The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Twenty-seven years ago, I left Iraq on the first leg of a journey that would take me to the United Arab Emirates, Germany, and finally the United States. Today I am an American citizen, a businessman, and the father of three sons. Because my small business, Sindbad’s Café and Market, has become a crossroads for people from all over the Muslim world, and for non-Muslims as well, I am often invited to speak at schools and churches.

Although I don’t consider myself a spokesman for the Muslim or Arab community, I have tried to be a bridge-builder between cultures. But I hadn’t actually been back to Iraq since I left three decades ago. Over the years, I have kept in touch with my sisters and mother in Iraq, and sent money when I could, though the U.S.-imposed sanctions made that difficult and sometimes impossible. My sisters accepted the help, but not my mother. “I don’t want money. I don’t need money,” she told me. “I want you. I want to fill my eyes with you before I die.”

Though I wanted to return for a visit, I postponed the trip again and again, held back by the demands of my business, responsibilities to my American family, and fear that if I returned to Iraq, I would not be allowed to leave. In the past year, the calls from Iraq became more urgent—my mother had become gravely ill. But the danger of a trip heightened with the war and occupation. On September 12, my mother passed away. A few days later, my sister Samiah called from Karbala. “We have no mother or father any more,” she said, sobbing. “You are the oldest now. We need you. Please come.” I could wait no longer. On November 11, I left Minneapolis on a one-month journey to my homeland.

As the plane lifted up into the sky, my memories brought me back to the hot summer day in 1976 when I left Baghdad. I was twenty-five years old. My friends from Najaf had accompanied me to the airport, and as we waited to board, they laughed and chanted, Allah wayak Abossi, “God protect you, Abossi, go and don’t return. You are a lucky man.” Abossi was a comedian popular on Iraqi TV at the time. That was my nickname because I was the funniest one among them.

Then somebody said, “Sami, be careful, ask your friends to quiet down. If the mukhabarat (secret police) get curious, they could cause some trouble and prevent you from leaving. Get on the plane, make sure it takes off, and then your friends can party on without you.” The festive mood died down, and when the time came to board the plane, I hugged and kissed my friends and said my last goodbyes.

Remembering that day three decades ago, I thought of my friends Bassem al Har and Fadhel Sunbah. They were classmates of mine at the teachers college in Karbala. After we graduated, Bassem al Har and I met at the teachers club in Najaf almost every night to talk about politics and philosophy, and to play Ping-Pong, backgammon, and billiards. Fadhel was a roommate of mine in the college dorm. He was an artist—quiet, polite, and shy, the best calligrapher in my school. Arabic calligraphy was my passion, too, so there was a bit of a rivalry between us, but he was always better than me. I would look for them when I got to Najaf.

Peering out the window of the airplane, I could see nothing, but I imagined mountains, and I thought of John Lennon’s song “Imagine.” As I dozed, I dreamt I was a giant bird, soaring over mountains, ignoring the borders between countries.

In Amsterdam, where I boarded a KLM flight to Damascus, the change of airlines felt like a change of countries: While the Northwest flight attendants had been businesslike and unsmiling, the KLM attendants were relaxed and friendly, and they chatted with the passengers. Some practiced their Arabic.

We landed in Damascus at two a.m. The Syrian customs officials hardly looked at my bags, even though they were crammed full of gifts for family and friends in Iraq. I hadn’t booked a room, but at the taxi stand, two Pakistani-American ladies from California on pilgrimage, reluctant to travel alone late at night, asked me to share their cab to the Safir Hotel. I jumped in front with our cabby, Tawfik. When he learned that I was an American, he begged me to take him with me when I went home. “Save me!” he said with mock desperation. He grabbed my belt, like a drowning man lunging for a life raft. The Pakistani women, who didn’t speak Arabic, were alarmed by this sudden gesture, but I reassured them—Tawfik was not attacking me.

The Safir Hotel is a gleaming glass and marble edifice near the Sayeda Zaynab shrine, where Zaynab, daughter of Imam Ali, is buried. (Imam Ali is the cousin of prophet Muhammad and is revered by Shiite Muslims as his rightful successor.) The Pakistanis booked the Safir’s special Ramadan rate, $89 a night. But at the front desk, I discovered a better rate: $39 a night for Arabs. Luckily, I had my old Iraqi passport with me, so I got the discount. My room had all the amenities of a Radisson or a Marriott, and a few more: a copy of the Koran, a set of prayer beads, a prayer rug, disposable slippers, and an arrow on the desk, pointing in the direction of Mecca. Too excited to sleep, I channel-surfed, flipping from Al Jazeera to Al Arabiya. The day’s big news was a truck bombing in Nasiriyah that killed eighteen Italian soldiers.

