained how he’d been walking home from school when some armed men forced him into a vehicle. “I have the blindfold, but they not beat me or anything. They make to me to phone my father on the mobile. They make me say to my father you crying you torture you
afraid to be kill unless my father to give $50,000.” A final ransom of $10,000 was negotiated and Lawrence was released within ten days.
^*

At dinner that evening, Greg complained that he had laundry to do. The team’s laundry facilities consisted of a plastic tub and the rooftop clothesline. “When am I going to get time? I can’t do it tonight, I’m with the delegation all day tomorrow, and we leave for Karbala on Sunday. I can’t go to Karbala in these,” he said, referring to the clothes he was wearing.

“I don’t have anything planned for tomorrow,” Tom said. “Why don’t I take the delegation for the morning meeting and you can get ready for the trip. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Kadhimiya. I like it there.”

“Are you sure?” Greg asked.

“Yeah, it’s no problem, but I need to be back for the afternoon.”

“We can do that, no problem,” Greg said. “Our morning meeting is at ten. That’ll give you lots of time to get back to the apartment, the delegation can grab a bite to eat, and then I’ll take them in the afternoon for the two o’clock meeting at the Muslim Scholars Association.”

I had first met Tom in August 2004 at a CPT retreat. He had just completed his training in Chicago and I had just been appointed to the role of Canada coordinator. I happened to overhear him say he had been in the Marine Corps. I was immediately intrigued. How does a former Marine become an activist, pacifist, violence-reduction Christian peacemaker? He explained that he had been a musician, not a soldier. He played the clarinet in the Marine Corps Band. In fact, he had never learned how to use a gun. He retired after twenty years, sold all his musical instruments and took training to become a baker in 1993.

I found this curious. I imagined that if I were a musician capable of making beautiful music, I would never want to part with my instruments. I asked him why.

“Well, I’m an artist. And art is something you give yourself to completely or not at all. You can’t do it in half-measures. It’s all or nothing.”

Led by a mutual spiritual curiosity, Tom and his former wife, Jan Stansel, began to explore Quakerism in 1983. A spiritual awakening during his transition out of the Marine Corps Band led him deeper into the practice of Quaker spirituality and he experienced a growing desire to live Quaker non-violence in an active way. When 9/11 happened, he was profoundly disturbed by the hard turn of American policy towards unlimited global warfare. Feeling an urgent call to respond in some way, he began to research different options and found CPT’s website. He left his job as a manager in a large organic food chain, went on a delegation and took the CPT training. Now his work was about to begin: he was leaving for Iraq in three weeks.

I asked him if he had any family. Yes, he said, two children: a son named Andrew, who was nineteen, and a daughter named Kassie, who was twenty-four. I asked him how they felt about his decision to work in Iraq. He answered in his matter-of-fact way that they were of course worried but he explained to them this was something he had to do. “Armies expect casualties when they go to war. Those working for peace in war zones have to expect the same,” he’d said.

The next day, I got up early to do my laundry. I scrubbed my clothes by candlelight in the bathroom. I was excited about our trip. Karbala was a fabulous city of gold-brick domes and minarets, Byzantine markets, solemn pilgrims, gracious boulevards. And we were going to meet Hussein Al Ibraheemy and Sami Rasouli, the founders of Muslim Peacemaker Teams, a group of Muslim peace activists CPT had trained in January 2005. They had ambitious plans to train twenty teams to do development work and human rights education across the country.

I went up to the roof to hang out my clothes. The sun was rising over Baghdad and the air was remarkably breathable. I lifted my face to the glorious new light. How I loved it up there. The roof was the team’s retreat centre, spa and gym, the only escape from visitors, the phone, the confinement of the apartment. There wasn’t much to it—a big cement pad furnished with some plastic lawn chairs and piles of junk that had nowhere else to go—but when you were there you could reach up and touch the sky, and for a little while feel that anything was
possible. I hung up my laundry and descended the stairs. It was time to leave for our first meeting.

Kadhimiya was my favourite place in Baghdad. At its centre was the Kādhim shrine, a gold-gleaming complex of towering minarets surrounded by a vast, teeming market where you could buy everything from bales of second-hand clothing to major electrical appliances to pomegranates. I had been to Kadhimiya several times before and never felt alarm, but that day I was on hyper–red alert. As we followed Adib into the Gordian market, it felt as if we were walking into a wall of hard stares. I checked constantly to make sure I could see Tom’s bald head following behind Norman and Harmeet. If we were separated, it would be impossible to find our way out of the market and back to the van. I didn’t want to think about what could happen to a lost foreigner.

