'I'm Waiting for My Destiny'

Baghdad Family Made Homeless by U.S. Missile Still Can't Rebuild

Mariam Jassam, 3, prays alongside her aunt, Suham Mohammed, at her aunt's home in Baghdad, where her family was living temporarily after their home was destroyed in March. (Photos Andrea Bruce Woodall -- Thewashington Post)

BAGHDAD -- Down the street from the trickle of sewage, past a shabby market where three U.S. Army Humvees patrolled through crowds, Madhlum Jassam clambered hesitantly over rubble left by a U.S. bombing in March. To no one in particular, he whispered a phrase. "God forbid," he said over and over. "God forbid."

"This is the refrigerator," he muttered, pointing to a crumpled carcass tossed in the debris that he called home. "These are my daughters' clothes," he said, gesturing toward a dusty brown sweater that was no longer familiar. He stopped, taking a deep breath, and surveyed the life he once had. "What can I do?" he asked, shaking his head. "Yell? Beat my chest?"

Jassam's new life began on March 31, when his home was destroyed by a U.S. missile strike nine days before Iraqi President Saddam Hussein fell. In the seven months since, like the country still shadowed by that collapse, he has tried to rebuild.

In vain, he sought compensation from U.S. officials administering the occupation -- seeking $5,000, recognizing he would settle for less. In desperation, he considered asking for charity from neighborhood mosques. And in resignation, he -- like his country, perched as it is between war and peace -- waits with frayed patience for answers to uncertainties.

"How's it going to end? I'm still waiting for my fate. I'm waiting for my destiny," he said. "Only God knows."

There's a saying in Iraq, often quoted by the elderly to describe misfortune. It tells of a married woman courted by a man named Ali. She divorces her husband, only to have Ali die. "She didn't keep her husband," it goes, "nor did she get Mr. Ali."

Like many in his country, Jassam is haunted by the proverb, and his story is a tale of today's Iraq. The country has endured a revolution whose reward is often lost on its people. Despite promises of prosperity and security, the U.S. occupation and reconstruction have yet to restore even the certainties of the past, shattered by the brief but violent war. In the shards left behind is a sense of helplessness. Jassam lost his home, then, in the void that has lingered, he surrendered hope.

He gazed at his house, the wreckage taking on the air of permanence.

"I'm like a farmer at the harvest," he said, "and my sickle is broken."

Fleeing to the Country

In the war that began March 20, the odds were stacked against Jassam's house, a four-room building of gray concrete and yellow brick. The neighborhood of Radwaniya was a redoubt of Baath Party repression, home to a palace of Hussein's, housing for his officers and barracks of his military elite. Even to those who lived there, its name had become a synonym for a killing field.

A few days after the war began, as Iraqi television aired patriotic songs, footage of goose-stepping soldiers and stock images of Hussein firing a rifle into the air, Jassam, his wife and his three children fled with two pillows, a blue-and-brown blanket and what they had left from government rations -- tea, rice, sugar, cooking oil and lentils. They piled into a battered orange-and-white taxi and, like hundreds, perhaps thousands of others, headed down the highway west for the safety of the countryside.

"We were escaping death," said his wife, Jamila Abed.

The driver was a friend. Rather than charge the going rate of 30,000 Iraqi dinars -- 10 times the prewar price -- he took them for free. It was, Jassam said, another instance of a community that pulled together, creating bonds that didn't exist before or afterward.

Within an hour, they were in fields irrigated by the Euphrates River, staying with a cousin who had opened his home to the families of three other relatives and six strangers. As tradition dictates, he provided his guests -- 35 in all -- with mattresses, blankets, food and drink. Jassam's family took up residence on the cold concrete floor of a guardhouse, next to a chicken coop.

For the weeks they were there, it provided the families' sustenance.

"We finished the whole coop," he said. "We ate chicken for lunch, we ate chicken for dinner. For breakfast, we had eggs."

The bombing was distant, but the threat of death lingered. The family recalled U.S. military helicopters flying low, suspicious of the crowds that had gathered at the farmhouse. They recalled the days of waiting, and they remembered the fear.

