Between Two Worlds by Zainab Salbi Read Free Book Online Page B

two, and yet I remember those and more.
    Mama did an extraordinary thing as the young pilot zoomed past us that afternoon. She raised her hand and waved at him. Then, after he was safely back up in the sky where he belonged, she looked over at me and took my stricken face in both her hands.
    “How cool was that?” she asked.
     
     
    When the war started, the atmosphere in Baghdad changed almost immediately. You could feel it in the air. Iraqi flags—red, white, and black with green stars—were everywhere and somehow intimidating, rather than reassuring to me as a child. Streets filled with Baathist marchers chanting anti-Iranian slogans. Anti-Iranian graffiti proliferated on public walls. Almost overnight, there were soldiers with guns and pictures of Saddam Hussein everywhere. Our state newspaper portrayed Iraqi military leaders as uniformed generals sitting politely in a round table taking instructions from the president; Iranians were shown as crazy mullahs in dirty beards who stood on chairs arguing and yelling at each other. These crazed zealots had attacked us because they wanted to spread their revolution throughout the Arab world, Saddam Hussein had told us, vowing to defend us. He titled this war the Second Qadissiya, after the First Qadissiya, which was fought in the seventh century to advance the progress of Islam into Persia, and compared himself to the great Muslim warrior of that war, Saad Ben Abi Waqaas. He didn’t call our enemies Iranians, but al furs Al Majoos, “fire-worshiping Persians,” a term I later realized must have been designed to revive ethnic hatred that had lain dormant since Persians, mostly Zoroastrians who worshiped fire, had converted to Islam many centuries earlier. By reviving ancient animosities and claiming that he was protecting Iraq from the spread of the Iranian revolution, he was able to portray this as a defensive war, not a war of aggression, which is forbidden by the Quran. Our media was so controlled that I didn’t find out until I left Iraq that Iran wasn’t the one that even started the war.
    At school, we learned to defend our country and our lives. We practiced hiding under our desks for air raid drills, took instruction in first aid, and found out that our enemies weren’t just Iranians, but unseen Iraqi collaborators who secretly supported Iranians. To combat these insidious traitors in our midst, we learned there existed a secret government agency called the Mukhabarat, which was described to us as men in civilian clothes who were working quietly to protect us from the danger these Iranian sympathizers posed to our safety. Mukhabarat means “informers” in Arabic.
    “I know who they are—the men with the big black mustaches!” Mohammed said, as always ready to show off his superior knowledge.
    Funny how you forget so many things teachers try to teach you, but you remember the looks on their faces when they’re caught off guard. My teacher looked nervous when Mohammed said that. I remember. After a moment, she corrected him.
    “No one knows what they look like because they are secret, ” she said. “That is the point.”
    But Mohammed was right. Even I knew what they looked like. Mama had just complained about them hanging around outside the ice cream shop the week before, a bunch of men with big black mustaches who looked as if they were entitled to just stand there and look us over from head to toe as we came out licking our pistachio ice cream cones.
    My parents had zero interest in politics. My father, the son of a prominent Ministry of Education official who had suffered censure for being frank about his political views, actively shunned politics. So, as I understand it, did many other educated Iraqis as Saddam Hussein brutally solidified his control of Iraq through his nationalistic pan-Arab Baath Party. Because both schools and airlines were nationalized, however, my parents had to join the Baath Party like most Iraqis just to hold a job. There