Thrown to the Assassins

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/03/thrown_to_the_assassins.html

Thrown to the Assassins

News: They cheered the U.S. invasion; they offered to help, signed on as translators, risked everything they had to work for the United States. But when they had to run for their lives, America slammed the door.

By David Case

March/April 2007 Issue


On the day the American tanks rolled into Baghdad, Abather Abdul Hussein and his wife, Balqes Abdel Mohammed, threw flowers. Literally. After a lifetime of turmoil and tyranny, the couple fervently believed the invasion would bring peace. Abather joined U.S. "democratization" efforts, such as a project to create a governing council for his neighborhood, and he occasionally ended up in the good-news Iraq stories that still seemed plausible in those days; one U.S. paper ran a five-column photo of him perched on a classroom chair surrounded by American soldiers, with a story about the "new Iraq."

These days, Abather and his young family are among the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have fled in fear for their lives. After months spent dodging insurgents who had targeted them for supporting the Americans, he and Balqes are relieved to have escaped—and bitter, like thousands of fellow refugees, that the superpower for which they risked their lives has abandoned them.

A short man who bundles his shattered body in layers against the desert's winter chill, the 34-year-old Abather is polite and relaxed, with an easy smile. An engaging conversationalist even in broken English, he loves to talk about Baghdad, his infant daughter, and his wife, an outspoken woman several years his senior, whom he calls a genius. "When we met she was a professor at Baghdad University," he boasts. "I was her student. When she walked into a room, hundreds of people would stand to pay her respect." Considering that his life savings will run out in two months, that he can't work legally in Jordan, and that he could be deported at any moment, Abather is remarkably stoic, though the anxiety leaks out in tics. He chain-smokes cheap Craven A cigarettes, crushing the charred filters in an overflowing ashtray; when Balqes complains, he sheepishly offers that "smoking is my only work." It's not quite true—his one other job during the past 18 months has been recounting his nightmare, over and over again, to border guards, embassy workers, and aid agencies. In December, he reluctantly told it to me, pulling documents from a worn leather folder to corroborate the details.

The story began after the ouster of Saddam, when Abather and Balqes, like many Iraqis, launched a de-Baathification program of their own. Their target was the dean who had been Balqes' boss at Baghdad University (and who, as Abather tells it, had forced her out when she resisted joining the Baath Party). Balqes wanted her job back; one day Abather confronted the dean, and tempers flared. American soldiers broke up the brawl, bound Abather's wrists with a zip tie, and interrogated him. He explained Balqes' gripe and what the loss of her job had meant for their family, including their 3-year-old son and Balqes' 14-year-old son from a previous marriage (her first husband had been killed in the Iran-Iraq War). Though he held a master's degree in engineering, Abather hadn't been able to get a job in the doldrums of sanctions-era Iraq, so he was scraping together a living repairing watches, his wife and children crammed into his father's small home.

"The soldiers were very understanding," Abather recalls. "I was impressed." They offered the family an apartment in a place called Iraqi Village, a compound near the Baghdad airport where Saddam had housed orphans he was grooming to become fedayeen loyalists. In return, the couple translated for the Americans, and eventually the Washington National Guard's 1st Battalion 303rd Armored Regiment hired Balqes as an interpreter, at $15 per day. Abather ended up leading a U.S. Army-contracted security squad with a monthly salary of $130. Learning that he was an engineer, soldiers later gave him lucrative reconstruction assignments. He started an engineering firm and worked with contractors such as ABB and Kellogg, Brown and Root; in one heady year, Abather's contracts would mushroom from a few thousand dollars to an $862,000 electrification project (later canceled because he couldn't procure the needed equipment).

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