"Most of the time, I sat with my children in my lap," said Abed, a veiled woman whose bearing befits her university degree. "I'm a mother, and I love my children. If a missile landed, I'd want us to die together. I'd want them to die close to my heart."

Hussein was toppled on April 9, but they stayed for another 10 days or so, fearful of the chaos that followed in Baghdad. Over that time, they spoke little about the dictator, less about the future. Abed remembered one sentiment that overwhelmed them.

"There was no more death," she said.

In Baghdad, Jassam's house and two others were already destroyed -- flattened in a missile strike that came, as neighbors recalled, at 3:30 a.m. Scavengers had already picked the rubble clean of belongings. His neighbor, who stayed in Baghdad, lost his mother, sister, wife, two sons and a daughter. Weeks later, Jassam said, the man was seen wandering the streets, having lost his mind.

Life at the Hospital

Wearing a nurse's coat and the haggard look of the overwhelmed, Jassam tried to negotiate the demands of families streaming last week into Yarmouk Hospital, where he works a 24-hour shift three days a week managing a wing that treats broken bones. Gone was the civility and solidarity Jassam recalled from the war. In their place were confusion and chaos.

Some families were frustrated, some were angry. Their unmet demands were not unlike Jassam's, played out on a smaller stage. Most of them wanted a response, perhaps just an assurance that someone was in charge.

"What do you want from me?" the gaunt, 42-year-old Jassam carped as a young man entered his office, its yellow paint peeling.

To another, who threatened to complain, he said sternly, "If you want to complain, you can complain, a thousand times."

In came a father whose son was shot in the right leg during a carjacking. He asked for a stretcher. "Do I have stretcher? Does it look like I have a stretcher? Go ask one of the assistants." Another asked where Dr. Mohammed was, seeking help for a neighbor wounded in the left arm as he tried to stop a robbery. "God knows," Jassam answered, lingering on each word. "I don't know."

Arabic is infused with formalities. In most instances, the responses are reflexive, removing any awkwardness from an encounter. For Jassam, they could carry the edge of sarcasm. "God bless you for visiting us," he told a woman whom he turned away.

"Some people say, 'Please, can you give me an injection? Can you take my blood pressure? Can you give me a Band-Aid?' " he said, his desk stacked with tattered pink patients' folders. "Until now, I haven't done my prayers. I haven't done them. I have no time. I have no time to think. Since the fall of the government, after the destruction of my house, I've felt tense all the time, always.

"You should excuse me," he said.

For more than three months -- or, as Jassam puts it, 100 days -- his family lived down the hall in Room 14, unused at the time. To secure the deal, he agreed to work as an always-available nurse. Abed and the three children -- Mustafa, Rasul and Mariam -- lived on three hospital beds pulled together. Their clothing hung from curtain rods that once separated patients. The hospital administrator asked them not to wander the halls and, to fill their time, the children made dolls out of bandages and other supplies.

Since the summer, they have moved from house to house -- a week here, three days there, a few weeks at another home, sleeping -- as Abed said -- "like sausages." They now live at his mother's house, sharing the floor of his brother's room. Tape from the war still covers the windows to stop glass from shattering in a bombing. They cook on a white stove next to the bathroom.

"Any person who doesn't complain, who keeps smiling at me, I end up staying," Jassam said.

On this day, he sat in his office after the crowds dispersed. His son Mustafa, 9, who attends school nearby, sat on a cot with a soiled green blanket. He opened his notebook, adorned with pink flowers, and read a poem from his Arabic class.

"My house, my house, my house."

"How beautiful is the house."

"How beautiful is the person sitting inside with nightingales and flowers."

"My father and my mother are two suns lighting the house."

Jassam said nothing.

Compensation Denied

On a cool, sunny day last week, Jassam returned to the house, in a swath of impoverished Baghdad where rural and urban still collide. A feral dog picked at the rubble. Across the street, in a lot awash in sewage, two horses stood tethered to a wall. This time, he came alone. When he brought Mustafa this summer to see what it had become, the child cried so violently he vomited.

As he stood on the street, his neighbor, 36-year-old Shadha Hashim, approached him. Her house, too, was damaged.

"No one has given us any compensation," she shouted. "Whom do I file a complaint with? Why won't anyone help us?"

