Sister Anne Montgomery examines the damage done to Yarmouk college, Iraq (photo: CPT)

New York Times
By Ian Urbina

In a place where everything seems broken, she has been a fixer. At a time when most other American civilians were leaving the country, she was just arriving.

Sister Anne Montgomery, a 78-year-old nun, avoided the United States-patrolled Green Zone when she moved to Baghdad, opting instead to live in Karada, a mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhood across the Tigris River from the American Embassy.

“You can’t possibly do the type of work we sought to do with Iraqi civilians unless you live with them,” she said in a recent interview from her home in East Harlem. She rotated into and out of Iraq regularly, from soon after the war started until April, when she returned home to take a break and get treatment for skin cancer.

As a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, an ecumenical antiwar group based in Chicago and Toronto, Sister Montgomery was among the handful of American civilians still based in Baghdad last year and early this year.