The next morning, as I looked out over the city from the balcony of my room, a powerful feeling came over me suddenly, from my feet to the top of my head—I felt like I was home again, or like a fish back in the water.

After a few hours of sleep and a hot shower, I was ready to hit the road. People asked me if I was afraid to travel to Iraq, but I felt no fear, just a sense of urgency to get on the road—first to see my sister Bushra in Amman, Jordan, and then to keep going until I got to Karbala in Iraq. I was a man on a mission, with Samiah’s pleas ringing in my ears. I checked out, loaded my bags into a taxi, and headed for Al Bramkah Square, to find a taxi for the four-hour ride to Amman.

The square was noisy, crowded, chaotic. I was soon surrounded by a swarm of boys, offering to carry my bags. A foreigner, somebody who probably has some money, is a target they can’t pass up. Some were as young as eleven. It was sad to see such young children not in school but out in the street, hustling to support their families.

Inside the taxi terminal, customs officers inspected bags. The young boy who helped me with my luggage suggested a small tip to expedite the inspection process. Fifty Syrian lira—about one dollar—changed hands, the inspector pulled open the zipper of one of my bags, pulled it shut again, and waved us on.

I offered my young helper the same tip, but he argued for more; after all, he had actually worked for his money, while the customs officer had done nothing. So I gave him another fifty lira, enough to buy a couple of chicken shawirma sandwiches at one of the food stalls on the square.

At least ten taxis waited for passengers to Amman. None would take just a single fare; three were half full, but none of the drivers were willing to leave without a full car. With a little cooperation, the cabs could be filled one at a time, but that is not the way things work here. The other passengers in my car had been waiting for at least an hour, but I quickly lost my patience. I demanded my passport back from the driver, but, desperate for my fare, he refused. He insisted that another passenger was on the way and we would be leaving shortly.Finally, I lost my temper. “Why all this disorder?” I shouted in Arabic. “Why are we late? Why aren’t we leaving? Why are we split up in three taxis?’’ The commotion attracted the depot supervisor, and finally everything got sorted out. A fourth passenger showed up, and when I offered to pay the fare for a fifth, we were finally on our way. The sign on the depot wall listed the fare for Amman as 460 lira, or about $9, but the driver charged us each 500, plus 200 more for my luggage.

When we reached the duty-free store near the Jordanian border, the driver asked for my fare, in dollars. While we waited in the car, he ran in, soon emerging with four cartons of Marlboros and Winstons. These he distributed to the passengers before we crossed the border, and then collected from us once we cleared Jordanian customs. A few miles inside Jordan, he pulled over at a grocery store and money exchange, and sold the cigarettes, netting himself a five-hundred-lira (ten-dollar) profit.

From the taxi terminal in my sister’s adopted home of Amman, I called Ali and Hassan Jaber, sons of a friend of mine. Haji Jaber, originally from Nasiriyah, lives now in Fridley, and he asked me to deliver gifts to his boys, whom he has not seen for seven years. They met me at the terminal, gave me a ride, and helped me check in at a hotel. Then we spent the next few hours trying to find my sister Bushra, her husband Atta, and their six children.

They had emigrated from Iraq to Jordan in 2001. After two of their children died in infancy during the period of the sanctions, Bushra and Atta had scraped together enough money to pay the exit fees. But her old phone number in Amman no longer worked, and after several futile attempts to track her down, we gave up. I entrusted Ali and Hassan with the money I had planned to give her in person. When they finally found her, days later, she cried and cried, sad to have missed me. (After I returned to Minneapolis, I learned from Haji Jaber that, a few weeks after I saw them, Ali and Hassan were robbed at gunpoint of all their belongings in their Amman apartment. Penniless, and with expired visas, they had no choice but to return to Iraq.)

We broke the Ramadan fast at a small restaurant near the taxi depot, run by an Iraqi from my hometown of Najaf. The flavors were rich with memories: juicy ground lamb kebabs dripping with fat, aromatic Iraqi rice, eggplant, lamb shank served on bread soaked with gravy. The bread was the flat Iranian-style bread of my youth, before Saddam kicked out all the Iranians, when nearly all the bakers in Najaf were Persian. Our dinner ended with chai sangeen, strong sweet tea, and I was the last to leave the table.