"God help you," Jassam said. After she left, he spoke from his own experience. "They'll ask anybody to help them," he said. "Everybody wants compensation. Everybody expects they should receive compensation, but no one is providing it."

Jassam first ventured back to his house 10 days after the war. They had lived there for 10 years, building it room by room and saving money for appliances by selling cans of government-rationed baby's milk for about $2. When he arrived, nothing was left.

"I imagined where my son was sitting, where my wife was sleeping. I knew that if I hadn't fled, I would be in the other world. Only God knows," he recalled. "I sat down on the ground. I put my head on my hands, and the neighbors came toward me."

They thanked God that he was alive, that his wife and children were safe.

"All the neighbors said, 'Come live in our house, our house is your house. Whatever you need is here,' " he remembered. "If they weren't crying for me with their eyes, they were crying in their hearts.

"It's difficult," he said. Then he repeated the words.

For two months, Jassam went repeatedly to a nearby U.S. military base. He prepared a claim form, photocopied his property deed and identity papers and tucked pictures of the damage in a manila folder. He shaved his beard, wore a white dress shirt striped with purple and put on a blue tie with red polka dots, the only one he owned. But after six visits to the base and a barely functioning courthouse, he was told bluntly if politely: The military was not responsible for damage inflicted during combat.

He said the interpreter working with U.S. forces told him he would have to wait until a government was established.

For a time, he considered going to two mosques in his neighborhood. The prayer leaders there offered to take a collection, even recruit worshipers to rebuild a room or at least a wall. But he said he was too proud to get their help. Dignity was all he had left.

"Until now I've refused," Jassam said. "You can imagine, it's difficult." Then he repeated the words.

It's in God's hands now, he said. "I've delivered my case to God."

In Arabic, Jassam's first name, Madhlum, means oppressed or wrongly treated. The irony prompted a rare smile.

"My name is Madhlum and I really am madhlum," he said, now laughing. "I'm madhlum, I'm madhlum, I'm madhlum. Until I die, I swear to God, I'll be madhlum, either under Saddam or under the Americans."

Uncertainty and Fear

Two phrases are heard often in Baghdad -- one a description, the other a proverb. The situation is taaban, people say -- it's tired or worn out. The other is more portentous: The ground is getting wetter. It means things are getting worse.

Jassam and his wife mentioned both.

Amid the cacophony of often-contradictory sentiments that define Baghdad, neither expressed anger at the U.S. forces, but both chafed at the idea of an occupation. They said they wanted the Americans to set up a government and help write a constitution -- in Jassam's words, "today rather than tomorrow."

But they feared the chaos that might follow the departure of U.S. forces in a country they said viewed freedom as anarchy, with its specter of sectarian and ethnic strife and threat of crime.

Sitting at the elementary school, where they picked up Mustafa, they talked of a city that was unfamiliar and uncertain.

"There's no government, there's no law. Who will listen to us?" asked Jassam, his eyes bleary after finishing a 48-hour shift. "Until now we don't know what the law is. Only God knows what will come in the following months."

The lack of authority dictated their lives, they said. Who would pay Jassam's salary next month? Who would bring down prices that have doubled for tomatoes, jumped 50 percent for meat and chicken? How would they save money for a house?

"What is democracy?" Abed asked, her daughter sitting in her lap. "What is democracy?"

"There are so many pressures on the people," she added. "If people feel happy, if they feel prosperous, then they can search for other things. But now the main worry is to get from day to day. Look at us, we're poor, what do we think about? We think about a house. We think about buying cooking gas and an oven. All of this was gone in a second."

She sat back in the couch in the headmaster's office, again a guest in a room not her own. She repeated a mantra heard countless times in Baghdad these days -- istiqrar and aman, stability and safety.

"A house is stability and safety," she said. "We have nothing in our hands. What can we do? With Saddam, we couldn't do anything. Now with the Americans, we can't do anything either. I hope, I wish the future will be good. But it's not in my hands."

As he often did, Jassam quoted a saying infused with faith. "God guides those who wish to be guided," he said.

Then, wounded by his wife's tears, he spoke in less lofty terms.

"I feel lost," he said. "If there is no home, you're completely lost. I feel like a stranger."