A City Without Men

Karima Hashim stepped onto her narrow street in Tal Afar, the closest thing to a playground she’d known in her fourteen years of life, and died, her mother says, when a single bullet from an American sniper smashed through her skull. She had been on her way to buy milk. For two days her crumpled body lay in a pool of blood, watched over by the rocking silhouette of her mother, Tahena, from a second-floor window where she kept a vigil, praying for her daughter’s departed soul and hurling rocks at any stray dog that came too close to Karima’s body.

Tahena was alone now. Her husband and two sons, fearing arrest, detention, or worse, had fled in front of advancing American and Iraqi troops who swept into the city in northwest Iraq last fall in pursuit of insurgents. She watched as the soldiers moved from house to house. Filled with rage, she fought back when they finally kicked her door out of its frame in the middle of the night. “We could hear her screaming at the soldiers,” said a neighbour. “You murdered my daughter! You murdered my daughter!” She kept repeating this until they left, having satisfied themselves that no male was hiding in the house.

When the soldiers invaded Tal Afar as part of Operation Restoring Rights, their goal was to clear the territory along Iraq’s northwestern border with Syria of foreign fighters and their local support network. The American occuppiers seem to assume that all Iraqi men are terrorists, and consequently detention centres are overflowing with suspects. According to Amnesty International, by late November 18,500 people were being held in prisons across Iraq, many of them innocent. By the time 5,000 Iraqi troops, backed by 3,500 American soldiers, arrived in Tal Afar, there were no men left in Tahena’s house hold, just as there were no males of fight ing age left in her entire neighbourhood.

Tal Afar, once a bustling border city of 200,000, has been shattered. Many neighourhoods have been flattened by US air strikes and nearly 400 homes destroyed. It is a desolate city, set on pause, where women spend their days praying for the return of their husbands and sons, who, in this rigidly patriarchal culture, sustain the households. Losing a husband or son makes even the simplest tasks challenging. “We’re afraid to leave our homes,” says Marwa Marwan, an eighteen-year-old student at the Tal Afar Secondary School for Girls. “It’s so dangerous. We do it only because it is necessary for our future. But the boys, if they are still here, don’t dare to leave the house.”

It’s an odd role reversal in a male-dominated society. But any adult male who stayed behind risked imprisonment, and many of the women have yet to hear from husbands, fathers, and brothers seized in the raids. “The Americans arrested my father,” says Asma Omar, another student at the school, as she fought back tears. “They arrived late at night and took him away. I haven’t seen or heard from him in almost a month.” Asma is adamant that her father, who sent her two brothers away just before the Americans arrived, has done nothing wrong. Most of the students in this graduating class of thirty girls tell similar stories. When asked if their houses had been searched by US soldiers, every single girl raised a hand. “We live in fear now,” says Zuleikh Alias, the school’s headmistress, adding that the stories of foreign fighters crossing from Syria and turning Tal Afar into a Taliban-style fundamentalist outpost are false. “It’s the Americans who frighten us. The mujahedeen never caused any problems. They never stopped the girls from attending school, and whenever there was going to be fighting they would call us and tell the girls to go home for their safety.”

With the arrival of the Americans, and the departure of most of the men in the city, the women feel vulnerable in ways they never have in the past. Not only are they afraid of the violence, they are also frightened by the American soldiers, who they claim spend more time staring at the women’s bodies than watching out for their safety. “It’s very uncomfortable for us,” says Marwa. “They never ask us about any dangers or terrorists or things we might need. They just stare and stare and stare.”

At a forward operating base in the al Sarai neighbourhood, one of Tal Afar’s most dangerous, an American officer, who refuses to give his name, responds with injured pride to the accusations. “You know,” he says, his face turning red, “these people tell us on the one hand that they were terrorized by the insurgents. Students couldn’t go to school because they were afraid of being kidnapped. But now that we’ve secured the area, they would rather we go out somewhere in the desert and not show our faces.”

The Americans have locked down the city so thoroughly that attacks against them from insurgents crossing the Syrian border have fallen off dramatically. But at what cost to the innocent non-combatants of Tal Afar? “It’s too much,” says Major Jameel, an officer with the 3rd Division of the Iraqi army. “The Americans don’t understand Iraq. They don’t understand that Tal Afar has had a lot of problems over the past couple of years.”

Many of those problems stem from the deeply ingrained animosity between the Shia and Sunni Muslim populations in the city. “So people are trying to get revenge by giving the Americans bad information,” the major says. “We should only be searching homes when we know we have good information. But the Americans are so afraid that they just go in, break down the door, and arrest all the men.”

America’s heavy-handed approach seems to be its answer to a fundamental question: How do you win a war against insurgents with a minimal loss of soldiers? At least part of the answer involves regarding every male of Arab descent in Iraq as a threat. A second element is to demonstrate that every threat confronting US troops will be met with enough force not only to neutralize the enemy but also to make the underlying message crystal clear: don’t interfere with us. And if civilians like Karima Hashim get in the way, their deaths can be blamed on insurgents or passed off as collateral damage.