Walking Through Fire: Iraqis’ Struggle for Justice and Reconciliation

Foreword

People of the Book know the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—the three friends who, while exiles in a strange land, refused to bow to the imperial gods because they had pledged their allegiance to YHWH. For their divine obedience, they were sentenced to death by fiery furnace. No cross, no firing squad, no lethal injection. This was execution Babylon style.

But, as Daniel records the story, the crowd noticed a fourth person walking with the three friends in the flames. And when they came out, there wasn’t even a hint of smoke on their clothes. This is Pharaoh’s-army-got-drowned, Jesus-didn’t-stay-dead sort of humor. The Bible loves to stick it to the powers with little details like this. I know Christian preachers love to suggest that Jesus was there with them, and I believe he was. But I’ve always wondered if the author of Daniel, rascal that he was, didn’t mean for his reader to think that maybe, just maybe, Daniel jumped in there with his buddies and lived to tell the story.

In the spring of 2003, when the military industrial complex of the U.S.A. transformed Baghdad into a fiery furnace, Peggy Gish was there. She was there spending time with children in a Sisters of Charity orphanage and with families on the streets. She was there and she told her government that she had no plans to leave, no matter what they decided to do.

She was there, I think, as an act of divine obedience, not unlike her predecessors in the great cloud of witnesses. She knew she was not the first, that she probably wouldn’t be the last. But this is what God’s people do when forced to choose between unfaithfulness and the fire. You step into the fire, presenting your body as a living sacrifice—a reasonable act of worship. What happens after that is up to God.

God can make a way out of no way.

One of the great gifts of my life is that, when I faced the same choice that God’s people have had to face since the days of Babylon, I was given the grace to step into the fire. My wife Leah and I drove into Baghdad with a Christian Peacemaker Team delegation five days after the shock and awe bombing had begun. When we arrived at a little hotel in that great city that sits on the Tigris and the Euphrates, the city was literally burning. Smoke was everywhere. Oil wells had been lighted, creating ten-foot flames.

But there in the midst of the furnace was Peggy. She greeted us with open arms. She welcomed us into the Movement of those who know the God who can make a way out of no way.

The great gift of this book is that it is an invitation for you to join that Movement, too. Peggy has stories to tell that feel like they came right off the pages of the Bible. And in a sense, they did. Because the same God who raised Israel of out Egypt raised Jesus from the dead. And we who live life with that God know that, by faith, the waters are still parting and the dead are still getting up from their graves.

Some are even walking through flames—and writing to tell us about it.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Pentecost, 2013

Introduction and Acknowledgments

In the aftermath of the 2003 war, U.S. government officials described the Iraqi people as liberated and claimed that new possibilities for the Iraqi society were worth the deaths and destruction. We who lived for awhile in Iraq saw from on the ground a different, more accurate reality—one of a broken society that would be difficult to heal.

This book is the story of the Iraqi people. Through their eyes—through their stories—this book tells the truth about what war and our government’s anti-terrorism policies have really meant for them. Prisoners in the U.S. detention system, and their families, tell about the abuses they experienced in that system. Iraqis from various social and ethnic backgrounds tell about the excessive violence of the U.S.–led occupying forces. But, these stories also describe the efforts of many courageous and creative Iraqis as they speak out against injustices and build movements toward nonviolence and reconciliation.

My personal acquaintance with the Iraqi people began in October 2002, five months before the March 2003 U.S. invasion, when I started working there with the Chicago and Toronto-based organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), and the Chicago based Voices in the Wilderness (now called Voices for Creative Nonviolence). After staying on into the war, I continued to come and go over the next nine years as part of a team of trained CPT peace-workers. My most recent time there was from March to the end of June 2011. Throughout that time, I lived among the Iraqi people, and so was a firsthand witness of the suffering caused them by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Regime, the international economic sanctions from 1991–2003, and then the 2003 U.S.-led war and occupation of Iraq. Our team accompanied Iraqis to get help or to escape violent situations and worked alongside Iraqis as they sought peaceful alternatives to the escalating violence. Having had amazing experiences and the unique perspective of one being on the ground over this nine-year period, I feel compelled to share this experience with others.

