Category | Arts & Living

What love joined together, hate put asunder

Published on November 4, 2008 by The Sentinel

This is an Iraqi love story, and it doesn’t have a happy ending.

    She was a Christian, Basma Habeeb Sifo, a 15-year-old student living in the now notorious neighborhood of Dora. He was a Shiite Muslim, Haitham Majid al-Saadi, an army recruit 10 years her senior.

    They met in 1995 at the home of his sister, her school friend, and fell in love across the religious divide, back in the days of Saddam Hussein, before the vicious sectarianism that has torn Iraq’s diverse communities apart.

    Still, it was rare for Christians to marry Muslims, and Sifo’s parents disapproved, according to her account. When she reached the age of 17 and asked permission to marry, they dispatched her to a nunnery. For the next two years she lived apart from the world, staying in touch with her lover only through furtive phone calls.

    In 1998, when Sifo reached the age of 19, she escaped with the help of a sympathetic aunt and went straight to Saadi’s home.

    “Marry me, or I will find my own life,” she told him. “I will marry you,” he said, and they wed the very next day.

    Life wasn’t easy. Her family ostracized her after she converted to Islam, out of love for her husband rather than obligation, she says. Saadi had left the army and earned barely enough to get by as a car mechanic.

    But they were happy. “I married him because I wanted to marry for love,” Sifo says, referring to the prevalence of arranged marriages in Iraq. “But after marriage he became more than a husband. He was my best friend.”

    Their daughter, Mariam, arrived a little more than a year later. Then came a son, Majid, a week after conquering U.S. soldiers arrived in Baghdad in 2003. Majid was born at home because the hospitals had been looted and were closed.

    Their lives began looking up. He got a job with the U.S. contracting firm KBR in the Green Zone for $600 a month. He bought clothes for Sifo and diapers for the baby.

    Around them, however, the insurgency was taking root. Sunni militants allied to al-Qaida in Iraq were taking over the streets of Dora and hunting down anyone who worked for Americans. Later, they would set their sights on Shiites and Christians.

    One day in 2005 came the inevitable threat, scrawled on a piece of paper and tossed over the wall. “Leave the Americans, or you and your family will be killed,” it said.

    The next morning they were gone, abandoning the job, their house and their furniture, joining an exodus of Iraqis that would displace an estimated 4 million people from their homes over the next two years.

    Though they found a room with relatives in a safer neighborhood, Saadi couldn’t find work and ends didn’t meet. Sifo became pregnant again, this time with twins.

    In early 2007 came the surge of U.S. troops. By fall, violence levels in Baghdad had fallen by as much as two-thirds, and even hot spots such as Dora were noticeably calmer. Sifo and Saadi began hankering to return home, encouraged by former neighbors who told them it was now safe even for Shiites to return to the Sunni-controlled area.

    So one day in late October, Saadi decided to go back, just for a quick visit “to have a look,” Sifo recalled. “He only wanted to check to see if it would be safe.”

    It wasn’t.

    Saadi’s body was found the following morning in a field near their former home. He had been shot four times. His arms and legs were broken, and his face had been disfigured by acid. His death certificate gives the cause of death as “multiple bullet and stab wounds.”

    At the age of 27, Sifo had joined the ranks of the estimated 1 million widows in Iraq. She can barely recall the weeks that followed his death. She lost the twins she was carrying. “My world went dark,” she said.

    And she has survived. She has found a job as a cleaner in the Green Zone, for $450 a month, but it hardly covers the bills. She lives with her children, her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law in a rented flat in the relatively safe neighborhood of Karradeh, the sole breadwinner in a household of women and children in a male-dominated society.

    Though conditions in most parts of Baghdad have improved, Sifo says it’s still not safe for Shiites in Dora, where anonymous leaflets distributed in recent weeks have warned against Shiites returning to their homes.

    Sifo says she is constantly afraid, convinced that militias are tracking her moves in and out of the Green Zone. As a woman living without male protection, she feels uniquely vulnerable. She cries frequently as she recounts her ordeal.

    The children have paid a price too. Mariam, now 8, has adapted and is doing well at school, but Majid, her 5-year-old, has become temperamental and unruly since his father’s death. He has lost weight and throws tantrums.

    “I am doing everything only for them,” says Sifo, who sees the face of her dead husband every time she looks at her little boy. “Sometimes I think I can’t go on, but I know I have to for the children.”

    Sifo’s own relatives, who have since fled to northern Iraq, still reject her. She says that their anti-Muslim sentiments have been sharpened by the sectarianism of recent years and that they now will reconcile only if she renounces Islam and abandons her children, who were born Muslims.

    That is something she vows she will never do.