their hands through their bleached blond hair and waited for business to improve.
NEAR THE BACK of the courtyard, Sayyid Nasiji watched the whores’ dance. He’d never understood the German attitude toward these women. A police station stood only a couple of blocks away. Why did the German cops tolerate this dismal scene? How had these women fallen so low? Where were their families?
Nasiji didn’t delude himself. Muslim nations had prostitutes, too. But at least Muslims were ashamed of the flesh trade and tried to stop it. The Germans seemed almost proud that women were selling themselves in public. They jammed the Reeperbahn. And the crowd wasn’t just sailors or ugly old men with no choice. Students and office workers came here to dance at the clubs speckled among the strip parlors.
Yet Nasiji liked Germany. He’d attended college at the Technical University of Munich, five hundred miles south of here. He’d initially planned to specialize in nuclear physics. But he was Iraqi, and his professors warned him that most nuclear power plants probably wouldn’t hire him. So he stuck to chemical engineering. Still, he spent most of his free time in the university’s nuclear labs.
Nasiji had grown up in Ghazaliya, in western Baghdad. His father, Khalid, was a brigadier general in Saddam’s Republican Guard. Khalid had risen far enough in the ranks to build a two-story concrete house and buy a used BMW 735i, his pride. But he had cannily avoided trying to reach the top of the Guard, dodging the bloody purges that swept away his bosses every few years.
Nasiji was the second-oldest of five kids, the favorite of his parents. His intelligence was obvious from his first days in school. After he graduated first in his high school class, Khalid encouraged him to study in Europe, getting him a visa to Germany and permission to leave Iraq.
Nasiji’s family was moderately religious, and Nasiji had grown up praying each week at the big Mother of All Battles Mosque in Ghazaliya. In Munich, he kept his faith, praying five times daily, never eating pork or drinking.
But Nasiji was hardly a fanatic. By the spring of 2001, his last year in Munich, his friends had grown outspoken about their hate for Europe and the United States. A couple even talked about quitting school and joining the jihadis training in Afghanistan. Nasiji wasn’t interested. He preferred to spend his time studying. And though he never argued with his friends, he thought that complaining about the West was a waste of breath. He was a visitor to Germany, after all. He would follow its customs and laws, and hope for the same respect from the Germans if they visited Iraq.
After graduation, Nasiji came back to Baghdad. He was home on September 11 when Khalid called with word of the attack. Nasiji and his brothers ran to the television and watched as the Trade Center towers burned. Amir, the oldest and most anti-American of Nasiji’s brothers, shouted gleefully when the first skyscraper went down.
“This makes you happy?” Nasiji asked Amir.
“Should I weep? Poor America. Did you forget what they did to us in 1991, Sayyid? All those years in Germany made you soft? They deserve what they get, the Americans. No jobs, empty stores — they’re to blame. These stupid sanctions. Beggars on the streets. There were never beggars before.”
Nasiji couldn’t disagree. After the Gulf War in 1991, the United States and United Nations had imposed sanctions that had crippled Iraq’s economy. Nasiji hadn’t found a job since coming home, though the Technical University was among the top schools in Europe. Even so, he knew he couldn’t let his brother’s words go unchallenged. “So our economy stinks. Killing those people, ordinary men going to work, what good does that do for anyone?”
“Remember five, six years ago, before you stopped brawling? Back in school, when every afternoon we looked around for Shia to beat? You know what you said to me then?”
“That was a long time ago, Amir.” Nasiji preferred to forget his days as a fighter.
“You loved it. And then one day you just stopped. You never did tell us why.”
“Forget it. What did I say?”
“That sometimes it’s necessary to tell the world you exist. And the best way is with a closed fist.”
“I was sixteen, Amir.”
“Even so. When the Americans bombed us ten years ago, they killed plenty of ordinary people. I don’t remember seeing them shed any tears. Now they understand how we feel. We’ve told them we exist.”
“I had American professors in Munich. They were always fair.”
