Where last hopes live and die

BAGHDAD —  Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and wives fill the waiting room of the U.S.-run National Iraqi Assistance Center in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone.

They have come to consult the lists of people held in U.S. and some Iraqi detention facilities, praying that their missing loved ones will be among them and not in the hands of the men with guns and no mercy.

From time to time, a young Iraqi man comes out and writes down information about the missing person: name, date of birth, the date he disappeared. After consulting a computer, he returns and starts reading out names.

A hush settles over the room, with occasional whispers of supplication, hands raised to the sky and tears.

When the man reads out a name and a detention center, the relatives light up with happiness. But when he says “ma mawjood” (not existing), their faces harden with disappointment.

For them, the search begins again. After two weeks, they will return, hoping that new names have arrived from the detention facilities scattered around the country.

Ajeela waits among them, her face pale and hands shaking. She describes in a trembling voice how gunmen arrived at her house a year ago this month and took away her husband.

“We don’t know why,” says Ajeela, who gives only one name out of fear for her safety. “Some days later, some men came to us and told us that he was killed.”

Ajeela says she went from hospital to hospital, to the morgue, to a political party’s headquarters and finally to the Interior Ministry, searching for her husband’s body. Eventually, the family decided to have a funeral without a corpse. But for the sake of their three children, Ajeela continued to hold out hope that he was alive.

Finally, she decided to try the center. When the young man tells her that her husband is at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, Ajeela jumps up from her chair, firing questions.

“Is he alive? Where is he? Are you sure? Thank God! Thank God! What shall I do? His mother’s name is Nujood? Please make sure,” she says.

The young man assures her that the information she gave him matches what he has in his computer. He asks her to wait while a permission slip is prepared to allow her to visit her husband.

Ajeela waits with a relative, Fatima, who is searching for her 18-year-old son. He was seized by gunmen last summer at the Dora market, a former insurgent stronghold in south Baghdad.

“We know Al Qaeda took him,” she says, wiping away tears with the sleeve of her long black robe.

It seems he was taken because his name appears on the membership list of a neighborhood security group that is helping U.S. forces fight Sunni Arab militants loyal to Al Qaeda in Iraq and its affiliates.

When the young man returns, he has the name of a detainee that is almost the same as that of Fatima’s son, off by only two letters. Fatima looks as though she will faint when he reads it out. But then she asks where he was captured.

“Balad, north Baghdad,” comes the answer.

It is a crushing disappointment. But the young man urges her to take a permission slip to visit Camp Bucca. Mistakes are often made when information is entered in the system, he tells her. The detainee still might be her son.

Fatima looks bewildered. At one point she starts to cry, then stands up as if to leave.

“It’s not him,” she says. “The place of the detention and his father’s name are not the same.”

But others in the room urge her to wait for the permission slip and to try her luck at Camp Bucca. She sits down again and lifts her hands in prayer.

“Oh God almighty, is it true that I will see him?” she asks. “You are the merciful, the capable and the best of all judges. Return my son to me.”

Ajeela, meanwhile, is already making plans to discard her widow’s weeds.

“It seems that my husband was among those who were found during the American raids in Arab Jabour, among the hostages in the dens of Al Qaeda,” in the region south of Baghdad, she says.

“When I see him, I will ask him one question: Why in all this time didn’t you extinguish the fire of sadness and sorrow with a phone call?”