By George Capaccio

Suha and I have been good friends for several years. I met her the first time I went to Baghdad. Now, after many visits and many shared experiences, we have become like brother and sister. In the winter of 2002 I was able to live with her and her family and to experience their daily struggle to survive under the oppressive weight of sanctions, imposed in 1990 and still in force twelve years later.

The family lives in a respectable neighborhood about one mile from the Tigris River. Suha’s husband Suhail used to work as a driver but now is retired because of a serious heart ailment. Their home belongs to an absentee landlord who was once Suhail’s employer. In exchange for looking after the house, he and Suha are able to live there rent-free. Their income, such as it is, amounts to about fifteen dollars a month. They have four boys, the youngest of whom, Omer, is three-years-old. Omer’s brothers are exceptionally well-behaved, polite, and loving, though they can get a tad crazy when playing or talking about their favorite sport–soccer.

by George Capaccio

It was the night before Christmas and my first time in the home of Um Haidar. Her name in Arabic means Mother of Haidar. She is not like anybody I have met in Iraq. When she enters a room, she is all there is to see. Her beauty is strength drawn from the deepest well on earth. The lines of her face travel as far as the most distant stars and there they conceive of heaven. But here, among us, her life is sorrowful. She bears her grief with the dignity of women who have carried water long distances on their head.

A few years ago an American missile destroyed the homes on her street, wounded many of her neighbors, and killed her little boy. She is not afraid to talk about that time and how she found his body and carried him inside and how he never rose from the dead to finish the game he’d been playing. After his death, she took his name, Haidar.