We turned right at a tea shop I remembered for its exquisite pyramids of pistachio sweet goods. Imam Ali’s house was just around the corner, a modest two-storey brick building marked by a set of concrete stairs on the edge of a labyrinthine world of crumbling arabesque houses.

Two men with bulging arms and machine guns hanging from shoulder straps stopped us in front of the imam’s house. The last time I’d visited, we were greeted by an old, bent-over man. Adib explained that we had an appointment with the imam at ten o’clock. They offered us their chairs and brought us tea. At eleven we were invited into the house by the old bent-over man. We took off our shoes and sat on a plush blue carpet in a spartan waiting room decorated with pictures of black-turbaned holy men. At 11:20 we were taken behind an intricately carved wooden screen.

Imam Ali was sitting cross-legged and barefoot on an ornate, hand-carved wooden chair. He wore dark brown vestments and the black turban that signified his authority as a direct descendant of the Prophet. He greeted us warmly, we shook his hand and then sat cross-legged on the floor in a semi-circle in front of him. I guessed that he was about forty, young to be the senior cleric of the third-holiest Shia
mosque in Iraq. He was attended by an aide who came and went, whispered things into his ear, handed him a phone.

It had been a traumatic year and a half for the imam and his community. On March 2, 2004, two weeks after I last saw him, fifty-eight pilgrims were killed when his mosque was bombed during the first open celebration of the Ashura since it had been banned by Saddam Hussein. Anticipating the possibility of an attack, Imam Ali had asked CPT to be present as observers at the religious festival. CPTers filmed the immediate aftermath of the bombing from the roof of a hotel located across the street from the shrine. Ashura is one of Shia Islam’s holiest days and marks the emergence of Shiism as a distinct tradition within Islam.
^*
On August 31, five months later, rumours of a suicide bomb attack during a Shia religious procession caused a stampede across the Imams Bridge that killed 965 pilgrims. The Imams Bridge connects Kadhimiya with Adhamiyah, a Sunni neighbourhood located directly across the Tigris River with a reputation for armed resistance to the U.S. occupation.

Imam Ali looked to have aged ten years since I had last seen him. Then, I had been impressed by his gentle comportment, his conviction that the two denominations could work together to form a new political accommodation. This time he was full of suspicion and blame. Dialogue and co-operation with Sunnis was no longer possible or desirable. He talked in angry, repetitious circles.

Tom caught my eye and discreetly pointed to his watch. “We’ve got to wrap this up,” he whispered, “or we’re never going to make it back to the apartment.”

It was another half-hour before we could honourably extricate ourselves from the meeting. There was no longer enough time to go back to the apartment to make the switch. Tom called Greg to let him know. We grabbed something to eat in Kadhimiya and proceeded directly to the Umm al-Qura mosque in Ghazaliya.

The Muslim Scholars Association was founded on April 14, 2003, five days after the fall of Baghdad. It was a hard-line organization of Sunni clerics opposed to the U.S. occupation and believed to have links to the insurgency. Aspiring to be the Sunni counterpart to the Shia marja’iyya (religious authority) led by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, it positioned itself as a behind-the-scenes power broker whose role it was to frame political goals and strategies for the whole Sunni community. CPT had been working for six months to establish a relationship with the Muslim Scholars. Our delegation’s visit would be CPT’s third meeting with them.

We arrived twenty minutes early for our two o’clock meeting. We pulled over within sight of the Umm al-Qura security gate and waited on a lonely arterial road bordering a middle-class residential area to the south and the open expanses surrounding the mosque complex to the north. There was no pedestrian traffic to speak of, and only the occasional passing car. At 1:50 p.m. we were allowed through the mosque checkpoint and entered the sprawling grounds of the Muslim Scholars national headquarters. The vast parking lot was empty but for a handful of cars clustered near the main entrance.

They take us into the house one at a time, Harmeet first and then Tom. It astounds me. This is where they’re taking us—a house on a quiet residential street with neighbours all around us? “Come,” a voice says when it’s my turn. The voice grabs my arm and pulls me out of the van. My mind screams
Run! Run!
but my body obediently follows. Eight steps to a door, an immediate right, six brisk steps through a dark kitchen and I’m in a spacious living room.