only memory, or hope, or regret
Could one day block our country from its path.
If only we feared madness.
If only our lives could be disturbed by travel
Or shock,
Or the sadness of an impossible love.
If only we could die like other people.
—Nazik Al-Malaika, “New Year”
The removal of belonging for Iraqis happened suddenly after the US invasion in 2003. This unfolded in different ways. Letters were delivered with religious symbols crossed out, hinting that people of a certain religion would be killed if they stayed in the neighborhood; family members were murdered or kidnapped and held for ransom; armed thugs came to places of work; churches and mosques, sacred symbols of religious communities, were bombed. For some Iraqis, the message was less violent but still effective. Messengers came to tell wives and daughters that they must dress differently; employment was contingent on membership in a certain tribe or political party. Whatever the means used to get the message of nonbelonging across, the chaotic and violent aftermath of the 2003 invasion was a crisis point for a huge swath of the Iraqi population.
In the years following the invasion, violence toward civilians escalated to the point that no group was left untargeted. Millions of Iraqis were faced with decision points—to stay or flee, where to go, how to get there, for how long, how do we survive, and what comes after that? The words “crisis” and “decision” are etymologically connected. “Crisis” originates from the classical Greek verb κuív-ειv—“to decide”—and in English, it has come to mean, among other things, “a turning point.”1 The violent denial of belonging precipitated a crisis—a search for its recovery.
What follows is a series of individual and family migration histories that represent common experiences of the violent removal of belonging, followed by exile and survival in surrounding countries, and finally the momentous decision points about asylum seeking and resettlement in countries outside the Middle East.2 While each of these individuals’ stories is unique, they illustrate common features of the Iraqi refugee experience.3 These portraits are by no means an exhaustive portrayal of the entire range of Iraqi experience but rather heuristic devices to explore individual lives as windows onto the loss and search for belonging. Their experience of resettlement in the Inland Empire of California, which is the focus of this book, was not an endpoint but rather a station along a continuum of belonging.
Belonging and Loss
Yousef, Suha, and Ibrahim recalled living in neighborhoods with varying degrees of ethnoreligious diversity. None spoke of growing up in completely homogeneous Muslim or Christian, Sunni or Shi’a, neighborhoods. There may have been communal tensions brewing under the surface, but the different groups had achieved a more or less peaceful coexistence. Overwhelmingly, Muslims and Christians spoke of each other as “good people.” This relatively peaceful coexistence, however, changed after 2003.
The US invasion, achieving its goal of defeating and disbanding the Iraqi army and laying waste to the country’s infrastructure, created a political vacuum in what had been a Sunni-minority-ruled regime under Saddam Hussein. Along with civilian casualties, there was an increase in organized crime and an emerging Sunni insurgency. Clear targets were those who were associated in some way with the coalition forces and the Coalition Provisional Authority of the occupation. After the first elections, which brought a Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki into power, professionals such as doctors were seen as indirectly supporting the government and were targeted by insurgents.
After graduating from medical school, Ibrahim survived the economic sanctions (1990–2003) by scavenging the smoldering junkyards for car seats and other spare parts, with which he fashioned dental chairs and clinic equipment. The economic sanctions imposed on Iraq following the Gulf War had resulted in a shortage of medical equipment, and he did brisk business.4 He would have preferred to practice medicine at one of the government hospitals, but that would have left him vulnerable to conscription into the military. Ibrahim had seen this happen to other doctors who had died in one of Iraq’s wars since 1981. After the 2003 invasion, he felt it was safe to take a position at Al Kadhmiya Hospital for Children, and he also opened a private clinic with a dentist partner. One day, after buying some drugs at the pharmacy, he returned to the clinic to find that a group of thugs had just gunned down his friend. Ibrahim gave his brother the keys to the clinic and never returned. Police later claimed to have arrested the assassins and told Ibrahim that he had been on the same hit list as his dentist partner. Ibrahim believed that while the assassins were simply doing it for money, the people behind them had political motives, to destabilize the country and take power.
Even indirect associations with the coalition could be deadly. Yousef, an engineer who worked in wastewater treatment in the oil fields, owned a shop in Baghdad that sold women’s accessories, cosmetics, makeup, and jewelry. It was a mixed neighborhood of Sunnis, Shi’a, Kurds, and Christians. After the invasion, Yousef’s shop began to have a large clientele of US soldiers who bought items for family members back home:
So the American army used to come to the shop to see why the shop is crowded. And also they used to buy from me some gifts, or they would ask me, “How much is this? What is this? What is that?” So, as a shop in general, drew their attention. So the terrorists that were in Al-A’amiriya [a neighborhood of Baghdad], they imagined that I—how to say it—that I was helping the Americans. Meaning, they considered me that I’m letting the Americans inside, I’m helping them; therefore, and according to this, I received a threat to kill, so I left.
After the death threats, Yousef and his wife, Nuha, along with their three sons, moved in with his brother for several months while deciding what to do next.
Interethnic and religious divides substantively widened with the increase of attacks on symbols of collective identity, such as the bombings at the Al Kadhmiya mosque. Both mosque and hospital are located in an elite Shi’a section of Baghdad, near the sacred Shrine of Imam Musa al-Kadhmiya, the seventh of the twelve imams in Shi’a sacred history. Ibrahim was on duty that horrible day in 2004 when the hospital was overwhelmed with casualties from deadly bomb attacks on people gathered for the sacred event of Ashura at the Al Kadhmiya mosque: fifty-eight people died, according to official counts, but Ibrahim believed that the number was much higher, in the hundreds. He remembered the scene: “A big hell, body parts everywhere in the street, by the mosque.” The hospital was overwhelmed, there were no beds, and surgery was being done on the floors.5
Attacks on religious symbols were accompanied by the escalation of communal tensions at the neighborhood level. As the conflict in Iraq came to be drawn along communal boundaries, there was a deliberate strategy by warring parties to physically displace each other at the neighborhood level—Sunnis from Shi’a-majority areas, Shi’a from Sunni-majority areas, or religious and ethnic minorities from Sunni or Shi’a areas.6 Outside of Baghdad in Northern Iraq, the Turkoman (a Turkish-speaking minority), already oppressed by Saddam’s efforts to replace ethnic minorities with Arab populations, were squeezed between Kurds and Arabs for control of Kirkuk. The violence that displaced people was not random but intentional, argues Jan Gruiters of Amnesty International: “There lies more behind people being forced to flee than simply a consequence of violence: the violence is often deliberately intended to purge cities, neighborhoods and villages of people who belong to another political faction, a different religion or ethnic group, or those who are voices of dissent.”7 Yousef believes not only that was he targeted because of his hospitality to US forces in his shop but also that he was in danger because he was a Shi’i in a majority-Sunni neighborhood.
The same was also the
