Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [98]
After she died, I sat with her sister, her aunts, her cousin, and her colleagues. They were the ones who told me the rest of her story: That Atwar had been the head of the family since her father died, and had resisted pressure to get married even though at thirty she was an old maid. She was too caught up in history, too busy building her own career, to start cooking dinner for a husband. She published a book tracing her adventures as a war reporter and had begun writing a second, examining the role of women in Iraq.
“During the battle of Najaf, the correspondents wouldn’t go out in the streets. The Shia felt Al-Jazeera was against them,” recalled Amna Dhabi, her colleague. “But Atwar was very neutral. She’d say, ‘I’m for Iraq, not for a specific sect.’ She got in her car and went to Najaf and went live on TV.”
The death threats pelted her for years. First she moved her widowed mother and younger sister to a new house in a safer neighborhood; a few months before she was killed, she took them to live in Amman. But it didn’t feel right. She couldn’t stay out of Iraq. She came home again.
“She believed fate had decided for her to stay in Iraq,” Atwar’s twenty-five-year-old sister, Itha, told me. “She would always say, ‘It’s better to stay in one’s country.’”
It was a deliberate choice. Atwar, unlike most of her stranded countrymen, had the talent and connections to get out of Iraq. But she wouldn’t go. She turned down jobs abroad, determined to tough out the violence. When Al-Jazeera was expelled by the Iraqi government, she went to work for the rival station, Al-Arabiya.
All the while, the threats kept coming.
This is not only the story of Atwar, but the story of Iraq. Her aspirations were the finest hopes of a broken country; her murder reeked of the hopelessness of a lost cause. Here is one woman, one soul among some 100,000 Iraqis who have been sacrificed, fed to appease the nihilistic blood thirst of a slow-motion national collapse. She was no more than the doctors, children, professors, street sweepers, goat vendors, soccer players, and other Iraqis who were snuffed in this war. But she lived on television when television was the national security blanket—the only glimmer of the outside world still allowed to penetrate an Iraqi home; a flashing, talking companion; an addictive succor. She had kept company with the country all down the darkest days. Her death matters because all of the deaths mattered, but most of them were anonymous, and she lived as a symbol of mad hope for an impossible, alternative Iraq: a place of liberated men and women, and the free exchange of ideas; a society that had moved beyond its sectarian differences. She died because that hope was indeed insane, a bold and audacious rejection of visible evil.
Life under Saddam meant existing in a very tight space, a land without horizon, discouraged from dreams. Then war comes and absolute change washes in on tides of killing. Iraqis, who had pined for everything in the world, were glutted with everything, all at once. Every imagined possibility, the ones that were hidden in the shadows, suddenly shimmered and breathed in the air. Saddam was gone, the country would reinvent itself, anything could happen. But … every possibility was chained to its own weight in danger and death. The claustrophobic closets of dictatorship gave way to the wild and wide-open and deadly plains of war and foreign invaders. The people found themselves stranded with no constraints except rusty imagination and the violence that stalked the land. There came to them all things light, and all things dark.
So it was confusing, talking to Atwar. She kept