Aunt Sahira was in bed when someone knocked at the door in the middle of the night. Terrified, she woke up her husband. He jumped from his bed unable to think what to do. He had few moments to decide what to do.
My two cousins were only five and six years-old. They were terrified and ran to their parents’ room where they all gathered unable to function. Their faces looked pale and their hearts pounded like drums, my aunt recalled. They knew the father was going to be taken and there was no way out for him to escape.
The men outside kept knocking at the door for five minutes until my aunt decided to open it. Five men in olive-color military uniform stared at her.
“Where is Yousif?” one man said.
“He… he.. he is … not here,” she said as she was shaking.
“Don’t lie,” he said. “Go in and bring him,” he ordered the other men.
She begged them and told them he has nothing to do with politics. He was just a merchant. Her heart pounded faster and faster. She knew that was it. She knew she is going to be a widow and her two daughters will be orphans for the rest of their lives. She sobbed and bent to their feet and kissed their shoes so that they leave him alone. No luck!
Two of the five men found him hiding in the closet. They took him in front of his wife and crying daughters.
“Take care of Hana and Zeena,” he said. His eyes were full of tears.
“Don’t take him please, please, please,” she cried.
“If you want to see him, come to Abu Ghraib tomorrow,” one man said as he slammed the door.
She didn’t believe what happened. She hoped that these men would never come and take him away. She loved him to death. In 1967, she fell in love with him when they were in the same undergraduate school, college of Agriculture. By end of the year, they got married. In 1977, they had their first daughter whom they called Hana and in 1978, their second daughter joined the small lovely family. Before Hana was born, they bought a house in Kadhimiya, a Baghdad Shiite neighborhood which embraces the shrines of two revered Shiites Imams and decedents of Prophet Mohammed.
It was 1982 when this incident happened when Saddam was going on with his oppression against the Shiites. The government claimed that Aunt Sahira’s husband was a member of the Islamic Dawa Party, a banned Shiite political party that revolted against Saddam and tried to assassinate him in that year.
Aunt Sahira took the phone and called her in-laws. She fell into despair when she heard that her two brothers-in-law were also taken to Abu Ghraib the same night her husband was taken. The next day, the whole family went to the prison to see what they could do to let the men released. At the prison, officials told them they seized the men because they were members of the “Dawa” party. They we are all shocked because they know that it was not true. Aunt Sahira and her mother-in-law told them they were not members of that banned party. She knew they would not listen to her. She knew that this was just the beginning.
For three months, she and her daughters were able to see Yousif in his prison in Abu Ghraib. She would take money, food, blankets, and clothes.
“Bring me pictures of you and the kids,” she recalls him saying. His eyes were red and his face was pale.
“I knew I would never see him after that visit,” she told me. She was right. She never saw him till this day. He disappeared like the hundreds of thousands of innocent Shiites did. The prison officials told her not to visit him again.
“They told me he was going to be taken to ‘another prison’. I knew they were going to execute him,” she said.
By course of time, things became worse. After her husband Yousif disappeared, she was forced to leave the house. It was confiscated by the government with all its furniture. She was lucky that she was able to run with her jewelry and important documents. She went to her in-laws house first but she found the government men seizing it as well. Then she went to her parents’ house where she heard the worst news. After the government confiscated her in-laws’ house, they denied them the Iraqi citizenship and forced them to leave the country in 48 hours. They were considered “foreigners” who should not be in Iraq.
Aunt Sahira and her daughters did not have to leave the country because her ancestors were all born in Iraq since the Ottoman period. All her documents said she was Iraqi. Her husband’s grandfather was born in Iran since his father was a merchant and he was there with his wife for business when they had their first son who was offered the citizenship of the country he was born in.
Since that time, she and her children were deprived from all of their rights. The daughters were treated in Iraq by the government as Iranians who cannot get a job or go to school unless the government approves. Aunt Sahira tried to make the government issue her daughters the citizenship depending on her citizenship since she was Iraqi but she failed. Then she did her best to convince them to let her daughters go to school at least. Finally, they did but they were also considered foreigners who did have neither a national ID nor a citizenship one.
When the daughters had to go to undergraduate school in 1995, no university in Iraq accepted them despite the high grades they got in high school. Even private universities refused to let them register because it was a government order. Finally, she took the risk. She kept asking for an interview with one of the high officials in Saddam’s Presidential Council. After two months of interviews, her daughters were granted the right to register in a private university but not a state-owned one.
