I didn’t want the war in Iraq to end before I thought, even once, about bringing back those who suddenly disappeared from my life. The war came as an inevitable fate—swift, sudden, like a loose white creature darting through the streets, devouring anyone in its path.
Ten years later, I decided to confront my losses, to search for Swiss chocolate, to count the absent people one by one. I wrote down the names and sorted them into lists: the kidnapped, the missing, those whose bodies were torn apart in a fleeting moment between car bombs and suicide bombers, and those who fell under American shelling. I wanted to learn how to swim and ride a bicycle.
The first to open the public auction of death was my uncle, Yaqub, during Saddam Hussein’s rule. My uncle, a man who loved wars more than life itself, was advised by everyone not to go to a war that even Saddam Hussein knew was lost.
A month before his death, he visited our home and asked my mother to prepare “fried bread,” a dish born in times of hardship. Flour was only available in officials’ homes. My mother sold her wedding dress, then her bouquet, to buy substitutes like bran or date pits.
“I asked the lady to take in the dress, and she laughed. She couldn’t believe I might look for it after the hunger ends. Of course, real flour is better than the available alternatives, but it’s full of lice,” my mother said, tossing the fermented dough into the pan, the sound of frying spreading like a daily hymn of survival.
My uncle wasn’t seeking prophecy as he headed to war. It was the natural, inherited path for our family: five of my uncles chose military service, while my father was the exception, choosing theater and culture. In every war, he was summoned, like any Iraqi, to the front. But the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a different kind of war—a very “democratic” war. For the first time, it gave him the chance to stay with us despite being called up. At least, if we died, we’d die together. He wouldn’t return to find dogs gnawing at our remains or be welcomed in a coffin wrapped in the Iraqi flag, which, like Saddam, was adept at playing with soldiers.
The flag bore witness to hidden things and all defeats, changing with each season, sometimes with stars, sometimes with “Allahu Akbar,” and once Saddam decided to write it in his blood, or the blood of the entire country. Then the stars were removed, and it remained atop coffins.
More than a million soldiers were called up, 600,000 of them reserves. 500,000 hastily kissed their families goodbye, and behind them, mothers threw water from “al-fafoun” bowls to bring them back someday. In 2003, Ba’athist men didn’t have time to chase deserters; their names weren’t hung on walls, nor were they shot at their doorsteps.
The American army entered Iraq with fewer than half a million soldiers—almost the same number of Iraqi soldiers who participated in the invasion of Kuwait. But this time, no one had to flee barefoot in stolen civilian clothes; it was enough for the soldier to stay home.
The Gateway of Losses: Baghdad Under Fiery Rain
Bombing became part of daily life. In March 2003, it wasn’t spring rain that washed the city’s streets but the mist of explosions. The planes became the sky, deciding where and when to rain, turning the weather into partly cloudy, accompanied by smoke from fires and victims.
At six in the evening, the countdown began. We waited for the first sound, the first tremor, the metallic scream that tore through the air before the ground. My sister asked me: What does the sound of an air raid mean? I replied, “It’s the Angel of Death, chasing us.” The raid wore a black sheet, blowing over the city from above, and Baghdad fell.
My father insisted we stay home despite the intensified bombing. At the time, I didn’t understand why I associated the planes flying overhead with a missile falling directly on my head. My fears were specific and clear: that it wouldn’t happen while I was in the bathroom, urinating, away from my mother’s embrace, or outside our secret hideout under the bed, where my mother gathered us with our cat, Tuti.
Tuti was the first to flee. Families followed—our neighbors, friends, neighborhood children—as if everyone suddenly decided to take a break from death.
Iraqis removed the mask of life. They played the song “Victorious, O Baghdad” in their cars, then abandoned them at the first gunshot. Every war curses the capital with borders: it fades quickly and turns into a city inhabited only by the dead.
The Great Exodus
People crowded in lines of fear, trying to reach the city’s outskirts, hoping the sounds of birds would replace the buzz of planes and the screams of American soldiers. They spoke a language we didn’t understand, except for “Hello, Mister,” which we memorized to declare peace and save ourselves.
All the houses in the alley emptied of their residents, except for ours and that of Umm Atour, our neighbor the nurse, who stayed to treat the wounded. She came to us once in the midst of heavy bombing, exhausted and angry: “They brought me a man with his head split in two and asked me to treat him! People here have gone mad!”
One night during the bombing, as we sat with her sharing food, she sighed and said enthusiastically, as if seeing the end of the tunnel: “Goodness is coming… we’ll eat like other humans.”
