Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Editor’s Note: Last year Bob reported on the brutal murder of Mayada Salihi, an Iraqi mother of two who worked as a translator for the U.S. Army and with whom he became friends during his tour in Baghdad. Here is a reprint of that report, followed by Bob’s July 11 guest column in Altercation.

When American humanitarian Marla Ruzicka was killed in Baghdad last year I wrote about her, as did many others, and she was known. When an American or European journalist is killed, the system works and they are known as well. Similarly, when a Soldier or Marine is killed, they merit ink and public eulogy once their names are released. But in this war the news comes in every day, displaying a sameness which confuses. It is “59 Iraqis killed by bomb” today, and on another day, “fourteen bodies discovered in Baghdad.” See here or here for example. Sadly, unless they are high government officials, at most all that is known of these victims is their town and, sometimes, their profession. They are anonymous, and with their anonymity, easier to deal with. Few accounts let you know an average Iraqi.

I cannot change this. I have no magic wand to wave and change the rules of the game of journalism and the market so that the corporations which constitute the news industry forgo some of their (generally double-digit) profit in favor of tripling their coverage in bad places around the world. I cannot remove Adam Smith’s damned-near-visible hand from this process. But I can tell you about one Iraqi, just one, and leave it to you to extrapolate.

Mayada Salihi: Red hair, raised in Baghdad, divorced mother of two adorable kids, herself the daughter of a divorced Shia mother and Sunni father. A scrapper. A Baghdadi through and through. Not always factual, but usually a truthteller. Devout fan of cheesy 1980’s American music, particularly Air Supply. Mayada was my translator through much of last year. You knew her too, albeit indirectly. It was because of May, and through her, that we found the schools which you so generously supplied and supported last year. Those who sent donations usually received a letter and pictures from me of the deliveries. May is in some of those photos. She was my friend.

She was well traveled for an Iraqi, having visited Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan in her 20s, but after her children, and Iraq, there is nothing which May loved more than a country to which she had never been, America. Her father was a comfortable government functionary and in those days she lived a life of moderate privilege. She had seen much of the Arab world, but for whatever reason, call it cultural penetration or just internationalism, May grew up fascinated by and adoring America. She started teaching herself English through that most classic of methods, singing along with American albums. As I recall, she told me that it was the Foreigner 4 album at first, and only a little later did she discover the obscenely sugar-coated songs of Air Supply. Eventually, in college, she majored in English.

Life in a Middle Eastern nation being what it is, however, she had a lot of pressure to marry. Eventually she settled on the wrong guy. He cheated, a lot, and so in a quintessentially American move, so did she. That ended it. Cuckolding publicly reduced her husband and they divorced. She got the kids.

Then we invaded.

A month after the fall of Baghdad May was volunteering, working as a translator for a succession of US and Iraqi forces…too many it seems. Living in Baghdad she got one warning note, ignored it, and was gunned down and left for dead by masked men in the alley beside her house just two days later. That was in the Spring of 2004. But May would not die.

Whisked to a hospital where her identity as an American translator was revealed, she was declared dead back in her neighborhood for the safety of her family, while in reality she went into hiding. Ultimately she recovered in Jordan, but the recovery took months. She could have stayed in Jordan, but in the end, she found that her heart would not let her. The two nations she loved most were now fused in a death-love struggle, she could not leave them alone. Besides, working for us paid better than just about anything else a divorced woman could legally do in Baghdad, and that allowed her to support “H” (her son), “M” (her daughter) and her mother. So she came back.

Working for the same unit again, we kept her out of the city, doing good work elsewhere in Iraq. But the draw of motherhood, and her city, brought her back to Baghdad. It was at that time that we met, in April of last year.

Living now in another neighborhood, May thought she was safe. But as any New Yorker will tell you, even seven million people can make for a small town in some ways. By late summer they had found her again. A note at her home, I have a copy of it which she gave me, told her to stop working with the Americans or she would be killed. But May would not, and I now think perhaps could not, stop. A few nights later she slipped her mother and kids into the Green Zone, buying off another family who had themselves received an eviction notice from the Iraqi government.

In Iraq, as it is in many other countries, its all about who you know. May thought that she could work her personal connections…this person knows that person whose second cousin is a deputy minister of agriculture…to pull the right strings and keep the apartment, and her family, together. I had a hand in that, while I was there. It was a distraction from the work I was supposed to do, but in some ways you could say that it was also the work that needed to be done. I left in February. Apparently, not long after I left, she was evicted.

May couldn’t live outside the Green Zone anymore. To do so would be to invite risk to her kids and her mother. So the kids went to live with her Ex, and her mother went to her sister. May found a small place for herself, a single room apparently, inside the Green Zone.

