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.

Their mother has always impressed me as a person of tremendous vitality and inner strength. She radiates a simple and pure love of life and people. “Your face is like the sunrise,” I once said to Suha, who blushed even as she fully enjoyed the compliment I paid her. Over the years we have created a sort of meta-language of gestures, looks, and short phrases in Arabic and English. Thankfully, we are able to communicate a great deal of emotion and thought despite our cultural differences.

When she was younger, Suha wore fashionable Western clothes and kept her hair uncovered. Today, like so many Muslim Iraqi women, she wears Islamic dress and lives according to the tenets of her faith. During my most recent visit, Suha was in mourning and dressed only in black. Black abaya. Black hijab. Her father had died a week earlier and her grief had only begun to blossom.

One morning we were sitting on the floor and finishing our breakfast of bread and tea. Her children were in school. Her husband had gone to the market. The house felt cold. Suha filled my glass and put the pot back on top of the heater, old and battered with barely glowing coils.

“George,” she said “why my sons not grow? Tareef is fourteen and you see how small he is. And no hair over his lip like other boys his age. The same for Ziad and Ramzi. What is the reason for this?”

I thought about how to answer her and then I said, “It is the embargo.” She didn’t understand my lumpy mix of English and Arabic. I tried again. “Because of the embargo, you have only rice and tomatoes to give your family but they need more. Like fruit and vegetables,” I said. “And chicken or meat.”

Suha began to cry. Still she didn’t understand me. “You mean I am not a good mother?”

I started to cry too. “No, Suha,” I said. “You are a good mother and I know how you love your children. Please don’t ever think you are a bad mother. I didn’t mean that. I wish my own mother had cared for me as much as you care for your sons.”

“Then why, George, why do they not grow? I do not feed well my children? I cause them to stay small and not grow?”

I wanted to explain to Suha that the food rations she and her family receive from the government are mostly carbohydrates and lack essential vitamins and minerals. I wanted to show her how the politics of sanctions have prevented her country from rebuilding its economy and how a depressed economy means high unemployment and stagnant wages. I wanted to help her, finally, to see the connection between the food she places before her children and my government’s intent to maintain and even strengthen sanctions no matter the cost to ordinary Iraqi families.

If I had been fluent in Arabic, I would have told her about all the other children I had seen throughout Iraq whose intellectual and physical growth has been stunted. Economic sanctions, intended to contain the country’s leadership, have inadvertently crippled the young and threatened the very future of Iraq.

Of course I could say none of these things. Nor could I put my arms around Suha and comfort her, or reverse the effects of her sons’ malnutrition. I could only sit with her on the floor of her home in the chill of a winter day, and let her tears draw out my heart.