This manuscript continues the story told in my first book, Iraq: A Journey of Hope and Peace, published by Herald Press in September 2004, which deals with our team’s presence in Iraq from October 2002 to June 2004. The first half of Walking Through Fire: Iraqi’s Struggle for Justice and Reconciliation covers events from summer 2004 to spring 2006, when our team lived in Baghdad and worked mostly in central and southern Iraq. It includes our work with the Muslim Peacemaker Team and the time of CPT’s Baghdad kidnapping. In the second half of the time recounted in this book, summer 2006 to summer 2011, we were living and working mostly in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq. This part of the book includes an account of the shorter kidnapping I experienced.

This on-the-ground view of many of the social and political events in Iraq between 2004 and 2011 counters the myths about the superiority of violent force to root out evil in places such as Iraq. Woven through the stories of Iraqis are the experiences of our peace team. These stories demonstrate that the power of nonviolent suffering love (the way of Jesus) is stronger than the power of violence and force, and can break down barriers and be transformative in violent or threatening situations.

I weave in bits of my own struggles of fear or pain while working in a war situation and in the context of U.S. global intervention and oppression, hoping this will help the reader identify with the struggle and pain of Iraqis and know them as real people. I also share personally to assure the reader that peace-workers do not do this work in a vacuum or out of a unique fearlessness or superhuman qualities, but deal with the same human struggles and weaknesses of most people.

Since its founding in 1986, Christian Peacemaker Teams has sent teams into global areas of conflict. As appropriate to the local situation, members of CPT act as international observers and engage in nonviolent direct action, working in partnership with local people to transform violence and oppression. More information about CPT can be found at www.cpt.org.

In securing information and opinions of other people (sometimes quoted, sometimes summarized) used in this text, I took extensive notes, asked clarifying questions, and checked with other sources or with other team members or our interpreters who were present during the interviews. When it was not possible to write down the conversations word for word I re-created parts or summarized the conversations afterward, as accurately as I could. I ask forgiveness from anyone that I may have inadvertently misrepresented.

I have changed the names and demographics of many individuals, because identifying them may put them in danger. Names given of my teammates are accurate, but after first naming them, I only give their first names. Many more team members and Iraqis who have done good work have not been named. When describing the work of Iraqi organizations, I give some additional information in the glossary. Anyone wanting more information should look at the organization’s website on the Internet. There is often more than one spelling for names of persons, cities, or institutions when translating from Arabic or Kurdish. I picked the spellings most authentic to or used by the local people in that location or more commonly used internationally. In many stories, there is a lot more that could be shared about what Iraqis or other teammates experienced that I omitted because of space constraints or because it seems that those are their stories to tell. There are many historical events in Iraq during this period that I do not mention. Instead, I chose to focus on events that illustrated the points made in this book or which I felt needed be added to the public accounting of these events. At times I give more of the Iraqis’ points of view than the views of the U.S. military or officials, judging that this balances what we normally hear, which is weighted more heavily with the Western viewpoint.

I am grateful for the love and prayers of my family and friends who have supported me during these years of work in Iraq, especially my late husband, Art, who had a similar vision of peacemaking and encouraged me each step of the way.

I am grateful for the following who critiqued this manuscript or advised me: Chabele Graziani, John Thorndike, Ivars Balkits, Cliff Kindy, Leah Vincent, Ellyn Burnes, and several members of the CPT team in Iraq. I am also grateful to our team’s Kurdish partners, who read portions of the manuscript, and to Lisa King for designing the maps. And thanks to Tim Kraus, who helped with the final editing and formatting. A special thanks to the countless Iraqi people who have, often with risk, helped our team in our work and opened their homes and lives to us in love—many of us being strangers coming from countries waging war on and occupying their country.

