Ilham’s husband wasn’t allowed to return to Jordan. He made it back to Baghdad and is in hiding in his family’s house. It’s expensive to call Baghdad so Ilham hasn’t talked to her husband in months.
And just recently Care announced that it would no longer be able to pay for her rent and electricity. The small amount of money she was getting for food is also going away. When we asked Ilham how she will get by, she turns her eyes toward heaven, “God will help us.”
Her daughters want to go to America. Ranaa speaks English and wears her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. After everything she’s been through she still has the bouncy optimism of a high school cheerleader. She wants to go somewhere safe. She wants to go back to school. She wants to be reunited with her father and leave behind the memories of the killings and the kidnappings.
Breegi thinks that going to America is the best option for people like Ilham and her family and he would like to see the United States bring over as many as possible. He says that the Mandaeans quickly adapt to the American lifestyle. Most of them know English, since it was taught as a second language in Iraqi schools. Traditionally, they’ve been craftspeople, gold and silversmiths, and professionals. Entrepreneurship is part of their culture. Within six months of arriving, he says, most Mandaean immigrants are off welfare and self-supporting. Within two years, they are usually business owners who’ve created jobs in their new home.
They seem like the ideal candidates for immigration. They are usually well educated because the love of knowledge is basic to their culture and it goes back to their Gnostic beliefs. They are persecuted because of their religion in Iraq. Because they are pacifists they don’t pose the same security risk as other Iraqi’s might. There are no Mandaean suicide bombers. There are no Mandaean terrorists.
In 2004 the US government classified Iranian Mandaeans as refugees “of special concern.” This means that they get priority when they apply for a US visa. The Iraqi Mandaeans and the Iranian Mandaeans are the same. Their culture existed before the Iran and Ira q borders were drawn and families were separated by the political boundaries. But while Mandaeans on the Iran side of the border can come to the US, those on the Iraqi side are not.
Ilham and her family are luckier than other Mandaeans. They live under impossible circumstances in Jordan but they are still alive. Shia religious leaders have put Fatwas on Mandaeans and other religious minorities. The general chaos in Iraq has made this minority population even more vulnerable.
Haifa is fifty years old and worked as a bookkeeper in a bank in Baghdad for over thirty years. She isn’t exactly the sort of person one would consider a threat to the social order, unless of course, you’re part of the new fundamentalist Islamic Iraq street patrols.
In January of 2007, Haifa was warned that she’d better start wearing a headscarf. She’s a Mandaean, not a Muslim and has never worn a headscarf. She didn’t see any reason to start wearing one.
A few days after the warning, she was stepping into a car when a gunman decided to enforce a fatwa. He shot point-blank into the side of her head. The bullet took out her left eye and shattered every bone in her face. The doctor who tried to patch her back together said that it was as if the bone had just dissolved.
A year and five operations later, she’d got an artificial jaw, an artificial nose and bone grafts from her hip to create cheekbones. She’s still facing three more major surgeries. She’s missing one eye and can only see light and shadow with the remaining eye.
When I asked Haifa’s friend, Najlaa, if the man who shot Haifa was caught, she laughed derisively. “What do you think?” she said, “There is no law in Iraq now, It’s just chaos.”
The impact of that gunshot reached far beyond Haifa’s face. It’s rippled through her family. Because Haifa was incapacitated, she needed someone to help take care of her. So her sister, Muna, took an unpaid leave of absence from her job. She also had to take out a substantial loan to pay for living expenses while she was taking care of her sister.
Before Haifa was gunned down, Muna was taking care of their mother. She’s elderly and cannot walk. Someone needs to take care of her 24 hours a day. A nursing home is not an option in war-torn Iraq. So Muna passed the duty on to her sister-in-law but now almost a year has passed. The sister-in-law has her own family to take care of.
But Haifa isn’t the only one in her family that has problems caused by all this new freedom in Iraq. Their twenty-year-old nephew was walking down the street, minding his own business when he saw a man holding a two-year old child shot down in the middle of the day, in the middle of the street. The gunmen left the man dead but the child was still alive.
