Walking September 11’s Other Crime Scenes

It was late in the afternoon when my mother told me that “they would come for us.” I was not yet 10 at the time. Climbing the stairs for a tea-time cheese sandwich, I left my brother and cousins to their football skirmish in the garden of my family’s villa in western Baghdad. Or so I remember. I saw two skyscrapers spewing smoke over New York, and my mother stone-faced before the TV. She was right. Less than two years later, in 2003, Iraq would be invaded on George W. Bush’s orders. Cluster bombs would rain over her home, and the garden where we’d no longer play.

Twenty-three years later, on July 24 of this year, I drove further west to see my mother’s grave a day before the anniversary of her passing from complications of a COVID-19 infection in 2021. The highway to the cemetery links Baghdad to Amman and Damascus, two parting stations for the millions who fled the sanctions during the long 1990s, as well as Iraq’s wars old and new. The guardrails, looted in 2003, were still missing. The road signs were shredded with shrapnel. Bullets pockmarked the lifeless lampposts flanking the asphalt. The cemetery’s walls, too, were sprayed with bullets. I washed my mother’s gravestone with bottled rose water I bought from a young lady by the door and read the fatihah. I knew it would be another year before I see her as I readied myself for another stint of chosen ghurbah, or estrangement, in Geneva, where I recently landed for my doctorate, happily far away from the United States. Close to my mother was buried a Christian woman whose headstone my brother makes sure to wash on every visit. Something George, it said. Between her and mother a budding palm tree will soon cast its shade. I did the same, washing the tombstone and saving the remainder of the drinking water I had for the date palm. I thought of how many thousands of Iraqis are unvisited and unremembered. Millions had fled along the highway I had taken, never to return. Behind them Iraq was riven, its wounds pried open and left unsutured. In the afternoon sun, the urchins who floated in swarms from grave to grave after visiting families, and never left until they’re given alms, disappeared. Life-size portraits of war’s many victims watched over the mute expanse of the necropolis. On a small tomb marked by an unchristened brick nearby, a child’s overalls seemed to dissolve into the earth.

I then made my way to Fallujah, past ruined prewar infrastructure and many checkpoints adorned with the faces of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and Qasim Soleimani, the two paramilitary commanders murdered in a drone strike near Baghdad’s airport in January 2020. It was a reminder, for those who needed one, of the omnipresence of Iraq’s Shi‘a Popular Mobilization Forces around the Sunni heartland they’d ostensibly liberated. As I parked near the city’s iron bridge, a loitering cab driver and a bored policemen were quick to show me where the bodies of Blackwater mercenaries were hanged after an infamous ambush in 2004. “It was on this side of the bridge,” one said, taking another bite of his falafel sandwich. Behind me was a flailing minaret ravaged by the ensuing fighting, and before me was the mighty Euphrates, with elegant palm trees guarding its southerly march. Here, young men often appear on the news for wanting to leap to an early death into the Euphrates. None stood midway on the bridge that day, but I imagined the river’s treacherous waters to be unable to soothe the pains of those who lived on its two shores. I looked for the Martyrs’ Cemetery on Google Maps and shifted into drive to a residential street nearby, past a curious mélange of ostentatious restaurants, nail salons, and collapsed rooftops. The walls outside still carried war’s insignia. Terrorists, Americans and Islamic State militants alike, had taken turns to ravage this place. Peering through a slit incised by the shrapnel scarring the cemetery’s rusted gate, I saw hundreds of tombs rested in crammed rows inside what used to be a sports field. They went to play, I thought, and never returned. Not a susurration remained.

It was past Abu Ghraib that I made my way to our western suburb. The district’s green ranches straddled the highway, but so much has dried up in recent years. Farmers pitched their stalls on the edge of the road, arranging pyramids of watermelon by their battered trucks. Behind them cows grazed in the few verdant meadows. My American comrades would have been disappointed that this mise-en-scène offered no inmate on a crucifix for them to photograph and parade on the screen. The spectacle was over; in its ruins ordinary Iraqis are left to piece together this broken future alone.