“You’re so naive. Look at Egypt. They use Arabs against Arabs. Muslims against Muslims. And the way they help Israel. One Yid is worth a million of us. You watch. They’ll find some way to turn this against us. They’ll come and steal our oil.”
AMIR’S WORDS SEEMED eerily prophetic to Nasiji in the months that followed, as the United States geared up to attack Iraq. The protests, the United Nations votes, nothing made any difference. The American tanks came to Kuwait and then over the border.
For the Nasiji family, the invasion was a disaster. Khalid lost his job as a general when the Americans disbanded the Iraqi army. As a high-ranking Baathist, he was barred from working for the new government. Some of Khalid’s fellow Republican Guard officers began organizing resistance to the occupation. Khalid refused. “Let’s see what happens,” he told his family. “Maybe it’s for the best.” Then the violence started. In November 2003, a cousin of Nasiji’s was killed at an American checkpoint. Another died in a suicide bombing.
The next month, Amir joined a cell of Sunni insurgents. Sayyid tried to stop him, but Amir insisted. “They’ll kill us all if we let them,” he said. He lasted four months. In April 2004, an American sniper shot him at 3 a.m. as he planted a bomb on the highway that connected Baghdad and Fallujah.
Fouad, the youngest of the brothers, died next. After Amir’s death, Fouad joined a local militia to fight the Shia who were taking over Ghazaliya block by block. Three months later, Fouad disappeared. A week later, kids found his body in a soccer field, his fingers hacked off, his face covered with cigarette burns.
In Muslim tradition, the family held Fouad’s funeral as quickly as possible, just one day after his body was found, at a mosque in Khudra, a Sunni neighborhood just south of Ghazaliya. Around the coffin, the women of the family screeched and moaned, an unearthly, terrifying lament of loss that seemed to demand a response from the blue sky overhead. Khalid wore his Republican Guard uniform to the funeral, a pointless gesture of defiance against the Shia who had killed his son. Once he had filled out the green uniform proudly. Now it hung loose on his shoulders and one of the sideboards had come askew. He mumbled the same words to all the men who greeted him at the funeral. “Too soon for this. Too soon.” He had turned old, Nasiji saw.
The ceremony took less than an hour, and afterward the family piled into Khalid’s BMW to head back to Ghazaliya. As they were about to leave, Nasiji hopped out, deciding to ride home with his cousin Alaa instead. The choice saved his life.
On an overpass over the main western highway out of Baghdad, two Toyota 4Runners forced Khalid’s BMW to a stop. Four men jumped from the Toyotas, AK-47s poised, shooting even before their feet hit the pavement. They blasted out the BMW’s windows and kept firing. Thirty seconds later, they were gone.
Nasiji reached the overpass a few minutes later. The BMW’s metal skin was pockmarked with too many holes to count. Blood and bone and gristle festooned the interior. The shooters had fired so many rounds at such close range that Khalid’s skull was almost gone and the green of his uniform had turned black with blood.
On the sedan’s hood the killers had left a mocking present, a wall clock whose background was a picture of Saddam. In the old days, Saddam had presented favored members of the Baathist Party with trinkets like the clock as signs of his affection. A note lay beside the clock, crudely scrawled Arabic:
AS HIS BROTHER AMIR had reminded him on September 11, Nasiji knew how to fight. He was only five-nine, but he had a middleweight’s build — lean, muscular, and quick. Growing up, he and his brothers had gained a reputation as bullies. They knew that their father could save them from trouble with a word to the local cops.
During brawls, Nasiji used his speed to overcome bigger kids, ducking inside their looping punches and hitting them until they ran or went down. He was the fiercest of his brothers, always ready for a fight. Yet he’d grown almost afraid of the excitement he felt when he knew a brawl was coming, the way his mouth grew dry and his hands seemed to swell.
One afternoon, a Shia teenager from Shula, a slum north of Ghazaliya, bumped into Nasiji’s sister in a local market. The contact was accidental, but Nasiji didn’t care. As the Shia — Nasiji never did find out his name —
