Table of Contents
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
New York
2009
To Zahra, Marla, Lara, and Hawra
Prologue
APRIL 4, 2003, BAGHDAD
It was not until the windows exploded that Ali and Rasmiyeh Kathem realized they had to get out. For hours, they had clutched their seven children to them as the firestorm approached. The brighter the flashes of hot, white light outside, the more coldly their sweat ran as they shielded the eyes of the little ones. The louder the booms that reverberated around their single-story concrete house, the more softly they whispered reassurance in the ears of their terrified girls. Perhaps the most petrified was three-year-old Zahra, for a child of that age is old enough to know when something is terribly wrong and too young to control her fear. At least Hawra, the baby, could be rocked back to sleep in her mothers arms if she was woken by a shaking of the ground.
Ali kept up a brave face for his sons, but inside he was tormented by alternating visions of hell. Stay holed up at home and his family could be blown to smithereens by a stray bomb intended for the barracks nearby. Race away in the taxi he drove for a living and they could be consumed by an inferno on the open road. When the glass blew in over some mattresses the older children had pushed together on the living room floor, their screams made up his mind.
He barked orders and bundled paperwork into a folder. Rasmiyeh parceled up clothes in a large piece of cloth and tipped her few gold trinkets into a handbag. Then, as quickly as they could, they assembled their priceless cargo in Alis vehicle on the road outside: Muntather, their eighteen-year-old son, took charge of his three younger brothers and one sister on the backseat, while Rasmiyeh squeezed her youngest daughters together on her lap in the front and began to pray.
As he slid behind the wheel and switched on the engine, Ali, too, was reciting the opening verse of the Koran. He understood that mayhem had descended on this district because it was full of military facilities and families. To get his children to safety, all he had to do was drive to his mothers house across town, as he had done hundreds of times before. It was difficult to concentrate on the road when so much was happening in the air, however. He craned his neck out the window to see what was making all the noise. Helicopters were swooping across the dawn sky like big black birds of prey. What if they were to start firing missiles on the highway? Ali pressed his foot down hard on the accelerator.
Ahead, two trucks were rolling up the road in convoy. Ali saw their high sides and thought they could protect his car from the force of any blast. He overtook the second truck and swerved in behind the first.
If it had occurred to him for one moment that these trucks might be the helicopters targets, he would never have been driving between them, looking at his five eldest children in the rearview mirror and glancing down at the youngest, Zahra and Hawra, in the arms of his wife in the front passenger seat. Nobody in that car suspected that the firestorm they had fled was sweeping back toward them at unstoppable speed. It struck in a split second with a white-hot bolt from the blue. By the time the thunderous roar of the erupting missile had faded away, Ali and Rasmiyeh Kathem were dead and all but two of their seven treasures were dying.
One
FINDING ZAHRA
If it had not been for a strange request from my office, I would never have followed the trail that led me through a teeming, terrified city at war to the hospital where I found Zahra.
We need an orphan, my boss said. Not just any orphan. A special one.
His instructions were as meticulous as they were startling. I should not settle for the first injured orphan I came across, he told me firmly. I should scan all the hospitals with pediatric wards for the special one.
A baby would be no good because it would not have an expressive enough face. The orphan we needed would be slightly older but still young enough to look defenseless. A girl would be better because she would seem more vulnerable than a boy. Ideally, she would be badly injured but still beautiful: she had to make a great picture.
So, to summarize, I was looking for a wounded girl, between one and five years old, whose parents had died and whose pretty face was more or less unscathed.
Okay, I said.
I repeated the details to my husband, Steve, who was also the photographer on my assignment, and alerted our driver to be ready to leave in five minutes. For a moment, I wondered whether anyone at the office in London understood what it meant to drive through Baghdad, with all its shooting and looting, on a mission to select and reject injured children with inconsolable families for a slot on the inside pages of our newspaper.
Yet I did not mind the cynicism of my brief. I knew it was for a good cause. The paper was planning a fund-raising campaign for the children worst affected by the war. My task was to find the face of that campaign and write the story that would launch it. The face and the story had to move readers, otherwise they would not give money. Since I had begged my boss to set up this appeal in the first place, I was in no position to complain. On the contrary, I had seen so many children hurt by the bombardment that I would have done anything to help.
I MADE A LIST of hospitals for the driver. Searching them for our ideal orphan would be tougher now than at the start of the fighting three weeks earlier. Barricades were going up to fortify all medical facilities against attack. Armed guards were being hired by the hundred to repel rampaging gangs. Doors had been barred to prevent any looters who pushed past the guards from plundering the sick and frail. I had heard that even doctors sworn to preserve life were carrying guns in case they had to kill in self-defense. Not only were hospital staff overwhelmed by the influx of civilians wounded in the American bombing, but a fear of the violence suddenly being inflicted by their fellow citizens had turned them into vigilantes on their own wards. If ever there was a warning sign that the fall of the countrys security apparatus would lead to the rise of a peculiarly ruthless anarchy, this was it.
Setting off from our downtown hotel in a hired Mercedes, we wound slowly past ministries once renowned for crude aggression, which had been left with no defense against the Americans smart bombs. Their roofs had been wrecked and their interiors razed, leaving little more than the crumbling facades of their former glory. The Ministry of Information, the propaganda mouthpiece of the fallen dictator, Saddam Hussein, had collapsed in a cloud of dust. Smoke was still billowing from the rubble of one of the dictators palaces.
On we drove toward our first hospital, past row upon charred row of burned-out buses, cars, and vans, each one representing an undisclosed story of personal loss for owners immobilized in a city that everyone but the looters seemed intent on fleeing. Hundreds of honking motorists lined up for fuel at the few garages still operating since thieves had started commandeering the tankers.
From one of the main highways, I saw the entrances to residential roads sealed off with barriers made from tires, planks, scrap metalanything that came to handto keep out militias that were forming fast and staking claims to clusters of streets they intended to control now that the dictators army and police had been smashed. Some of the militias had already begun to fight over their territory.