Up Close, It’s a Different Story /
Saad Qasim refused to leave his home. Nothing and no one could push him to abandon it. It was all he had in the world, planted firmly in Amriya, in Baghdad’s west. His parents lived next door, with his brother’s family on the other side. It isn’t that grand, an average middle-class Iraqi house, modest next to massive villas nearby. It is made of dull-colored brick, with a garden and a high gate. But, he told me more than once, “I can’t ever leave.”
Arab children seldom stray far from their parents when they grow up. A family home means more to them than it does to typical Americans whose idea of happiness might be a backyard for Memorial Day cookouts but who can more easily pull up stakes and move on. To Saad, like so many in the Middle East where nothing is certain, his house is his pension, a trust fund for his daughters, his identity.
“My house is my past and my future,” he told me, and nothing would make him give that up. Not the bodies that began to pile up in the football field around the corner. Not the gunshots that killed his neighbor, the man’s brains spilled in the backseat of Saad’s car as he raced to the closest hospital. Not the threat to his own life, and his family’s, by the Sunni executioners who made Amriya a killing field.
On the night his friend was killed, Saad risked death to come to my office. The man’s blood had spattered his carton of Marlboro Reds. “I just can’t believe this is happening here,” he said, wiping tears on a yellow shirt stained with yet more blood. By then, this was no longer the spirited Saad who used to visit my office frequently to stand in the doorway and tell me about life in Iraq.
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