That was all she thought about regarding change. She wasn’t alone.
Iraqis didn’t know the taste of sweets, fruits, or meat before 2003. Everything was engulfed in the fog of sanctions since the United States imposed its economic blockade on Iraq in 1990. Saddam decided to stay in Kuwait. Stubbornness turned into hunger, and the blockade erased the appetite for life.
Doors closed on us suspiciously. Windows of houses were sold to buy eggs, which became more expensive than a teacher’s salary, the latter suddenly dropping to less than two dollars. My generation, the ’90s generation, grew up on homemade cheese, boiled potatoes on the oil heater, and “mahrouk osba’o.” I never dared to imagine the taste of chocolate: “Is it sweet? Will it make me happy?” I understood years later why the entire nation was sad.
My mother kept an old catalog of household items, and in its last pages were pictures of Western sweets, chocolates, cakes, and colorful fruits. My sisters and I once looked at them and asked our mother: “Why can’t we eat these things?” Then we cried and screamed, so she sold the catalog. It was the last of our library.
Bananas After the War
For a long time, we weren’t waiting for Saddam’s fall as much as we were waiting for bananas. They weren’t available—just like many other things the regime criminalized. He wanted us to dream of the taste of Pepsi, to try mimicking it at home. In Mureydi Market, a poor imitation was born: a white powder mixed with water, turning into an intoxicating drink made of illusion. Many fell for the street vendors’ trap, those who would call out in a soft voice: “Want fizzy Pepsi?” And when the frail citizen, whose pants now hung loose from hunger, looked intrigued, the vendor would pull out a bottle opener. At that very moment, the sound “tshhhh” would erupt, and he would hand over the bottle. The man would convince himself it was Pepsi, and that the sugar was carbonated water.
In Mureydi Market, there was another Iraq, one that forgave and let its children flee, one that stood behind Saddam Hussein’s suit. Forged passports, fake IDs for those seeking an escape from slow decay, new American foods and European clothes. In that market, they found alternatives for everything—except bananas.
Fifteen years after Saddam’s execution, his granddaughter was writing a book, claiming that the children of the family were only allowed to drink Pepsi once a week—so they could understand the suffering of the average Iraqi.
One evening, my father came home from the school where he taught. Before changing his clothes for his evening job delivering gas, he said to us: “A student came to me during recess today—he seemed in a hurry, like he was running from something. I asked him, ‘Why do you want to leave? Has your father returned from captivity?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you find your uncle’s body?’ ‘No… I just want to go, please.’” Then he leaned in and whispered: “Today, my mom is cooking chicken. There are 20 of us in the house. I don’t want to be left with just the bones.”
That evening, we felt sad, but we didn’t cry. My mother decided to reward our patient imaginations with a new dish—something we’d love. “Hummus with tahini,” she said excitedly. “We’ll mash the chickpeas to make falafel too. And we’ll replace the olive oil with animal fat.”
It was delicious.
Restaurants of War
I wanted the war to end quickly so I could see all the meals I had been deprived of. No one could have imagined the number of restaurants that would flood Iraq after 2003. It was as if Iraqis wanted to take revenge on the siege through food. Today, according to official figures, there are more than 24,000 restaurants in Iraq—nearly a thousand in Baghdad alone.
Iraqis don’t look for parks. They don’t have gardens, or playgrounds, or spaces for joy, but they find what they need in restaurants.
In the early days of the war, my mother stockpiled bags of kleicha—a traditional pastry made of dates and flour. It was nearly our only meal, three times a day. And if she wanted to add some variety and something savory, she would turn to the monster of the frying pan.
Eggplant was the companion of both the dining table and the hearts of sorrowful Iraqis throughout the years of hardship. It would be sliced thin, soaked in water and salt, then fried until it turned black—like someone carrying the darkness of the days in their skin. Don’t eat it cold. It turns rubbery, its dry oil sticks to its surface, then to your throat. The “black one” remained more loyal than anything else.
Once, my sister couldn’t stand the same two meals anymore. She wanted bread and eggs—at any cost. What was the use of the money she’d been hiding? We could die at any moment. “Cook the eggs,” she told our parents.
We could only pretend to be alive in the morning. In that brief window between air raids and daylight, we would practice riding bicycles, play with bits of shrapnel, and sometimes just stare at one another in silence.
That day, we took a few steps outside with my father to look for eggs and bread. Suddenly, a human head rolled in front of us and stopped at our feet.
