vegetables for a month. She said yesterday the children were crying, ‘We don’t want soup anymore,’ and her neighbor heard their cry and gave them a plate of food. This is one case out of thousands of widows.”
Two weeks earlier she delivered school uniforms to orphans in Abu Ghraib. “A little boy came to me shivering, without a coat and shoes,” she said. “I can’t explain now how I managed to stop myself from crying, and the look in his eyes and his happiness while I was putting the new clothes on him, and he was looking at the new bag and new books.”
I told Um Omar that I could see the children were still afraid. “How do you want them not to be afraid after they saw the terrorist militias raiding their areas, killing their fathers, killing their brothers, and destroying their houses? I know a displaced woman who told me that she saw two of her neighbors being dragged away just because they were Sunnis. She said they dragged the father and his son and killed them. How do you expect the young children to forget them easily? Obviously these kind of things have more impact on the spirit of children than they do on older people, and I don’t think that it will just go away and the wounds will heal quickly.”
Um Omar complained that Amriya’s population had once been prosperous and very educated: a neighborhood for lawyers, doctors, and teachers. She estimated that 40 percent of those educated people had been displaced. The families who replaced them in Amriya were less educated and from poorer neighborhoods.
Since 2006 Um Omar had registered 5,520 displaced families in Amriya, and they hadn’t yet returned to their homes. “They are not willing to return because their areas became 100 percent Shiite areas, and their houses were either destroyed or burned, and their sons were killed. They can’t return anymore though they want to return home.” They would never be able to return, though Shiite families had returned to Amriya, she said.
Um Omar admitted that there had been some security improvements, but she did not attribute it to American efforts. “It happened by the Awakening’s efforts. The tribal men’s efforts were the reason for improving the security. In the past, our areas were always raided by the militias and interior commandos, arresting many of our guys and taking them to unknown destinations. This is not security, right? We couldn’t stop the militias from doing this. I think security was improved when the Awakening guys joined the security forces.”
Forty percent of Amriya’s homes were abandoned, their owners expelled. More than five thousand Sunni families from elsewhere in Iraq had moved in, mostly to Shiite homes. Of those who had fled to Syria, about one- fifth returned in late 2007 when their money ran out. The Ministry of Migration, officially responsible for displaced Iraqis, did nothing for them. The Ministry of Health, dominated by sectarian Shiites, neglected Amriya or sent expired medicines to its clinics. Like elsewhere in Iraq, the government-run ration system, upon which nearly all Iraqis relied for their survival, did not reach the Sunnis of Amriya often, and when it did most items were lacking. Children were suffering from calcium shortages as a result.
Seventeen-year-old Ahmad Maath was a student who helped support his family by leaving Amriya and collecting people’s rations and fuel for them. Amriya’s citizens were afraid of the INP who guarded the fuel station. “They are with the militias,” he said. “They say, ‘Fuck you, Sunnis, you are pimps’—you know, such silly things. But what can we do? We tolerate that because we want to feed our families.” He and his friends would bring the tanks at night and wait until the morning to collect the government-supplied kerosene. One day Ahmad saw the Mahdi Army surround the station and take ten thousand liters of kerosene and one hundred and fifty cooking gas cylinders without paying. They said they needed it to cook for the Muharram ceremonies.
I had heard of corpses being dropped at garbage dumps, where dogs would feed on them. Twelve-year-old Abudi, my friend Hussein’s son, had seen many corpses in one of the main squares. “I saw people executed by Al Qaeda,” Abudi told me. “I saw a woman here being executed. I felt scared from them. I feel afraid from both, the Americans and Al Qaeda. They attacked my father, a car rushed and shot my father. I felt sad. My father got injured and he was bleeding, but he is okay now. The Americans killed a child in Amriya because he was playing with a toy gun.”
