And yesterday, there he was, under contract to the same military he holds responsible for his brother's death, voting in an election made possible by that military. He was full of hope, but he felt the pain that made this moment possible as well.
"Many, many people lost family members," Alhamdani said Monday when he registered to vote. "They still will go out there to vote. . . . I want democracy to take place in this land. I know I lost a brother. I'm sure my brother, in his grave, that he's happy to see elections finally taking place in Mesopotamia."
After his brother was killed, it was too dangerous in postwar Iraq to bring his body to the family burial ground in Najaf, south of Baghdad. Since then, he has been reburied there -- a bittersweet sign of progress toward peace.
Yet Alhamdani and his two expatriate brothers and his sister in Baghdad still have not been able to bring themselves to inform their aged, ailing parents in Baghdad of Mohammed's death. That price of freedom is still too great, the children worry, for the old people to bear.
At the polls, two women in colorful robes and silk scarves embraced with tears in their eyes. They held up their purple fingers and kissed them.
"It's indescribable," said Tanya Gilly, 30, a think tank project director from Germantown, a Kurd who reached the United States four years ago. "Just as I was marking that ballot, I was overtaken by emotions that are very, very hard for me to describe. These elections are for all the people who died. For all the mothers who collected the bodies of sons from security prisons. The mothers who lost sons in mass graves."
Her tears came again.
"This is the day our dreams come true," said her friend Paiman Halmat, 54, a teacher at a child-care center, who is also Kurdish and has lived in the States for 26 years. "I feel like I was just born. Today is our community's birthday, our nation's birthday, everyone's birthday."
This is what democracy feels like.
"I never practiced the vote, I never practiced the freedom -- it's just like when you're born," said Mohammed Alkhafaji, 33, an artist and hairdresser from Springfield, a Shiite originally from Basra, in the south. "You feel like you have the right to do whatever you can do."
He held up his purple finger: "I wish I could keep this forever."
The polling place was like a huge unfinished basement, with a concrete floor painted maroon. Signs indicating where to go and how to exit were hand-lettered in Arabic, Kurdish and English. When someone cast a ballot, some of the dozens of poll workers -- many of them purple-fingered Iraqis -- would cheer and whistle. Voters marked their ballots behind cardboard partitions on tabletops.
As Nivras Kazim, 28, a researcher at the Hudson Institute, deposited his ballot he shouted something in Arabic so loud that all activity in the room briefly halted. Kazim later translated: "Damn Saddam, damn Zarqawi, damn the Baathists!"
Ghalib A. Maksood, 78, used his purple finger to point out his niece, Ghoson Nayif Judy, in a picture he brought on the bus he caught in New York City at 3 a.m. He told her story, how in the last days of the regime, Hussein's surrogates murdered her in her home. "They put a plastic bag over her head. They steal all her jewels."