It was time to run—to my grandfather’s house in Sadr City. Something of us remained back there on the street, as we looked at Umm Atour, who stayed behind alone, clinging to us like the cold oil of the eggplant.
The entire way, my mother wept. She clung to my father’s ear and said, “I told you over and over, even before we had these poor kids—we should’ve fled! I saw Baghdad as a destroyed city twenty years ago, but you wouldn’t listen. You let us starve, and now we’re seeing severed heads. What’s next?” My father said nothing.
We lived for days on the rooftop of my grandfather’s house. We slept under the light of airstrikes—almost like a high beam that Baghdad had never seen before due to the ongoing power outages. The house was overcrowded, and we fought over who got to use the bathroom. We had only one meal a day up there. The wind played with my hair and raced the bite of food to my mouth. The cold made the food freeze quickly.
My uncle’s body—he was an officer—arrived on a night without electricity. Women gathered around the shroud, their shadows growing in the dim glow of an oil lantern. They wailed and beat their faces and chests. His youngest daughter pushed through their ritual, trying to make them stop. They didn’t notice her. She carried the casket—it was very light, just a handful of charcoal the size of a small palm. She took it and held it like a mother cradling her newborn, and walked away with it. The mourning continued without him.
The house turned into a graveyard. After my uncle, came the body of their maternal uncle, arriving on foot. Then, another fell from a missile, killed while standing in the neighbors’ house. One of them ran, trailing blood behind him, and reached us begging for help. Then his soul decided to leave. For my mother, this was the excuse she needed to return and die in our own home. “You need to believe that Azrael is walking all over Iraq, not just here. Take me back,” she screamed. And for the first time, my father answered: “Have you even thought, for a second, what we’ll do if we come face to face with American tanks on the road?” My mother always had a solution—white men’s underwear, cut into strips and hung out of the car windows. “The Americans will know we’re brave,” she said. “They’ll know we’re resisting.”
Baghdad… A City for Sale
We didn’t find Baghdad. We found a massive looted store drowning in chaos. Refrigerators and washing machines were strewn across the streets, clothes tossed on sidewalks, the sounds of arguments rising everywhere, while American soldiers stood at street corners… smoking, watching.
Even our home wasn’t there. It wasn’t our home anymore. Everything had been stolen—furniture, clothes, even our scrapbooks holding memories of surviving the blockade, our childhood magazines Majallati and Al-Mizmar, and the last of the eggplants.
“Tssssss”—I can still imagine the sound of the missile launching from the stealth jet. It draws closer, louder, and just seconds before impact, I squeeze my eyes shut in rage, not even recognizing whose hand is holding mine in the darkness. I tighten up until the pilot decides to stop playing.
In the morning, men emerged from the wreckage carrying doors, women dragged windows, and children ran in clothes too big for their bodies—as if the city had exploded into fragments, and everyone was trying to salvage a piece.
The coalition forces didn’t care about the state institutions. But they protected the Ministry of Oil and the Central Bank. They broke the locks with their own hands and then signaled to the people to go inside. They helped Iraqis loot their own history. Over 170,000 artifacts were taken from the Iraqi museum by smiling faces.
We didn’t know all of this because the electricity was out. What I did witness was my neighbor being trampled to death during a looting frenzy in one of Saddam’s palaces—specifically in the kitchens. One eyewitness said, “For the first time in their lives, they saw new types of meat.”
I can’t remember who once said this, but it stuck with me: tomato trucks used to be crushed—so Iraqis wouldn’t get used to the taste.
Unquenchable Thirst
Eggs had become affordable, but the water had been cut off. We dug wells in the courtyards of our homes—like grave diggers. All they yielded was disappointment and dust. We carried buckets on our shoulders and walked through different alleyways in search of water, which we then had to boil over weak flames to make it safe to use.
Once, I tripped and dropped the bucket. All the water spilled onto the ground, and I cried a lot. When I returned to refill it, the well owner refused to give me more. That day, I punished myself by refusing to eat or drink.
On every corner, American military helmets and tanks roamed. Sometimes they handed out leaflets and cakes wrapped in transparent bags, but our neighbor would shout warnings in the alley: “They’re full of pig meat! They brought it so you’d lose your honor, just like them!”
The coalition forces distributed food aid to NGOs and to some neighborhoods. Citizens would look at the strange metal cans, lined up like silent soldiers, as if they came from outer space.
These aid packages reached the markets. In Shorja Market, my father bought the unknown cans so we could try post-siege food: cans of beans, ready-made soups, tightly sealed biscuit packets—the kind that made them tall and heavyset. “This is their food, that’s why they’re stronger than us,” we would say, as we chewed and turned the cans over in our hands, reading the foreign words without understanding them.