I visited Abudi’s elementary school in Amriya. It was overcrowded because of the many displaced children. Its population had grown from 400 to about 769 students. Each class contained fifty-five students, with three to four students to a desk. One boy lost his father in Amriya when a bomb landed on their house. There were children displaced from Jihad, Shuhada, Furat, Shula, Turath, Amil, Hurriya. The teacher asked them if they wanted to go back home. “We can’t,” a child said. “We are threatened by gangs.” Sabrin was a small girl whose father was murdered in a drive-by shooting in the Muhamin neighborhood of Amriya. Abdurahman was a sixth-grade boy from New Baghdad. The Mahdi Army had threatened his family and kidnapped and killed his brother. His family’s house in New Baghdad was occupied; now they were renting a home in Amriya. To help support his family Abdurahman worked in restaurants and sold black-market gasoline on the streets. When Al Qaeda still controlled Amriya, one of his brothers was arrested by the Americans because a
“When the children first came here they found themselves in a different environment than the one they used to live in,” the school principal told me. “The way they behave and the way they are is all different. Gradually, they started to adapt to here. Of course, they were very afraid as a result of what they had seen in their areas. Some of them wake up at night. When they hear gunfire they just keep screaming. When a Hummer passes by they scream, even when they are inside the class. They are hurt from the inside. But you know they are children, so they occupy their time with playing and other stuff.”
The school guard, who had not been paid in months, told me neither the Americans nor the Iraqi army brought security to Amriya. “Let us be realistic,” he said, “our brothers from the Thuwar secured us. They are better than the army and the Americans. The Americans don’t do anything when you go complain about something. They just put it down on a paper, while the Awakening, when you go complain to them, they do something. They go to those who did wrong and punish them. They are our sons, from the same area and we know them well, while the Americans and the army are not.”
Um Omar took me to visit the family of Saad Juma, who had been displaced from the Amil district by Shiite militias more than a year earlier. I found them in the burned-out house of a Shiite family that had fled with only their clothes. When Saad and his family moved in, the house was torched and dirty, full of tires and other flammable items that had been used to burn it. The Shiite militias had expelled all the Sunni families from the area using loudspeakers on police cars to warn them. They cursed Sunnis and said they would kill anyone they saw on the street. “I remember one of our neighbors who lived nearby was killed there,” Saad said. “They killed him immediately. Another one was killed with his two little children in his garden. The militias called him by his name and shot him with two, three shots in the head, and they left the house after that.”
Saad insisted that before the war, relations between Sunnis and Shiites in his area had been good. “We were like one family. Those militias came from outside, not from our area. Maybe from Shula or from other areas. They might come from the other side of the city.” Um Omar added that “the militias knew who the families were, and they knew the area well. They must be helped by the others in this area.” Saad agreed, adding that the local Sadrist office was near their area.
Saad owned his previous house and had shared it with ten other relatives. He was a construction worker before he was displaced, but now he relied on the Ethar Association for food and aid. “The government is busy with itself,” he said. “It doesn’t care about people. It only cares about itself.” I asked him if he wanted to go back home. “Is there anyone who doesn’t wish to return to his home?” he asked me. But he didn’t think it was safe enough.
Abasya Aziz was from the Sunni Mashhadani tribe. She and her family were expelled from the house in Hurriya they had lived in for thirty-five years. For two days Shiite militiamen shot at their house and called on them to leave. The men left to find a new house, but the women stayed another four days until one was found. “We were very scared alone,” she said. “I was scared to take all the furniture at once. So every day I take some of the furniture, and I also had to leave some furniture there.” Their new house had no electricity, so she had to show me around with a flashlight. The landlord originally wanted rent to be 350,000 dinars but because they were poor he reduced it to less than 250,000. “I wish to return [to Hurriya] and live a stable life,” Abasya Aziz said. “That’s what we are looking for. Now we can’t go back there because it is not safe. Also, I am afraid for my other sons. I can’t go back. It has been one year, and it’s still not safe there.”
On the outskirts of Amriya, on a muddy field, I found a Sunni family in a makeshift brick home. I spoke to twenty-two-year-old Haidar, who lived there with eleven other family members. He told me that they were expelled from Amil by the Mahdi Army in 2006. His eighty-three-year-old grandfather had owned their house in Amil. Now Mahdi Army men were living in it. Haidar was on crutches, his legs amputated after a car bomb exploded too close