So Haifa’s nephew did what anyone would have done. He picked up the wounded child and took him to the hospital. That was the beginning of his own nightmare. A few hours later, he got a phone call telling him that because he saved the child, he would be the next victim. He left for Syria almost immediately.
And just recently Care announced that it would no longer be able to pay for her rent and electricity. The small amount of money she was getting for food is also going away. When we asked Ilham how she will get by, she turns her eyes toward heaven, “God will help us.”
Her daughters want to go to America. Ranaa speaks English and wears her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. After everything she’s been through she still has the bouncy optimism of a high school cheerleader. She wants to go somewhere safe. She wants to go back to school. She wants to be reunited with her father and leave behind the memories of the killings and the kidnappings.
Breegi thinks that going to America is the best option for people like Ilham and her family and he would like to see the United States bring over as many as possible. He says that the Mandaeans quickly adapt to the American lifestyle. Most of them know English, since it was taught as a second language in Iraqi schools. Traditionally, they’ve been craftspeople, gold and silversmiths, and professionals. Entrepreneurship is part of their culture. Within six months of arriving, he says, most Mandaean immigrants are off welfare and self-supporting. Within two years, they are usually business owners who’ve created jobs in their new home.
In 2004 the US government classified Iranian Mandaeans as refugees “of special concern.” This means that they get priority when they apply for a US visa. The Iraqi Mandaeans and the Iranian Mandaeans are the same. Their culture existed before the Iran and Ira q borders were drawn and families were separated by the political boundaries. But while Mandaeans on the Iran side of the border can come to the US, those on the Iraqi side are not.
Ilham and her family are luckier than other Mandaeans. They live under impossible circumstances in Jordan but they are still alive. Shia religious leaders have put Fatwas on Mandaeans and other religious minorities. The general chaos in Iraq has made this minority population even more vulnerable.
Haifa is fifty years old and worked as a bookkeeper in a bank in Baghdad for over thirty years. She isn’t exactly the sort of person one would consider a threat to the social order, unless of course, you’re part of the new fundamentalist Islamic Iraq street patrols.
In January of 2007, Haifa was warned that she’d better start wearing a headscarf. She’s a Mandaean, not a Muslim and has never worn a headscarf. She didn’t see any reason to start wearing one.
A few days after the warning, she was stepping into a car when a gunman decided to enforce a fatwa. He shot point-blank into the side of her head. The bullet took out her left eye and shattered every bone in her face. The doctor who tried to patch her back together said that it was as if the bone had just dissolved.
A year and five operations later, she’d got an artificial jaw, an artificial nose and bone grafts from her hip to create cheekbones. She’s still facing three more major surgeries. She’s missing one eye and can only see light and shadow with the remaining eye.
When I asked Haifa’s friend, Najlaa, if the man who shot Haifa was caught, she laughed derisively. “What do you think?” she said, “There is no law in Iraq now, It’s just chaos.”
The impact of that gunshot reached far beyond Haifa’s face. It’s rippled through her family. Because Haifa was incapacitated, she needed someone to help take care of her. So her sister, Muna, took an unpaid leave of absence from her job. She also had to take out a substantial loan to pay for living expenses while she was taking care of her sister.
Before Haifa was gunned down, Muna was taking care of their mother. She’s elderly and cannot walk. Someone needs to take care of her 24 hours a day. A nursing home is not an option in war-torn Iraq. So Muna passed the duty on to her sister-in-law but now almost a year has passed. The sister-in-law has her own family to take care of.
But Haifa isn’t the only one in her family that has problems caused by all this new freedom in Iraq. Their twenty-year-old nephew was walking down the street, minding his own business when he saw a man holding a two-year old child shot down in the middle of the day, in the middle of the street. The gunmen left the man dead but the child was still alive.
So Haifa’s nephew did what anyone would have done. He picked up the wounded child and took him to the hospital. That was the beginning of his own nightmare. A few hours later, he got a phone call telling him that because he saved the child, he would be the next victim. He left for Syria almost immediately.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