Peggy Faw Gish

Athens, Ohio

July, 2013

Prologue

Trembling, Allia held her six-month-old child tightly on her lap in her living room in Baghdad, as though she feared he, too, might be taken from her. She looked up with her tear-filled puffy eyes as she thanked us for coming. Her mother and other relatives cared for her older four children as they wandered in and out of the room. A strong woman, Allia now looked weaker and paler since we had last seen her two weeks ago.

In mid-February 2006, she and several neighbors had come to our team’s apartment, asking for help. Her husband and six other men from the Baladiyatt neighborhood had been detained during house raids by Iraqi Special Police forces. We began visiting detention facilities and U.S. offices with members of her family to find out where her husband and the other men were being held and what they were charged with, but found no clue. This meant sleepless nights for their families, crying together, jumping every time the phone rang. A week later, we heard that the body of Allia’s husband was found mutilated and buried in a sewer in Najaf.

My husband’s done nothing! What will become of us? Where can I go, so my children can grow up in peace? This was not a time for our questions, and we did not have answers to hers. We could only be present with her and cry with her as she poured out her pain and fear.

Unfortunately, such circumstances were not new. I had been working in Iraq since October 2002, five months before the March 2003 U.S. invasion. After staying on into the war, I continued to come and go over the next nine years as part of a team of people from the Chicago and Toronto-based organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT). Living among the people, we saw their suffering and what the war and occupation meant for their lives. We accompanied them to get help or to escape violent situations. We worked alongside Iraqis as they spoke out against injustices and built movements of nonviolence and reconciliation.¹

Four and a half years later, in 2010, the image of Allia’s pain came back to me in a more personal way. Over these years, I had experienced terrifying things. I had seen bodies torn by bombs and felt the terror of the people around us. Militants had come into our own apartment and threatened our lives. When we met Allia, we were trying to free four of our own kidnapped team members. After that ordeal was resolved, we moved to the Kurdish area of northeastern Iraq. A year later, in January 2007, I was kidnapped in northwestern Iraq, and so like Allia, was a victim of perpetrated violence. But today a new tragedy shook my life. This time it was my loss.

This day, July 28, 2010, in Suleimaniya in northern Iraq, started out in a normal sort of way—hot, even in the early morning. After our team’s morning meetings, my teammate, Marius van Hoogstraten, went to interview two Kurdish Iraqis about how they saw the drawdown of U.S. troops affecting Iraqi society. Garland Robertson, Chihchun Yuan, and David Hovde went to the downtown Suleimaniya market. I decided to stay home and write.

By mid-afternoon, my article about an event that brought urban Kurds together with displaced families living in the Zharawa tent camp still needed some work. The team cell phone that I carried rang. No name registered on the phone.

My oldest son’s voice sounded strained. Hi Mom. It’s Dale. My heart jumped a beat with excitement. But then he added, I have bad news. My stomach tightened as I unconsciously braced myself. "Dad just died . . . in a tractor accident . . . about an hour ago." It took awhile for his words to sink in, but they still seemed unreal. Then my heart hollowed out in anguish. Dale relayed all he had heard about the accident that had killed his father and my husband, Art. That was not a lot, since Dale was in San Francisco and the accident happened in Ohio. I questioned Dale, desperate to learn as much as I could. Of course, I’ll come home as soon as possible, I managed to say.

While other members of the team did what they could to support and help me, our team’s support staff in Toronto arranged for flights home. Holding myself together, I packed and organized information to leave on the computer. I told my teammates that my life had just been torn apart. Neighbors dropped in to share their sadness, cry with me, and say goodbye. I drifted back and forth between numbness and intense pain.

Is this even a fraction of what Allia felt when her husband was killed? She had the added horror of his being the victim of brutal murder. Her grief-stricken face still haunts me. Is this what drives Iraqi fathers, mothers, and brothers to come and plead for us to help find their family members who have disappeared, or are imprisoned? Is this kind of pain the seed of the growing anger and disillusionment of Iraqis, who managed to survive the invasion and then had hope that things would be better with Saddam gone, but who now wanted the U.S. to leave?

