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By Anna Bachmann
Voices in the Wilderness
Baghdad
February 12, 2004
We waited there for three days before our driver, an Iraqi named Sattar, was ready to take us in. An engineer by training, Sattar supports his family by driving the 12 to 15 hours each way from Amman to Baghdad and back several times a week. At 1 AM on the dot, he met us in the hotel lobby ready to drive us in. We had heard stories of drivers falling asleep at the wheel and Sattar couldn’t have had more than five hours of sleep, so we were determined to stay awake for the entire journey. Unfortunately, I was quickly out like a light. I had two travel partners. N, a student from Virginia who I had met briefly before the war in Baghdad and who had spent most of the last year studying Arabic in Syria, and Lorna, a journalist from the Hudson Valley of New York. N was soon splayed out on the seat in front of me but fortunately Lorna had more staying power and kept up a near constant banter with the soft-spoken Sattar.
By Anna Bachmann
Voices in the Wilderness
Baghdad (This letter written from Amman, Jordan, on her way into Iraq)
“They say ‘Welcome to Jordan!’ when you arrive in Amman,” Hassan said, “But for me it was really ‘Welcome to Hell!’”
Hassan was our waiter at a local restaurant. He stood out immediately because of his Brooklyn accent. Over the course of serving us a simple meal of hummos, tabouli, roasted chicken and flat bread, he told us his story.
Hassan came to the United States in 1974 … he was 17 years old. Growing up in New York, he eventually started a family and later a small business with a partner. Then he made the mistake of obtaining a unregistered handgun for self-protection. In September 2002 he was arrested for carrying the weapon but was soon on probation for the offense. For most American citizens the probation would have run its course and that would, most likely, have been the end of it but Hassan’s probation brought him under the eye of the Immigration Service.
Listen to Arundhati Roy (author of The God of Small Things and Power Politics) speak out against war on Iraq in discussion with historian Howard Zinn. Santa Fe, New Mexico, September 18, 2002.