Sometimes, American army patrols would suddenly raid homes, beating, shouting, smashing things, destroying everything, then leaving without reason. Arrests happened en masse. Four years into the war, over 400,000 people had been detained.
My brother could have been one of them… he was only three. He’d been given a plastic water gun and was so happy, pulling the trigger and spraying our hearts with water. A U.S. patrol approached, and by cruel coincidence, they saw my “armed” brother. The soldiers rushed toward him, grabbed him, shoved him, dragged him, yelled in his face. I didn’t understand what was happening. They were taking something from him the same way war pulls your life toward the abyss. He cried and resisted. I took the gun from him. They seized it, held it up, examined it in their hands, then realized it was plastic. They took it anyway. My brother kept crying for it. One of the female soldiers came back to silence him—with a packet of mixed nuts.
Doesn’t this scene remind you of something? Oil for food?
When Iraqis Began Eating Each Other
The freedom to eat, and the freedom of opinion—what could be better than that? Everyone could have what they wanted without having to reveal the little Saddam Hussein within them. Perhaps no one realized that the phase of the “new freedom” would be paved with the carpet of personal vendettas. It pains me that instead of turning toward new meals—KFC and pizza—Iraqis preferred to feast on each other.
On February 22, 2006, the mosque across from my school collapsed as if it had never existed, and people fell—some faster than others. I ran, searching for my sister.
My mother stood barefoot in the middle of the alleyway, among other mothers who shared the same frantic panting, bullets overhead. She was waiting for us to then scream: “The Imam Al-Askari shrine has exploded!”
And just like that, the city was split in two, like an apple.
Between 2006 and 2008, over 60,000 people were killed, and tens of thousands went missing. On the eve of the bombing, we ate cheese and molasses to the sound of endless gunfire and mortar shells. That was the last time I noticed the taste of food. After that, eating became a mechanical habit, like locking the door before bed. They cut off my cousin’s head and placed it in a pot of bean stew.
As if it were part of an unfinished meal. Outside school, my friend was shot dead because she refused to wear a hijab. She was Christian. I saw her bleeding, the blood seeping quickly, as if it was in a hurry to leave before she did. Two days later, my aunt’s wife called: “He’s been kidnapped.”
By the fourth call, I brought out a notebook and started writing: How were they killed? When? Where? Numbers, names, dates, methods of execution. The pages turned into a long funeral. Meanwhile, my mother wiped her tears with the edge of her veil and whispered: “Did they eat well before they were killed? Or did they die hungry?”
In the neighborhood, like all neighborhoods, no one knew who was killing whom anymore. I can’t remember when my elementary school classmate became a member of the gang whose name I still don’t dare to say, even after all these years.
We walked among corpses—some had been lying there for days and had become part of the street. Sleeping faces, various sleeping positions on sidewalks, without anything covering their bodies. My sister and I named the road to school “the Bermuda Triangle,” and we braced ourselves to enter it one day and never return. One time, we found dogs gnawing on a corpse.
We tried to get close to help, but the sniper fired a warning shot near us. We had to keep walking, as if we saw nothing. When we reached school, another corpse would be waiting for us. We looked for the teachers, but no one was there except the corpse of the guard, lying in the middle of the schoolyard, his children scattered in the classrooms. My life was reduced to two extremely dangerous roads: from home to school and back. As for the city’s alleyways, everyone had forgotten what they once were.
Once, my sister and I tried to cheat fate and go to school without encountering traces of Azrael. At dawn, we walked lighter than air. A woman met us, her blood indicating that she’d been killed just moments earlier. The daylight stretching toward her face gave us the impression she was only sleeping. Her brown hair had been styled for a long time, a beige skirt and blouse, red shoes with small heels. Several golden necklaces and rings. “How beautiful and elegant she is,” my sister said. “I hope her family finds her and gives her a funeral in those same clothes.” That woman still visits me in my dreams. Still—like everyone else.
That same year, Baghdad was brutally and rapidly split into two: Sunni and Shiite. A demographic shift was forced upon it. It became a city with only a quarter of a heart. Its greatest victims were the minorities. The gang threw the hijab onto us. They forbade young men from using hair gel, wearing accessories, or even different styles of belts. The “punishments” were carried out in front of everyone—public torture sessions. Even cucumbers and tomatoes in some areas were punished; they were not to mix in salads, it was religiously forbidden.