Navigating through the checkout counter in the Amman, Jordan airport the next day, I walked frozen, as in a dream, still finding it hard to believe it was real. Here I was, halfway around the world, working with others as they struggle for justice, but I wasn’t there for Art in his last moments of life! The world around me had caved in and a dark pain tightened its grip. Waiting at the gate and sitting on the plane I read a historical novel to keep my mind and emotions at bay until reaching home.

Every one who knew my husband expected he might die or be injured by a violent act in the West Bank, where he worked with CPT each winter for the past fourteen years. Instead, the accident happened on our farm in southeastern Ohio, where we earned our living selling organic vegetables at our local farmer’s market. We had moved there years earlier with a group of families that formed a Christian communal farm. Here our three boys, Dale, Daniel, and Joel, grew up roaming the woods, working alongside us in our gardens, and being taught at home until high school.

Art and I had long felt outrage and grief for people around the world living under oppression and war, and had been working in the U.S. in various movements for justice and peace since we were in college in the mid-1960s. We had known people whose relatives had been horribly murdered in concentration camps under Hitler, after our country had refused the immigration of thousands of Jews in World War II. We knew our country was founded on genocide against the native peoples on this continent. It was also built upon the mass killing, rape, and oppression of enslaved Africans and their descendants. It had trained and supported death-squad fighters in Central and South America. We saw how people in our country have looked the other way or justified violence perpetrated against women and people of various gender orientations, and many other here unmentioned groups of people.

But this was new territory. This tragedy was happening to me. There was no way to change it. I thought, I must find a way to walk ahead . . . find my way to the other side of this vast stormy sea . . . care for the empty hole inside me. I have no other choice. It is horrible and hard.

Once I was home, loving family and friends surrounded me and walked with me as I struggled through my grief and found healing as I soaked in the beauty of the woods, worked in our garden, sold vegetables at our farmers market, and took part in local justice and peacemaking activities. Eight months later, feeling stronger, I was able to return to Iraq with a deeper, more personal understanding of the pain of the Iraqi people and a realization that more of their story must be told. This account of the story starts six years earlier than my husband’s death, in the summer of 2004, where my book Iraq: A Journey of Hope and Peace left off.

It’s the story of a beautiful people with a beautiful land and culture that has been besieged and wounded, but not totally broken. As I lived among them, their struggle has also become my struggle. It’s the struggle of thousands of people around the world who resist forces of injustice and oppression through nonviolent means and discover peaceful alternatives to the ways of grasping power and institutional violence or brutal force.

(Courtesy of Lisa King)

Map

1

: Map of Iraq

(Courtesy of Lisa King)

Map

2

: Map of Northeastern Iraq

1. For the story of those early years, October

2002

to the summer of

2004

, see Gish, Iraq.

Part One

Summer 2004—Spring 2006

1

Changes

"Miriam! Salaam Alle’kum. So good to see you! How’s your family?"

"Zeeniin! (Good!"), she answered. After initial greetings on this July 2004 day, we each asked myriads of questions, using my broken Iraqi Arabic and Miriam’s limited English. We sipped tea in her sparsely furnished sitting room, dimly lit because the electricity was out.

First she poured out the good news. We can now use the park along the [Tigris] river. Ma’a just started school, and Marwan just turned twelve . . . Then a worried look flashed over her face. But Salah still has no work. Things are not good here in Baghdad. Last month a bomb exploded near the Sadeer Hotel and also broke the windows of our house. We live in constant fear. Our neighbor, Thamer, has been kidnapped.

I couldn’t count my visits at Miriam and Salah’s house since October 2002. Especially enjoyable were the times we sat around a tablecloth on the floor with heaped up dishes of rice with chicken, or of dolma—vegetables stuffed with a rice and meat mixture—my favorite Iraqi food. One memorable day in late March 2003, during the bombing of Baghdad, Miriam and I heard a bomb blast in the distance while we were talking. We hugged each other and cried.