I had already paid for a room for the night, but since we couldn’t find my sister, I was eager to get on the road, as soon as we could find a trustworthy driver. Ali and Hassan suggested their friend Kareem, but he was already booked; he recommended his friend Uday. I joked and said, “I thought Uday was dead.” Kareem laughed and said, “That’s a good one.”

“The regular price is $180,” Uday told me. “But I am only going to charge you $150.” Later I learned that the going rate from Amman to Iraq is $80 to $100. Drivers that are in Jordan from Iraq usually have customers in the outbound direction, and they are forced to return empty. So if they get a passenger on the return trip, they are lucky.

We called my youngest sister, Samiah, in Karbala to tell her that I was on my way, and she begged me to wait until dawn so that I would travel through Iraq in daylight. In the background, I heard her husband, Sayed Jamal, saying the same: “Make sure he doesn’t travel in the dark!” (Sayed means “mister”; we always call him that, because he is a direct descendent of the Prophet.) But I was impatient. I asked Uday, “Do you mind if we leave now?” And he said it was up to me. I couldn’t wait. I believe in my fate. I believe it is written.

Uday, an Iraqi from Nasiriyah, was about six feet tall and in his twenties, energetic and a good driver. The first four hours of the drive to the Iraqi border were uneventful, and with my American passport, we cleared Jordanian immigration quickly, while hundreds of others waited for permission to leave the country. Once inside Iraq, Uday maneuvered the ’91 Chevy Caprice through three lanes of eastbound traffic like it was an obstacle course, swerving sharply to dodge debris and road kill (which, he explained, might be booby-trapped), and staying as far as possible from the shoulder, to avoid roadside mines that could be detonated by remote control.

Before we’d left, Uday had advised me to conceal my cash, in case of armed robbery. There was a calculated risk here—I didn’t know whether I could trust Uday, and hiding the cash somewhere in the car would do no good if robbers stole the vehicle. So I taped half my cash to the inside of the brake light in the back window and kept the rest in my pocket. Robberies are frequent on the Amman-Baghdad highway, so cars often travel in convoys at very high speed to reduce the risk.

Most of the robberies are in the eastbound lane, because travelers headed into Iraq often carry large amounts of cash and valuable gifts and merchandise. But when you leave Iraq, you have nothing, so they don’t rob you. They are clever. If you have an SUV, you pretty much get robbed no matter what. A barrier divides much of the six-lane highway, so some cars race east to Baghdad in the westbound lanes. That reduces their risk of robbery, but it increases the risk of accidents, especially at night.

As we raced along at up to 90 miles an hour, Uday assumed the role of a tour guide. This pile of wreckage was the remains of a Syrian bus struck by an American missile; those bright lights in the distance were a coalition air base. Coming up on our right, the city of Ramadi, Khaldia, then Fallujah, and on the left, Abu Ghraib, home of the infamous prison. I wondered why we saw no coalition forces on the highway, and Uday said that since the attacks by the Iraqi resistance began, they no longer patrol this highway after dark.

Uday was robbed once himself, not on this highway, but farther south, on a stretch between Bat-ha and Nasiriyah, where the freeway has not been completed. The road curved to the right, and he had to brake suddenly to avoid a palm-tree trunk lying across the road. Two gunmen jumped out, pointing their machine guns at him, and ordered him out of his car. Next they ordered him to lie down on his stomach, tied his hands behind his back and searched him, taking his wallet and everything in his pockets and his car.

Cars kept coming; drivers saw the robbery in progress and honked their horns. Then farmers in the area heard the noise, so they started shooting. That made the two robbers flee. They must have been farmers from the area, said Uday; nobody would attempt this kind of robbery on foot unless they had a hideaway nearby. Somebody from another car untied him, then they moved the tree trunk, and he drove to the next village. When he arrived there in his car, which had been spotted at the crime scene, some of the villagers suspected he was one of the robbers.