Because my mother and father came from different sects, we were granted the gift of choice: abandon the marriage, the sect, or the house. That’s what the gang told my father, who refused to change anything. My mother cried to the sky and pleaded, “I’ll become Hindu if they want, just let us stay in the house. Where will we go this time?” We left the house for the second time—alone, to the gang. The walls had no tongues to tell us what happened. But they had a face, marked by leftover weapons, traces of blood, and torn clothes strewn about.
Our neighbor wasn’t as lucky. After a while, Iraqi forces uncovered bodies buried inside the walls.
Our other neighbor was even more cursed. They killed her son… she calmly walked out and scolded her husband: “I told you not to give him a religious name.” Names were enough to kill their owners in this city.
Before we were displaced, the gang was planning to have fun with residents’ lives through military clashes with American forces for days. Battles would start like that, without warning, as if someone had pressed a hidden button on the city’s wall. We’d be trapped inside our homes, watching our food supplies dwindle. Only stale bread would remain. My mother would say over and over:
“One day all this will pass. We’ll sit in a restaurant and order everything. We’ll eat until we’re full, then we’ll laugh.”
The battles would end the same way they began. The fighters would leave, taking their weapons with them and leaving the corpses of passersby alone on the ground.
Cyclical Terror
We were at home when a car bomb destroyed the nearby market. My mother was there. My little brother cried, wanting to run to her. We rushed out, searching among the body parts. Seventeen of our neighbors were among the victims. He said Allahu Akbar before blowing himself up—he wanted to have lunch with the Prophet, they say.
That morning, the mallaya (the mourning assistant) arrived in the neighborhood. She couldn’t move from house to house anymore.
She asked that all the women be gathered in one place. The street became a large, weeping womb. I looked at them and asked: Does anyone know they’re here? Does their wailing echo anywhere?
Hours later, the militia approached some of the neighbors, took them, and executed them in revenge.
I envied my neighbor, who, after the massacre, managed to escape with only the clothes on her back to Syria, and later made it to Canada. Years later, she confessed to me: The first thing I looked for in the land of snow was an Iraqi restaurant that grills masgouf fish.
The years escaped with more than 65,000 car bombs and four million refugees. I wasn’t on either side. The machine that shredded citizens kept running. Survivors dreamed of a homeland like any other, where a young person’s biggest worry is the color of their graduation robe.
I got my chance—and my voice—to say no to all of this during the October 2019 uprising. “At least today we can criticize the government in our gatherings without the walls eavesdropping,” said my mother’s friend, who disapproved of any protest.
She had lost her brother after his boss filed a report against him for eating his breakfast— “mahrouk osba’o”—on a newspaper that had Saddam’s face on it. “You want a country? Sit and rest,” she says, mocking it all.
My parents refused to let me join the demonstrations. “Fine, I’m at work,” I’d say to my mother from a closed car. I’d head to the protest square and lose more and more friends—not to car bombs this time, but to the state’s bullets and tear gas. I went back to my notebook. I couldn’t find it. I bought a new one and began writing again.
Even after the protests ended, killing became easier than before. Over 700 civilians were killed in Tahrir Square. Then dozens of activists. Two men. On a motorcycle. A silenced pistol. A bullet to the head.
This time, the fear was heavier. It surrounded me like thick fog. I was receiving many threatening messages. On Telegram. On WhatsApp. I reported them to the police: “It’s obvious they’re just teenagers,” the officer said. I yelled at him. The messages contained details of my day, the bright colors of my clothes. I began watching my shadow, changing routes, but the fear still breathed on my shoulder.
Once, I got out of a taxi. A man on a motorcycle approached me. He raised his hand. I screamed hysterically. But he was holding a phone, trying to call the person who had placed an order. In his other hand was a pizza.
At my mother’s pleading, I left the house for the third time. I was alone. No one to pat my shoulder, no one to remind me I’d return one day. My feet led me to Umm ‘Atoor, my neighbor the medic—the woman who had tended to half the neighborhood’s wounds from snipers and car bombs, and then from the protests.
She welcomed me with a face that wrinkles never betrayed. She laughed and said, “You’ve grown, and now you’re receiving threats from this land all on your own.”
Then, like bidding farewell to an army, she slipped fruits and kleicha into my bag.
Three times, I’ve left my house without knowing why.
Each time, I packed the faces of the corpses that stuck to my brain, my mother’s sorrow as she scolded my father for staying until the very last moment, the sounds of rockets—all the war. And then I’d think about eating eggplant.
Everything feels like a family tree of this country.
There is no time for courage in this land.
