Baghdad, Iraq
Kathy Kelly
Voices in The Wilderness

Meeting with our Iraqi friend, Sattar, who struggles now to adjust to the Occupation, we asked him if he has any hopes for the future. “If someone takes you to a far away land, to an unfamiliar city, and then to a street where there are no lights, –if you ask yourself how you would feel, then you will have an idea of my feelings now.”

He told us about a “good” encounter with a US soldier who showed kindness and decency during a ten-minute conversation while Sattar was stalled for two hours at a checkpoint. The soldier apologized for the long wait. Sattar posed a question he regularly asks of soldiers who talk with him: “What are you doing here?” The soldier said he wasn’t sure, but that they’d been told they had come to help Iraqis by getting rid of Saddam Hussein. “You’ve done that,” said Sattar. “Why are you still here?” The soldier couldn’t say, but he thought they still might have some important work to do in Iraq. He and Sattar shared a good moment of civil conversation, something to help balance some awful exchanges Sattar has had with soldiers who have behaved rudely.

Once, when Sattar was driving three Iraqi engineers out of Iraq, a soldier stopped him at a border checkpoint and said, “OK, you ali babas, (thieves) who did you steal this from?” (Meaning the SUV that Sattar drives for the company which employs him). “Are you talking to yourself?” asked Sattar. “No, I’m talking to you,” the soldier said, clearly irritated. “Well, you are the ali baba, it’s you who have come into our country to take it over. Why do you think you are here?”

The soldier bellowed, “We’re here to save your country.”

“No,” said Sattar, “You’re here to save your selves. You’re getting paid to be here. Maybe you are here to escape jail, or to get a US passport, …but you are not saving us. Saddam is gone. You could go now.” The soldier threatened to take Sattar and his passengers back to Baghdad, to turn them into authorities who could jail them, but when he realized that the engineers spoke English and had witnessed the exchange, he settled for searching Sattar’s bag and waved them forward.

The cruel fiasco of the Shock and Awe campaign and subsequent occupation has created a murky future for Sattar and an equally confusing present even for the “victorious” occupying forces who still haven’t been able to answer Sattar’s question, “why are you here?”