In Karbala, my sister Samiah, her husband, and my nephews and nieces greeted me with hugs and tears, and a homecoming feast that was all the more abundant because it was Iftar, the meal that ends the fast each night of Ramadan. In the old days, the tradition was to kill a lamb to honor a visitor, but because of the war and the sanctions, they couldn’t afford a lamb. Instead my sister killed a chicken, and following tradition, I jumped over it. Samiah was my kid sister, the youngest in the family. Because my father was away when she was born, working in Kuwait, I had the honor as the oldest son of naming her, and I named her Samiah, after myself. When I had last seen her, she was ten years old, and I remembered her as a beautiful young girl. Now she looked weary, haggard, much older than thirty-nine.

Our Iftar feast began with burek—savory meat pies filled with ground lamb, onion, and spices, followed by kubeth hameth, dumplings of ground lamb and bulgur cooked in a sour lemon-flavored soup. Then came the sacrificial chicken, fried Kentucky-style in my honor, and a masgouf, a whole carp, baked in the oven, and tepsi, eggplant with lamb and tomatoes, aromatic Iraqi rice, okra cooked in tomato sauce, pickled vegetables, and fasenjoon, an Iranian dish of chicken with walnuts and pomegranate juice, all washed down with dogh, sour buttermilk.

Samiah’s kids, Leila, Lubna, Luma, and Mustafa, asked a lot of questions about their cousins. I told them about my son Saif, who is studying at the National Technical School for the Deaf in Rochester, New York. My second son, Saad, is in his second year at UMD, and the youngest, Tarik, is a freshman at Spring Lake Park High School.

The next day, all seven of us piled into Sayed Jamal’s ’94 Hyundai for the hourlong drive to Najaf, where my other sisters live and where my mother is buried. Samiah, Leila, and Lubna sat in the back seat, while Luma and Mustafa fought over who would get to sit in front—in Uncle Sami’s lap. Unlike the two older girls, the two youngest, born during the time of the sanctions, are tiny, with thin, fragile bones. There are no seatbelt laws in Iraq, or seatbelts, either, and traffic accidents are a daily event.

As we entered Najaf, we saw a sad sight. In the seventies, the government had planted a green belt of trees around the city. After the war, when there was a lot of looting, the trees were all chopped down for firewood. Now all that remained was a forest of stumps. The air in Najaf is smoggy, reeking of diesel exhaust and sewage. There are flies everywhere.Najaf is about the size of Minneapolis, with a population of 400,000, but its cemetery is the largest in the world. Imam Ali, the cousin of Muhammad, is buried in Najaf. Many Iraqis want to be buried near him, so that he will be their advocate on Judgment Day. From all over Iraq, the dead are brought in their coffins to Najaf, first to the shrine of Imam Ali, and then to the cemetery for burial.

At the cemetery, we bought some rosewater and incense sticks from vendors. When we reached my mother’s grave, I knelt down and touched the top of the grave and recited Al Fateha, the first verse of the Koran. Then my sister Samiah broke down and started wailing. “Mother, wake up!” she cried. “Sami has arrived.” Following the tradition, we poured the rosewater on her grave, and lit the incense and candles, and spent half an hour reciting prayers before we left.

In Najaf, my sister Samirah had prepared a big feast and invited five families—at least thirty people, counting all the kids. But tradition dictated that I must first visit my oldest sister, Salimah. She doesn’t have a phone, so I couldn’t call her, so I just went to her home and surprised her. When we get to her house, everybody shouted, “Salimah, Salimah, come on out, Uncle Sami has arrived!” Salimah is my most sensitive and emotional sister; during the period of the sanctions, she twice tried to kill herself, because she couldn’t provide for her eleven children. When she saw me, it was a very emotional moment. She wept and hugged me and wouldn’t let go of me for a long, long time. She is younger than me, but she looked much older; years of war and sanctions have taken their toll.

The first friend I wanted to see in Najaf was my old neighbor Rashad Khalifah. We used to talk about poetry and politics, when we were in college together, and he had often asked about me after I left Iraq. Tracking him down wasn’t easy, but I found him sitting in front of his auto parts shop across from the El Askeri mosque, deep in thought, staring out into space. He didn’t notice me, so I snuck behind him and sat down behind the counter. When he came back into the store, I asked him, “Can I help you?”—as if it was my shop and he was the customer. He did a double take, and then he recognized me, and we hugged and laughed, and then we sat down and talked for hours.

Rashad told me about the friends who are still around, but when he got around to our old friends Bassem al Har and Fadhel Sunbah, he stopped, looked down, and with a deep, sad voice said, “Sami, they were executed. Killed by the regime.”

