The Flying Carpet of Small Miracles by Hala Jaber

Author:Hala Jaber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

I NEVER TOLD MY PARENTS what I was doing in Iraq. They were only too aware that I was reporting the news along with hundreds of other journalists. But they were oblivious to the unconventional methods I used to gain insights into the insurgency. For instance, I would never have dreamed of mentioning to Mama or Baba that I had driven to a remote farmhouse at dawn without any security to interview a highly educated, multilingual geek who had filmed an Italian hostage being executed with a shot to the head beside a shallow grave.

Although my mother would have preferred me to be changing her friends’ lives as a cosmetic surgeon, a corporate lawyer, or at least a tax accountant, she took a certain pride in the recognition I was beginning to receive. My father just worried and could not stop himself from telephoning the foreign desk of The Sunday Times for news of me.

“Good morning, my dear,” he would say to Sean in his overfamiliar English. “I haven’t heard from Hala. Is she well?”

One day when he was recovering from a cataract operation, he asked my mother to bring a copy of The Sunday Times with her to the hospital. He had thought I was in Baghdad, so he was alarmed to see my picture byline staring back at him from the page beside the dateline of Najaf, the holy city, where American forces had surrounded the rebellious troops of the Shi’ite Mahdi Army. Imagine his horror if he had known that I had crossed from American to Mahdi army lines by walking slowly toward them in a bulletproof helmet and a black chador over my twenty-two-pound flak jacket, my arms in the air and my mouth dry from a combination of 50-degree-Celsius heat and pure terror.

Another thing I kept from the family was my sense that the harder the assignments became, the easier I was finding it to live with myself. It was not just that the danger saved me from introspection; in highlighting the horrors of the war, I was also paying homage to the little victim who had been closest to my heart. It was as if covering the conflict gradually absolved me of the guilt I felt for letting Zahra die.

The trouble was that as I put myself in more and more frightening situations, my courage began to desert me. The illusion that I would be safe in Iraq as an Arab, a Muslim, and a woman was diminished by the deaths of others like me, including journalists, as the bombings and beheadings intensified.

In some nightmares, I would find myself frantically trying to escape from kidnappers who could run faster than me. In others, I would be kneeling with my hands bound, staring at the lens of a video camera in which I could see the reflection of a masked man coming up behind me with a long, curved knife. I had watched too many videos of hostages’ heads being jerked up by the hair so that their throats could be cut with the sawing motion that precedes decapitation.

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