The Assassins' Gate by George Packer

Author:George Packer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

8

OCCUPIED IRAQIS

“WE MUST GO OUT OF IRAQ! We must travel! We must see America! Can you give us hope?”

A young woman named Aseel and one of her coworkers planted themselves in my path one day in a hallway on the campus of Baghdad University. Aseel was a pale, pretty twenty-eight-year-old computer programmer. Her cream-colored veil seemed incongruous with her vitality, and in fact it was just a prop: She wore it to keep from being killed by fundamentalists. “They speak in name of God,” she said. “Before, they spoke in name of Saddam.” There were many fears in Aseel’s life. She was afraid of kidnappers: A group of them had snatched her friend as she got off the bus; Aseel had barely managed to run away. She was afraid of her neighbors, who threatened her with harm if she ever took another picture of American soldiers. She was afraid of the woman who ran her office, a former Baathist who used to wear a uniform and sidearm to work, and whose three framed photographs of Saddam were still propped up on the floor, facing the wall. Aseel complained that Dr. Sami Mudhafar, the new university president, was too weak to get rid of the Baathists. They still had the run of the place.

“Do you feel danger here? I feel danger,” Aseel said as we spoke in her office. “I feel a life in prison—after liberation! I want to see the world, I want to learn more, I want to feel I’m getting something important for my life. When you visit countries, that’s a simple thing of having freedom. That’s the thing I lost for my life. The danger is still in the streets. In this room. Especially in this room.”

The Baathist office manager walked in and glared. She told Aseel that I would have to leave.

“We are in prison here,” Aseel whispered. “I have no freedom.”

I offered to drive her home. She lived with her parents, her brother, and a maternal uncle who had gone mad after imprisonment and torture. Their modest house, on an empty street in an underbuilt new neighborhood of eastern Baghdad, stood baking in the relentless yellow light of midday. The power was out, and because the phone didn’t work, Aseel had been unable to warn her mother, so the family served me a simple dish of rice and beans in the darkened room. On one wall Aseel’s mother had written a Qur’anic verse in chalk during the war, a prayer for safety that the family recited together. On another wall hung a photograph of her mother’s parents, from 1948—a man with a small mustache, a woman with bright lipstick.

“During royal times, the people were more modern than now,” Aseel’s father said. He was an architect in the Ministry of Information, nearing retirement. In 1965, he had studied in Manchester, England, but the family now belonged to Iraq’s beaten-down middle class, crushed by two decades of wars and sanctions. At one particularly desperate moment in 1993, her mother had sold most of her gold at a low price.

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