“Why?” I asked. I knew Bassem was a communist, but last I heard, he was out of the country, living in exile in Hungary. Rashad said Bassem got very homesick, so he snuck back into the country to see his family. When he tried to sneak back out again, through the Kurdish area to Turkey, he got caught. When they found out who he was, they executed him.

Fadhel Sunbah was arrested with two of his brothers, Rashad said, in order to blackmail his fourth brother, who had fled to Iran and joined the Badr Brigades, the military arm of the Hizb Ad-da’awa resistance against Saddam’s regime. When the fourth brother didn’t come back, they killed Fadhel and his brothers. Their father died a few months later, of a broken heart.

Hearing the news, I felt sick. As soon as I could, I went to Fadhel’s family’s jewelry store in Najaf’s main market, now run by Fadhel’s nephews. I introduced myself, told them that their uncle had been my best friend, and offered my prayers that his blood, and the blood of his brothers, might help to build a new Iraq. Everybody in the shop wept.

Almost everybody I met in my native country has somebody in their family who was killed or is missing. When I met my cousin Aziz, the historian of our clan, he gave me a list of the names of fifteen men from the Rasouli family who have been missing since the Iraq-Iran war. And the tragedy continues: The week after I left Iraq, Rashad’s own son Muhammad was killed by robbers, who shot him and then stole his car.

Walking around Karbala, we saw few signs of the war or the occupation. The occupying troops here were Bulgarians and Poles, and there was a tacit agreement between the occupiers and the local population: You don’t bother us, we don’t bother you. (That lasted until December 28, when coordinated attacks on several sites killed seven occupation soldiers.) Najaf and Karbala have not seen the same level of destruction and violence as Baghdad, or the same level of resistance as Samarra and Tikrit. Everyone I talked to in Najaf and Karbala was glad that Saddam is gone.

A flood of pilgrims, mostly from Iran (home to most of the world’s Shiite Muslims), have pumped money into the local economy in Najaf and Karbala. The Iranians, now much wealthier than the Iraqis, pay for street cleaners, and have sent a fleet of sanitation trucks to keep the holy sites clean. Najaf and Karbala have little religious significance for Sunni Muslims but are the holiest cities for the Shiites, rivaling Mecca in their importance. When Saddam was in power, he charged Iranians $500 to enter the country, a sum few could afford. Now that he is gone and they can enter for free, Iranians rich and poor are flooding across the border. But you see many more beggars on the street than before, and more homelessness. There is plenty of food, but people complain about shortages of fuel, water, and frequent electricity blackouts. People ask, “Why can’t this great superpower restore electricity here after so many months, when they could restore power in the U.S. after the East Coast blackout within a few hours?”

Many people wait in line for hours to buy gas, some so they can turn around, siphon it out and sell it on the black market. The police can go to the front of the line at the filling stations, but they too sell their gas on the black market, for four or five times what they pay for it.

In Karbala and Najaf, you see lots of vendors on the street selling everything from dates and oranges to toys, shoes, and cigarettes. You see young boys who should be in school selling the gasoline on street corners. It is unhealthy work; when the boys siphon the gas from the tanks, they draw poisonous gas fumes into their lungs. Because I was well dressed and carried a camera, the vendors assumed I was a pilgrim from Iran, and called out to me in Farsi.

My brother-in-law Sayed Jamal, a stocky, jovial bearded guy in his early forties, strode through the streets of Karbala like a mukhtar, a mayor, with me in tow, greeting everyone we met. He used to be a jeweler, but now he is a partner in a small money exchange. I asked him what kind of business is good now in Iraq. Gold, he said. Under the sanctions, people sold all their gold, because they were in need. Now with the sanctions lifted, people want their gold back.

At the Roknil Bustan “Corner Garden” restaurant in Karbala, I struck up a conversation with the cook. “I understand you are an American,” he said. “If you can take me with you, I am available.” It is something I heard over and over again.

On the way to Baghdad, to deliver gifts for a friend, we suddenly found ourselves behind a Humvee guarding the rear of a convoy. We tried to pass, but two soldiers with machine guns in the back of the Humvee waved us back. So I stuck my head out the window and talked to them. One of them was named Sean, and the other was Bert. It’s okay to take their pictures, Sean said. He’s from Texas. Bert didn’t say anything, and he kept his finger on the trigger.

