Iraq’s Lost Generation
I met eighteen-year-old Mu’min in the Baja Café, my evening hangout in Baghdad’s Mansur district this past summer. It was an inconspicuous place to arrange interviews, send emails, and drink melon smoothies. Men played billiards, dominoes, and backgammon, and downed fruit juices and ice cream. Mu’min was there almost every night, a thin, handsome kid, street-smart and hardened, but still open to talking with me. I had spent time in his neighborhood while reporting on the war for the past seven years, and we chatted about dead militia leaders and American soldiers we both knew.
When the Americans invaded in 2003, Mu’min was eleven years old, living in West Baghdad’s majority-Sunni neighborhood of Amriya. His father was a retired police officer. Their life before the war had been good, he recalled.
On one of those early days of the war, Mu’min and his father drove to the airport to take food to his uncle, a soldier in the Republican Guard. They found him shot to death. It was the first time Mu’min ever saw a dead body. Later that year Mu’min’s father was out driving, moonlighting as a taxi driver. A bomb targeting Americans exploded, and American soldiers arrested all the men in the area. Mu’min’s family could not find his father. They held a funeral for him one year later. On the third and last day of the fatiha, as the funeral was called, a man who had seen Mu’min’s father in prison told the family that he was alive.
“At first we didn’t believe him,” Mu’min told me, “then a second man came who had been in jail with my father. Then we believed him. We tried to find my father in Abu Ghraib. When we went there, the Americans said, ‘we don’t have anybody with that name.’ We went more than twenty times.”
Later that year, when the Americans destroyed Falluja in the effort to rout the anti-occupation resistance, thousands fled to Amriya. Some were former fighters who brought violence with them. Mu’min was washing his car one day when a masked man told him, “Go inside. We are going to attack the army.” Mu’min didn’t believe him, but soon heard the sound of a rocket-propelled grenade being launched and exploding on its target.
One night, more than two years after he disappeared, Mu’min’s father showed up. He was wearing his prison clothes. His hair had turned gray. He had trouble walking. He was thin; his skin was yellow and his lips were blue. In prison he had been in solitary confinement and was tortured with sleep deprivation, dogs, beatings. His ankle had been broken. His arms had been tied above his head, injuring his shoulders. His personality had changed. He would wake up at night screaming.
The next year Mu’min, too, was imprisoned, after he took his father’s gun and chased after some men who were stealing his car. An American patrol arrested him and accused him of being a terrorist. They put him in prison, beat him, and, three months later, released him.
Like many Iraqis, Mu’min and his family fled to Syria in 2006 at the height of the violence. When they returned to Amriya after a few months, al Qaeda men were occupying their house. The family went to live with an uncle nearby. At the time, former anti-occupation fighters, in cooperation with the Americans, were establishing an Awakening group in Amriya to fight al Qaeda. Over the mosque loud speakers, they urged anybody who wanted their home back to join their group. Mu’min and his father both joined. Mu’min was trained and stood guard in the neighborhood every day with an AK-47. Five months later, in 2007, the family got their house back. They found Shiite corpses inside and buried them. Mu’min dropped out of school.
I can’t go back to school after what happened to me, he explained. Now he does odd jobs and hangs out at the café every night, just one of another lost Iraqi generation.
Comments
Tweet
About the Author
Nir Rosen’s latest book is Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World.
Related Articles
Nir Rosen,
An Ugly Peace, Once the Americans Leave
Keep in touch with Boston Review
all the while the new system is not that much better than before: widespread violence, torture and police brutality are still there,
all in all everyday life has not yet improved.
May I suggest you do some critical thinking on the subject of blowback, of unintended consequences?
Most American think that Iraq is so over, that the surge worked wonders, or at least was central in stabilizing Iraq.
I think the story of Iraq has not yet begun, especially in light of previous major blunders such as Operation Ajax, overthrowing the Iranian democracy in 1953. History's writ is long, a factor impatient Americans never seem to comprehend.
Very best regards, Tarquinis