It was very hard for my cousins, who never saw their father since 1982, to cope with the society and school where they saw their friends being embraced by their parents. However, they remained hopeful. They thought they would see him again one day. One of them fell in love with a young man in her school. They loved each other till they were about to be engaged. I remember her telling me about him and how he loved her. Their marriage was never meant to happen. The man’s father was a colonel in the Iraqi army. If he marries a Shiite “foreign” women, it means he would lose his job and lose any possible job in the future. The man’s family begged him not to marry her in order not to destroy the family. Eventually, they did not let them get married. His mother forced him to marry one of their relatives.
When my cousins graduated from university, they were jobless. No government institution accepted their applications. They were not allowed to work in any government institution. There were a few private companies which were able to employ them but they refused so that they don’t be in trouble with government. Eventually, they stayed at home jobless and single. They all shared the salary my aunt got from her job as an agricultural engineer in the ministry of Agriculture, a position she got before the government took her husband.
Unable to depend on their mother’s $2 monthly salary, they decided to have their own small business, a sewing workshop where they made fancy curtains and clothes for people. Both of them were talented. Neighbors, relatives and friends depended on them. Instead of buying an expensive shirt, they would buy the cloth and give it to my cousins to make it a fancy inexpensive shirt.
Before they graduated, they lived in my grandparents’ house which they shared with my other uncle and his six family members. My aunt and her daughters got a room in the house and shared one of the bathrooms with my uncle’s family. They tried to rent a house but everything was expensive compared to my aunt’s little salary. Everyone advised her to sell the rest of her jewels but she refused because she wanted to give them to her daughters when they get married.
In 1998, my other aunt was able to move to a bigger house. She gave her smaller house to Aunt Sahira so that she settles there instead of living in one room in my grandparents’.
When the war started in 2003, my aunt’s hope revived. She suffered from Saddam’s tyranny and here was the best time for her to get her rights back. Few days before the invasion, she asked if she could come and stay with us. She was worried because she was by herself with her daughters. We went through the war altogether. We ate, ran, hid, cried, worried and survived the atrocities of the war together.
Few days after Saddam’s fall, rumors spread in Baghdad. Radio stations reported that political prisoners were found filthy and hungry in underground prisons. Since that time, Aunt Sahira and her daughters started hoping that the father is still alive even after twenty-one years passed. I remember one day that one of my cousins woke up in the dark crying. She dreamed of her father. As she was crying, she told us she saw him in her dreams standing in one of the prisons calling her to come over to free him.
Since then, Aunt Sahira’s husband search campaign started. Her first step was going to the “Association of the Free Prisoners” which was based in Kadhimiya where they found the records of the Shiite prisoners who were taken to Abu Ghraib or the other prisons. The records the association found were bulky. However, my aunt did not lose faith. She went there every single day hoping she could find his name among the survivors. Days and weeks passed but there was no luck. She did not give up. Three weeks passed. The association told her that his name was neither among the dead nor the survivors. It seemed there were other records they did not find. Eventually, she gave up but kept the memory of her husband in her heart.
It was hard to for them to give up hope. One of my cousins fell into despair. She woke up every night crying and calling for her father. She said things like she could hear him calling her. Her mother and sister hugged her and cried with her. We were all heartbroken.
Days passed. Aunt Sahira decided to go on in her life. She never gave up her rights. Finally, she was able to rent a new house and get her daughters employed in the agriculture ministry. But the happiest moments for them was when her daughters were finally granted the Iraqi citizenship and nationality IDs. The new Iraqi constitution considers anyone’s father or mother is Iraqi is also considered Iraqi. They visited us the day they received the IDs. When I congratulated them, tears of happiness fell like rain. After 23 years, they got their rights back. They are no longer "foreigners" or "Iraninians". They are Iraqis now.
The house my aunt rented in 2003 was in Amiriya. There was no sectarian violence at the time. Now, it’s considered one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Baghdad where insurgents move freely in a lawless area where US and Iraqi forces find it difficult to pass through sometimes.
After the bombing of the Askari Shrine in Sammarra and the aftermath retaliation of the Mahdi Army militias, Shiites in Amiriya were threatened by the Sunni insurgents. Families were forced to leave their houses. Aunt Sahira stayed there until all her Shiite neighbors were threatened. She was afraid that she was on the list too. So she decided to leave the house which she dreamed of having for the rest of her life.
In August, 2006, she started looking for houses in Karrada, a neighborhood where the majority in it are Shiite. Finally, she found a two-bedroom apartment there. It was twice the price she paid for the house in Amiriya. Few months later, it became so dangerous for her brother, whom she shared her parents’ house with, to stay in his Dora neighborhood as Shiites were threatened there as well.
Without any hesitation, she told them they can live with her. A month later, my third aunt, a journalist and a secular women, joined their small “displaced refugee camp” in Karrada.
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