Sayed Jamal had met another American soldier, a few weeks earlier. The soldier said he was from Minnesota, so Sayed Jamal tells him his cousin has a coffeehouse in Minneapolis. “What’s it called?” the GI wanted to know. “Sindbad’s,” said Sayed Jamal. “Sami!” the GI exclaimed. “I know Sami! That’s no coffeehouse, that’s a restaurant.”

In Baghdad, unlike Najaf and Karbala, we see many Americans, and many concrete barriers. When we arrive at the Al Hamra Hotel to deliver our parcels, we are frisked and questioned by three Kalashnikov-toting Iraqi guards before being allowed to drive through a maze of concrete barriers. On our way back from Baghdad, we went to Mahmudiyah, a bustling small town thirty miles south of the capital. My friend Bahar, who lives in London, had asked me to give his mother $300 from him. We were received with unbelievable warmth. Bahar’s brother Nahrawan closed his shop for the day and rushed to the market to buy kebabs for everyone.He told us to make sure to park close to the house—otherwise our car would be stolen—and sent one of his sons twice to check on it. In a vacant lot nearby, vendors had set up an open-air thieves’ market, selling pipes, wiring, and construction materials stolen from government sites. Nobody tries to stop them. The family lives in fear, the mother said; they hear stories every day about robberies and kidnappings. Everybody knows that she has money, because she has sons who work abroad. Before, life was a nightmare because of the regime, but at least they had security. Now things are less stable, and everything is more expensive. My family in Najaf and Karbala also lives more comfortably than many of their neighbors, but with less fear; the holy cities are farther away from Baghdad, and less dangerous. Outside Nahrawan’s house, we see a teenage boy in rags, huddled against a fence. Perhaps he lived in an orphanage before, but now he lives on the street, surviving on handouts from Nahrawan and his neighbors.

Heading back to Najaf, we ran into a traffic jam, and then the sound of distant gunfire. Later we learned that half a mile ahead of us, resistance fighters had ambushed two vehicles, killing seven Spanish intelligence officers.

There were few outward signs of the war in Najaf, but I visited one large clothing factory that was bombed three times during the war. Nobody knew why it was bombed; it was a clothing factory that produced school uniforms. Nobody could tell me if anyone was injured, but more than 1,750 employees, including 1,500 women, were out of work. The director told me that after the war, U.S. military personnel came, inspected the damage, and said the coalition would help them rebuild. But that was months ago, and the promised assistance had not arrived.

On Laylet al Qudr, the anniversary of the death of Imam Ali, who was murdered in Kufa and is buried in Najaf, hundreds of bare-chested men marched through the streets, beating themselves bloody with chains and chanting their devotion to Imam Ali and the Twelve Imams. It is believed that if you worship God on this night, it is better than a thousand months of prayer. On the street people gave away tea and temmen wa qima, a traditional dish of rice, lamb, split yellow peas, dried lemon, and spices. Thousands of people were out on the streets, many gathered around televisions, watching a drama about the martyrdom of Imam Ali.

Later that evening, at Salimah’s house, I pointed to a picture on the wall of Imam Ali and the Twelve Imams, and asked, do you think Imam Ali really looked like that? Some said the portraits were based on visions of the imams from dreams. But nobody knows what the imams looked like. I asked them how much of the pictures are true and how much is imaginary. Why should we spend this tremendous energy on these three days and commit ourselves to ideas that we are not sure about? It’s just like a mirage—we keep going toward that mirage assuming that it is water because we are thirsty, but we never get to that water because it is a mirage, a figment of our imagination, and meanwhile we neglect other things like our city and our children and our future.

The reason that the Sunnis were able to control the country is that they live in the present—they joined the Baath party and the army, while we Shiites keep reliving ancient history. I told them, the deceased imams will be really upset if they come back to life and see how backward we are. They don’t want us to keep crying and mourning and neglecting our living standards.

One day in Najaf, Sayed Jamal arranged an interview for me with Ayatollah Ali Assebzawari, in his office, across the street from the Shrine of Imam Ali. After noon prayers, we waited our turn while he met with a man who has asked him to resolve a family dispute over an inheritance. His verdict will be based on Shariah, Islamic law—and for the faithful, it is the only law that matters, especially now, with the official legal system in shambles.

The learned Sayed Ali al Mousawi Assebzawari was a handsome, soft-spoken man of medium build in his early forties, wearing a white dishdasha and brown aba (a clerical vest) and the black turban that indicates that he is a direct descendent of the prophet. His office is furnished with a big colorful Persian carpet, cushions, and a low desk on the floor. He is a religious scholar and the author of a recent book on the Islamic view of cloning (permissible, he says); a shelf in his office is lined with Islamic texts.

