I’m a father. I have a son and a daughter. Two days ago I read something that made me engage in an “unpleasant” thought experiment. I imagined that I and my son had been killed in an attack on our home. That my wife had lost her job. That she and my daughter had to flee the country due to death threats from the same men who had killed my son and I. That they had used all their money in order to bribe their way into Canada. That my wife’s cancer recurred and she couldn’t work. What would happen to my daughter, with no money, no food? What would she choose to do?
Sounds like a paranoid nightmare of epic proportions, doesn’t it? How could that happen to my family and my daughter, living as we do safely ensconced in American suburbia. And true, a scenario like the one I’ve just described isn’t likely to happen to my family.
But something like this nightmarish daydream of mine is happening to many Iraqis each day, and this is what Iraqi women who have fled their country are actually choosing to do to stay alive in Syria, even as I write these words:
MARABA, Syria — Back home in Iraq, Umm Hiba’s daughter was a devout schoolgirl, modest in her dress and serious about her studies. Hiba, who is now 16, wore the hijab, or Islamic head scarf, and rose early each day to say the dawn prayer before classes.
But that was before militias began threatening their Baghdad neighborhood and Umm Hiba and her daughter fled to Syria last spring. There were no jobs, and Umm Hiba’s elderly father developed complications related to his diabetes.
Desperate, Umm Hiba followed the advice of an Iraqi acquaintance and took her daughter to work at a nightclub along a highway known for prostitution. “We Iraqis used to be a proud people,” she said over the frantic blare of the club’s speakers. She pointed out her daughter, dancing among about two dozen other girls on the stage, wearing a pink silk dress with spaghetti straps, her frail shoulders bathed in colored light.
As Umm Hiba watched, a middle-aged man climbed onto the platform and began to dance jerkily, arms flailing, among the girls. […]
For anyone living in Damascus these days, the fact that some Iraqi refugees are selling sex or working in sex clubs is difficult to ignore.
Even in central Damascus, men freely talk of being approached by pimps trawling for customers outside juice shops and shawarma sandwich stalls, and of women walking up to passing men, an act unthinkable in Arab culture, and asking in Iraqi-accented Arabic if the men would like to “have a cup of tea.”
What if this atrocity was happening to our neighbors, friends and families? What if our daughters and sisters were being forced into prostitution in order to earn enough money to stay alive. Would we care about a story like this then?
Yet, we still have politicians in Washington like Senator Joe Lieberman standing heavily guarded by American soldiers in a Baghdad market, wearing a helmet and a flak jacket, and then proclaiming that the lives of ordinary Iraqis are so much better now that we have invaded and occupied their country, trained members of one religious sect to act as death squads to slaughter the members of another religious sect, and spent billions of dollars on reconstruction projects that never get completed, and large American military bases that do.
(cont.)
Dear Senator Lieberman, answer me this: If life is so much better in Iraq, if we truly are making progress, why have over two million people fled for their lives to neighboring countries? And why are Iraqi women, and yes, adolescent girls, selling their bodies to Syrian men because it is the only way they have to feed their families? Why?
Silence, of course, is the only answer we will ever get to such questions from honorable, strong, and eminent statesmen like Senator Lieberman. But I wonder if the good Senator would take the time to imagine such a possibility happening to his family. I know his wife is the daughter of holocaust survivors, so I suspect it wouldn’t be as much of an intellectual exercise for him as it probably was for me, after I read this report in the New York Times two days ago.
Afterward, would he be willing answer my questions then? Would he still say the lives of young women, like 16 year old Hiba and her mother, are better off because of our occupation of her country? I can’t tell you what his answer might be, but I can tell you how this story made me feel after I read it. Sick. Sick to the point of nausea.
But then, I’m not a powerful United States Senator whose moral courage is praised so often by our news media, nor am I an expert on the War on Terror, or gifted with the foreknowledge of what would happen to our nation if we ever withdrew our troops from Iraq.
I’m only a blogger. And the father of a young adolescent girl. Whom I love very, very much.
As I’m sure Ulm Hiba loves her daughter, too.