Motherhood is a strong pull though. May would leave the Green Zone fairly often, alone in her car, to go see her children for a few precious hours.

At the end of the month of May, just after returning from my pre-wedding honeymoon, I found an e-mail in my inbox from one of my friends back in Baghdad. Nobody had wanted to tell me, at least initially, but now they felt they should. Two weeks earlier, while driving through the city to see her kids, May was intercepted and kidnapped by Ansar Al Sunna. Their standard tools are the AK-47, rape, and the power drill (with which they torture their captives, drilling holes through body parts until finishing them off with a drill-bit to the head). The day before the e-mail, the police found the husk of my friend’s body in downtown Baghdad. Ansar Al Sunna had taken full credit. Now I understand hate.

Mayada Salihi, 1970-2006. Please remember.

***

I was raised in a family which took great joy in children. Irish Catholics from New York City, generations of my mother’s side, the Kellehers, were cops in the metropolis. My great uncle, James Kelleher, was effectively my grandfather, as my real grandfathers had both died either before I was born or before I was really old enough to know them. Uncle Jim was a classic. When I was small, we would often visit for the holidays. Every year he would lift me up, and placing me on top of the refrigerator, pretend that he had lost me (leaving me atop the six-foot-tall appliance yelling, “Hey! Hey! I’m up here!”) while everyone else in the overcrowded holiday-dinner-making kitchen played along. Alternatively, he would pull a quarter from my nose, or a banana from my ear. Of such things are the happy memories of childhood made. I like to think that I am a little bit like my uncle. I hope that he would agree. He died while I was in Iraq, and because he was “only” my great-uncle, I could not return to his deathbed, or his funeral. It was with him in some part of my heart that I worked, with you, to try and bring happiness and supplies to those schools in Baghdad in late 2005 and early 2006.

A large part of that effort was also helped by my friend, and translator, Mayada Salahi. You may recall that I reported that she was beaten down (after her ammo ran out), abducted, and slaughtered last year. My failure of May will remain with me. Forever.

But I did not just fail May. I failed her son and her daughter as well. I failed to get them to a safe place. This too will remain with me.

I cannot reveal May’s son and daughter’s names. They are good kids. As Uncle Jim had done for me, I taught her son how to play “slaps,” and “rock / paper / scissors.” As Uncle Jim had played games with me, I played a video game with May’s son. I helped her daughter with her English homework and looked at her artwork. I set them up with pen pals, ate a few meals with them, and learned some Arabic from them. These are good kids. (I cannot say how old they were either, again for their safety, but will note that her son was only just above my waist, and her daughter came up to about my ribs.) If I could have gotten them out of Iraq, gotten them to my own hometown of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, or anywhere really, they would be laughing on green fields with friends today.

And May would be alive.

And her children would have a mother.

And I might not wake up, way, way too early some days.

Back in mid-February, the Bush administration announced that we, as a nation, would allow some 7,000 Iraqis in to our country this year. I did not know what the numbers had been when I announced this. An Altercation reader who deals with the issue gave me the facts. My response was effectively one-word long, expressing my anger, sense of betrayal, and frustration. His response, reprinted almost completely, is below.

Sometimes “motherf***er” is the only appropriate response. Or at least the only thing that comes close. It seems I was actually a little too optimistic about this year’s admissions. As of mid-May it [the number admitted in 2007] was under 70. It was 202 last year, 66 in 2004 and 298 in 2003. Out of the more than 2 million who’ve fled the country so far. I don’t know of anyone who even has a guess as to how many former US employees there are in that total.

The State Dept has the main responsibility for the resettlement program, and they have been doing a lot of finger pointing as to where the delays are coming from. First at UNHCR (the UN High Commissioner for Refugees) for not referring the refugees to them, and then at DHS for not getting out there to do the security screenings. And I don’t even want to think what will happen once they start doing the screenings — the current state of the law would deny entry to the into the country to people who paid ransom to kidnappers to try to free their family members. That would qualify as material support to a terrorist organization.

I definitely don’t want to let UNHCR off the hook in all this either. From what I heard from one former translator, the employees giving him his asylum interview were more interested in finding out if he had witnessed any atrocities by US troops (he hadn’t) then whether he was in danger in Iraq.

So that’s the state of things when it comes to Iraqi refugees at the moment. There are a couple of potential bills floating around congress to try to speed things up, but I don’t really see them having much impact in the short term. By the way, in case you were wondering, the top qualification for the highest refugee official in the state department was running Maryland’s lottery (and Bush’s campaign there).

And now we learn that we will not likely even meet that pathetically modest goal of 7,000 allowed in.

I serve my country, and have done so with body and soul on the line for 18 years. I love my country in such a pathetic, corny way that it verges on the humorous. But sometimes … I am ashamed of my country.

This is one of those times.