Now, in 2004, I just returned to Baghdad after a three-month break. Hours ago I was on a plane as it did its usual steep spiral descent into the Baghdad Airport. The airport bus took me to the checkpoint where one of my teammates, Maxine Nash, and our driver were waiting. Our driver drove amid a cluster of other cars, slowing down when we caught up with two U.S. Military vehicles ahead of us, and staying a safe distance behind. When they stopped before an overpass, all the cars behind stopped too. The road from the airport into the city was still targeted periodically by resistance fighters and considered one of the more dangerous roads in Baghdad. Fortunately there was no problem today.

My thoughts drifted back to those I left two days ago in the U.S. It was always hard to say goodbye to my three adult sons and my husband, Art. Even my sense of calling and excitement about returning didn’t remove the pain of leaving those I love and the lingering doubts about seeing them again. I clung to and treasured the good times we’ve had together.

This pain of leaving was doubled by my middle son Dan’s negativity about my working in Iraq. He lived in Cincinnati, three hours away from Art’s and my home near Athens, Ohio. On the phone, before leaving for my third trip to Iraq in December 2003, I had listened to him for about an hour as he heatedly gave political and practical reasons why I shouldn’t go back. It’s stupid for you to go! . . . There’s so much violence there. What good can you do? . . . How do you know you won’t just be used by the militants to accomplish their agenda? But before our conversation stopped, his tone changed and we talked more personally. He acknowledged that behind all his arguments was his fear of something happening to me. Our talk ended tenderly as we each said I love you.

But after that phone conversation, he withdrew from me and the rest of our family and would not return our calls, letters, or e-mail messages. I was thankful for the support I received from my other two sons, Dale and Joel, even though their lives took them in different directions. I carried a well of pain about Dan, even though deep down inside, I knew he loved me. I believed this was his way of trying to protect himself from having to go through the emotional pain of consciously worrying about me. I struggled with whether or not I should give up this work because it was so difficult for him. I didn’t want to cause him grief, but I also felt something would die in me if I gave up the deep calling I felt to continue to work in Iraq.

Back in early October 2002, I was standing in front of a crowd of about two hundred outside the Athens, Ohio County courthouse, speaking against war in Iraq. In two weeks I’m joining a delegation to Iraq, I said. "Could hundreds of Americans going there now, possibly help prevent a war? We don’t know. But we must try. If we are not ready to give ourselves for peace, who will? We want to be present with and understand what the conditions are for the people there, who are now under threat of attack. The Iraqi people should not have to bear the tragedy of another war. I love my three children and my grandchildren, and I want them to grow up to live free and healthy lives. But Iraqis want the same for their families. And their lives are just as important as the lives of North Americans."

Then, after living and working in Iraq, my love for the Iraqi people deepened. They became part of my family—it just kept expanding. Yet, Dan’s challenges stayed with me. What could we do in a place of such pervasive and complex violence? Were we taking unworthy risks? Could we really make a difference there?

Filled with such questions, here I was, back in Iraq. Once our car left the Airport Road, we drove into the Karrada Dakhil neighborhood, past familiar shops, to our apartment on Abu Nawass Street. It felt like coming home.

As usual, I looked for what had changed, and over the next days and weeks Iraqis were quick to fill me in. One man told me, Now we have a different kind of freedom, freedom with misery. A teenage neighbor said, After the invasion we got mobile phones, the Internet, and satellite TV. We lost gasoline, electricity, and cooking gas.

Several people in Tahrir Square in central Baghdad expressed their concerns about the economic problems in Iraq. I’ve been out of work for many months, one man said with tears in his eyes. I had to sell many possessions to survive. With the end of the UN sanctions on Iraq, and the new unregulated import policy, there were more manufactured goods in the markets of Iraq’s cities, yet poverty was severe, with 40 to 60 percent unemployment and increasing malnutrition. Foreign goods flooding into Iraq and the U.S. takeover of many of Iraq’s businesses were eroding the economy. Meanwhile, most Iraqis tried to go on with life as normally as possible.

Resources like gasoline were harder to get. It was common to see lines of cars up to a mile long outside the gas stations. One time that summer, the entire city was without running water for five days. We sparingly used water from the reserve tank our landlord kept on the roof.

And the heat! It was like an oven. Before