Fatima can barely move. She spends day after day on a small cot attached to one wall in the living room of her home in Baghdad’s Sadr City. Sometimes they help her sit up, although most of the time she is lying down. But she wasn’t always like this; she remembers that she lacked hours of the day to work at home and share with the family. The kitchen, covered with a green paper full of trees and birds, is a memory of times when life was taken with greater joy.
The deterioration began after he saw the video of Mustafa, his youngest son, hanging from a Fallujah bridge in the summer of 2015. The Islamic State (IS) had used it to terrorize millions of Iraqis. Then, months later, came the death of her husband, who could not bear the pain. “How can they do that, he was just defending the country from him!” Says this 60-year-old woman, all in black, for whom one of her grandchildren has put a cushion on her back for her to sit on. comfortable.
Shortly after IS moved in and took control of more than 30% of Iraq, Mustafa called her and her husband for permission to follow Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s fatwa. The highest authority of the Shiites in Iraq had called on the Iraqis to unite in the defense of the country.
For years, Fatima had feared for the future of her five children; first during the Saddam Hussein dictatorship and later when the US invasion arrived in 2003. “With Saddam they persecuted all these young people, many times they imprisoned them for nothing. And they disappeared for days, ”says the woman, who acknowledges that she initially celebrated the arrival of the Americans. She thought that this would put an end to the nightmare lived by hundreds of thousands of young people, many of them Shiites like her children. “There was only a very short period when things were good, then chaos ensued. They killed each other, and I never knew if they were going to return home, ”says this woman who is listened to by her son Raed, who was the last member of the family to be in contact with Mustafa. One day she received a call: it was her brother, who told her that he had been injured in a battle. He had asked his companions to leave him, to go in search of help. He remained hidden in a room of a house surrounded by IS. The last they heard from him is that he would try to escape through a cultivated field. Days later, a video surfaced of an Islamic State entourage driving Mustafa around Fallujah in a convertible. Later they hung him from the bridge.
Raed still saves the videos on his mobile. When she shows them off, she emphasizes that Mustafa is being paraded around Fallujah and some of the townspeople raise their hands in approval. “The way they killed him reminded me of sectarian warfare. IS did not refer to him as a member of the Iraqi army, but as a Safavid fighter, which for them means related to Shiism and Iran,” says Raed. During the sectarian war that bled the country dry between 2006 and 2008, Fatima’s five children stopped going out together. “Fallujah may be Sunni, but he was there as an Iraqi to help free him,” Raed says of his brother Mustafa.
Imam witnessed those years. For her, the hardest of these last two decades marked by difficulties. And also for the deaths. There is no exact figure, but it is estimated that around 120,000 civilians died from the invasion until the withdrawal of US troops in 2011, according to Iraq Body Count, an online platform that has monitored the number of deaths.
“It is very difficult to find a family that has not had a loss,” says this woman who runs an NGO dedicated to supporting women who have been left in charge of their families. Taking a walk through the Adhamyah neighborhood, one of the main Sunni neighborhoods, she recounts that Sunnis and Shiites killed each other; when she went out in the morning they found bodies lying on the sidewalks, more than once children.
At that time, he helped thousands of families who had had to move to this neighborhood; by then the inhabitants of the city sought refuge in areas dominated by their sect. Imam still supports more than 1,500 families, many of them headed by widows who have had to take responsibility for feeding, educating and supporting their children, like Suhar. She was 24 years old when her husband was killed in the majority Shiite neighborhood where they lived. “They had sent him several notices and one day they came for him.” Three months later, he learned that he had been murdered. She had to seek refuge in Adhamyah. The nights were marked by explosions and she, an inexperienced girl from a family where the mother was Sunni and the father Shiite, was alone with three children in a neighborhood where she did not talk about her private life. By then no one but Imam’s NGO and other organizations were helping her.
Professor Nesif al Hemiary, head of the Iraqi council of psychiatrists, explains that thousands of women have lost children or husbands and have to take responsibility for their families. “This situation adds more trauma to the original trauma. Many fall ill, and all this has affected their lives in multiple fields”, explains Al Hemiary. He recognizes that the government and institutions are far from being able to help these women because the country’s problems are enormous.
Suhar says that years later her greatest pain comes from feeling abandoned by her family. But also that her children have had to witness what happened to her father. She wishes they could leave the country, she fears what might happen to them in the future.