He was willing to be interviewed, but he politely refused to allow me to take his picture; he didn’t know anything about this magazine, The Rake, and he didn’t want his picture or his words to appear next to pictures of naked women. I assured him that it is a very proper magazine, read by sophisticated, well-educated people. But I wonder whether he had looked up the definition of “rake” in a dictionary.

I asked him what the U.S. had accomplished since the end of the war, and he said “nothing.” The American forces had a good plan to get rid of Saddam, but they didn’t have a plan for how the Iraqi people should start their new lives. After six months of occupation the system is still the same as before, he said; he didn’t see any improvement. They changed the currency, but the economy is still corrupt, there is no economy, no reform, there are thousands of police assigned by the American authority, but those police have no teeth. There is no place to go and complain if there is a crime, so crime is spreading everywhere, especially kidnapping and robberies.

I asked him, what do the Iraqis owe the Americans for removing Saddam’s regime? He answered, “Who installed the regime in the first place? They just removed a regime that they installed, a regime that tortured us and caused pain and agony for the past thirty-five years. They didn’t do us any favor—they installed him, and then they removed him. They knew for the last thirty-five years that this was a brutal dictatorship and they didn’t do anything to help the Iraqis get rid of him, and in 1991 when the Iraqi people rose up, they didn’t help the Iraqis but they condoned Saddam’s brutality. To liberate Iraq now is nothing, for all the suffering the U.S. allowed to go on for thirty-five years.

The so-called resistance in the Sunni Triangle isn’t a real resistance, he said. That’s just acts of desperation by supporters of the old regime who have lost their power and privileges, but if the occupiers stay and become colonizers, you will see a real resistance; the whole Iraqi people will participate. We have been told that the coalition force came to eliminate the old regime and leave, so we are expecting no more than that. By a certain time they should leave. “We are waiting and watching, and I hope we will not need to confront each other.”

There is a lot of death in Iraq. But it isn’t just Saddam or war. The risks to Iraqis’ health are legion. Many of my friends, I learned, have died from car accidents, or heart attacks, or other diseases. In Najaf, I visited my cousin Haji Hassoun in his tailor shop. I walked in unannounced and asked him impatiently when my dishdasha would be ready. Puzzled, he asked when I’d brought him the fabric. I said, “Thirty years ago!” Then he recognized me, and laughed, and we talked about old times. But three days later, I attended his funeral; he died suddenly of a stroke.

There are also many deaths and killings that go unreported. My brother-in-law Mudhar, Salimah’s husband, who used to be a butcher and now works in a funeral home, said that they get the bodies of two or three former Baathist officials every day. One recent arrival had been decapitated.

Two young children were killed at an elementary school while I was in Karbala. At first, people said it was a terrorist attack, but now they think it may have been an unexploded American cluster bomb, picked up by one of the kids. Nobody knew. The principal didn’t want to talk about it. If he said it was a cluster bomb, he would be accused of being against the Americans. If he said it was terrorists, he feared being killed by the Baathists. The parents were angry because there was no police investigation.

On one of my last days in Iraq, talk turned to the future, which for many Iraqis is both hopeful and heartbreaking. The future is, in many ways, up to the women alone.

Salimah’s oldest daughter, Nadia, twenty-nine, lost her husband in a fire at his workplace. The chances she will remarry are very slim—there are lots of women with no husbands. My sisters asked me, Sami, is there any chance that we can find you a nice woman? They surprised me with the question. It took me a minute to think about it. I told them I might marry again if I move back to Iraq. I am not sure if a woman from Najaf would fit very well in American society. “Sami,” they said, “if you decide, seriously, that you want to get married, you just let us know and we will have for you a parade. All kinds of women, the women of your dreams. If you want, we can find one for you, college educated, twenty or twenty-one years old.”

I laughed and joked, “Younger!” “Sami,” they said, “if you want one even younger, you can have a younger one. There are many families that would give you their daughter. All they care about is that you protect her.”

I may return to Iraq someday—not to stay there forever, but perhaps for a few years. I would like to work with the ministry of education, or perhaps as the mayor of a town, where I could help build the new Iraq. As an Iraqi-American, I would like to be a link between the two countries, and heal the relationship between my two homes. They could use another father, brother, uncle.