After the Fall, Amal Surrenders Her Illusions

Reconciling With Reality

Ever so slightly, Amal's writing began to change in those turbulent months. During the war, infused with the government's propaganda, she had spoken with the force of a loyalist. Precocious, the smartest of Karima Salman's daughters and an enthusiastic inductee in her school's Baath Party group, she had competed with her sisters in pledges of fealty to Hussein, even if her diary was more reflective. In April, a week after his fall, as her fellow Shiite Muslims celebrated his demise, Amal still held tenaciously to received views. Hussein was all she knew. "Until now," she said as she sat with her family, "we still say his excellency, the president."

But privately Amal seemed baffled, and she gave voice to her confusion in the diary. A war she dreaded was over and a revolution she did not understand just beginning; she tried to reconcile her experience with reality, as churning, unpredictable and menacing as it was.

"We used to have trust in President Saddam Hussein," she wrote on April 11, two days after his fall, "but now we don't know whom we trust."

Hussein still cast many shadows in Iraq; he would do so for months and years to follow. Almost immediately, the mass graves of those he had persecuted began to be unearthed, the victims numbering in the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. With their discovery came an accounting of the dead. Days after Hussein's fall, photocopied pictures of men missing or executed and now celebrated as martyrs began to crowd for space in markets, offices and mosques. Their dark eyes, lonesome, stared ahead.

Quieter was the process of demystifying Hussein. His name was still whispered; who knew if danger remained, if somehow he might still be listening, waiting? "No one knows where President Saddam Hussein's whereabouts are, or when he will appear with his army," Amal wrote in an entry on April 16. "They say Saddam Hussein is in Baghdad with a big army, built for the final battle between Iraq and America. No one knows if this is true or not. They are just rumors, true or not."

Secrets soon poured out, and Amal digested the horrors of the government she had once seen as indestructible. Weeks after Hussein's fall, she and her family watched some of the 50-cent videos that flooded the market. They detailed the ornate palaces in a style of kitschy Arabesque that Hussein built -- "all with gold and silver," she wrote -- the gassing of 5,000 Kurds in 1988 in the northern Iraqi city of Halabja, and Uday Hussein's notorious abduction of women whom he fancied.

"Saddam's eldest son, Uday, is the biggest corrupt person on earth," she wrote after watching the videos over two days, their viewing interrupted by blackouts. "Any girl he liked, he would take. No one could say anything because he is the son of President Saddam Hussein. His other son, Qusay, is also cruel, like his father and brother."

The same, she wrote, went for Hussein's other relatives.

"No one realizes they are gone, all of them, forever," she wrote.

An Open-Ended Collapse

The U.S. invasion that toppled Hussein and brought the occupation never had a real name. The Bush administration called it Operation Iraqi Freedom. Predictably, Hussein's own name for the invasion, Marakat al-Hawasim, Defining Battle, was similarly grandiose.

Like many in Iraq, Amal and her family simply called the war the suqut -- "the collapse" or "the fall," a name that probably made more sense than any other. It designated the end of 35 years of pitiless Baath Party rule. In a way, it suggested, too, that another beginning had yet to be inaugurated. Through 2003 and 2004, Marakat al-Hawasim lingered in the wreckage of the government's fall. It remained open-ended, its muddled aftermath as inconclusive as Hussein's fall seemed climactic. For Iraqis, suqut meant an end without renewal, a seemingly endless interim. It was a life imposed, not chosen.

"Everybody is asking about the future, the future of Iraq," Amal wrote in the summer of 2003. "Some are asking where is the future. Others say Iraq has no future anymore. These are all opinions, but no one knows what the truth is."