In Baghdad, farmers and unemployed graduates take turns to occupy the streets in their thousands. Riot police descend on them with force, dragging the old and the young alike. Activists are harassed in the depth of night, and books are confiscated from international fairs. Water already fails to reach the sprawl of the metropolis, and families pay hundreds of dollars to keep the air conditioning on in unbearable summer months. As the September 30 deadline nears for the much-hyped disarming of the poseur militiamen who want to liberate the Palestinians that Shi‘a death squads had killed on the streets of Baghdad after 2003, someone close to the factions told me he’d be fine with a standoff: “We’d kill a few people.”

Untouched by these realities, many of Iraq’s pompous diaspora scholars are unashamedly silent. Living Iraq comes from Edinburgh University Press this winter. Go ahead and guess how many of the contributors actually live in, or are actively committed to the struggles of those of us who live in this disfigured country. Foreign reporters, still lounging in their irrelevance, look the other way. NPR reporter Jane Arraf recently thought that Baghdad was safer. Reporting from a mall, our intrepid investigator was uninterested in saying to whom it was that the country felt safer. Surely not the women activists who are murdered outside their homes. Unlike the captors of American journalist Shelly Kittleson, of whom one was recently sentenced to prison, those who kill and disappear Iraqi intellectuals remain at large. Kittleson’s scandalous abduction by Shi‘a militiamen in March 2026 stirred no concerns about the safety of native critics (because, alas, they are an extinct breed) or her own interlocutors, whose faces she has a habit of posting online. In her article on her own kidnapping for The Atlantic (where else?), Kittleson’s coming to the country is my disappearing act. The first of her articles I find reason to read in years, the piece reminds me of Eduardo Galeano: “We see maps without inhabitants.” Important stories exist, she assures us with self-awarded authority, but for them to be told, Western arbiters of truth need to be present. Without them there is only desert. In 2005, Binyavanga Wainaina had blistering words to say on foreign writers in his satirical essay for Granta: “Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.”

It was at the metropole’s degree factories that I came to see how irrelevant characters like the Israeli academic and researcher Elizabeth Tsurkov (who incidentally also detailed her own kidnapping in The Atlantic) wash up on our shores, although their motives and intentions are hardly uniform. At Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), where I did my first master’s, I shared classrooms with future imperial servants who queued up for Madeleine Albright’s courses, subservient Arabs who would end up at the Washington Institute and elsewhere in the think tanks of Washington, D.C., and active servicemembers in the U.S. Army. One student volunteered with the Danish forces in Iraq, likely at Ain al-Asad Airbase, where the NATO members’ troops were stationed in the western Iraqi desert during the war with the Islamic State, and had pictures of herself in uniform on her social media. She once wrote a piece, I was told, on Iraqi poets, and insisted that a comprador Palestinian acquaintance introduce me to her. Now she will read these lines and know why she was shooed away.

While the significance of campus activism during the early episodes of the genocide in Gaza cannot be overstated, the violence of having an Iraqi survivor of America’s many wars share learning space with his potential aggressors was lost on my esteemed professors, although a minority of them were principled members of the left. To celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the program’s founding, CCAS invited Mo Amer, a comedian who once said that the American GIs he entertained in occupied Baghdad, where he slept in one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces, were “the best audience I could ask for.” Joseph Sassoon, an associate professor at the Center, hoped CCAS would “continue to attract the best minds interested in studying the region.” I’m not so sure.

The ubiquity and banality of America are inescapable, but another reason for straying toward them has to do with the unbearable, violent defamiliarization of home, the grief of having to write about it, and for whom. Not because those who suffer the most are ineloquent in the “art of speech,” as Simone Weil writes in her essay on Human Personality, for my ancestral poets are masters of eulogy and invective verses. Nor because that region in one’s heart where an infliction of pain strikes is inert, unable to articulate its cry any longer. It is a rejection of the expectation that I perform my pre-assigned victimhood before you, reader, that I would write for your passive consumption.