UNTIL war came to her home town in Iraq, Mona Ghunnam’s life was full and
happy. She had a husband who doted on her and a playful four-year-old
daughter. With her parents and four brothers nearby, she never wanted for
company.
Her happiness was destroyed one day in 2003 by a missile that killed her
mother and father, all her brothers and her precious little girl. It left
Ghunnam herself partially paralysed.
Her husband, a policeman, fought to have her treated in a western hospital but
could not come to terms with her injuries. He cast her out of her house and
moved in a new wife.
Ghunnam, a 29-year-old maths teacher, joined a despairing exodus of 750,000
Iraqi refugees to Jordan, where she slept on a pavement and then in a
storeroom. Last week she sat in her latest one-room temporary home, weeping
for the family she has lost and uncertain how to face the future alone.
She is no longer a mother, a wife, a daughter or a sister. It is so hard for
her to see a purpose to her life that she prays God will end it and relieve
her of her heartache. “I cannot be happy,” she said. “There is no more
happiness for me.”
Ghunnam’s story reflects the sadness of more than 2m Iraqis who have fled
abroad, mainly to Syria and Jordan. Many law-abiding citizens now find
themselves living illegally because their visas have expired. They struggle
to get accommodation, healthcare and an education for their children.
Although some refugees have returned, the vast majority are too afraid to go
home to areas where sectarian death squads and ethnic cleansers still hold
sway. Yet the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) found homes in other countries for a paltry 4,575 last year and
admits it is unlikely to fill its quota of 25,000 in 2008.
Ghunnam has been put forward for settlement in the US, the country whose
missile shattered her family, a place whose language she does not speak and
where she knows nobody. She dreads the prospect, yet she is considered
luckier than the thousands still waiting to be processed by the languid UN
bureaucracy.
For now, Ghunnam is trapped like the rest of them in Amman with her memories
and an inescapable shame at her decline from respected schoolmistress to the
status of beggar.
Her last recollection of her daughter, who was named Iraq, is of her playing
with a toy as the rest of the family stepped on to mats to perform their
afternoon prayers on March 31, 2003, in the second week of the US-led
invasion.
“Mind you don’t fall,” she told Iraq with a smile before turning to face
Mecca. The next thing she knew, Ghunnam was waking up in hospital four
months later with three pieces of shrapnel in her head, no hearing in her
right ear, an amputated toe and a paralysed left side.
“I wanted to see my daughter,” she said. “I asked about my brothers and my
parents, but my husband and his family came up with excuses as to why I
couldn’t see them.”
Her husband persuaded the US military to bear some responsibility for his
wife’s injuries and she was flown to Austria for surgery to remove two of
the pieces of shrapnel – the third remains lodged near her brain.
Only then was she told of the deaths. “It was the hardest day of my life,” she
said, half-choking. “I wanted nothing in life any more.”
Even more cruelty was about to be inflicted on her, however. Seven months into
her treatment, her husband Muhammad suggested they return to Iraq, sell
their home in the eastern city of Kut and collect their back pay so they
could settle in Austria.
In Kut, she signed over her house to her husband so he could sell it and gave
him her wages. Months went by and he grew distant. His family began talking
about a second marriage.
When she confronted him, he admitted he had no desire to leave Iraq and every
intention of taking another wife.
“He sacrificed me,” she said, a tear rolling down her face. “He had my house
and my money, which he used to buy a new car. I was an invalid now,
unemployed, a burden.”
She gave away her daughter’s clothes and toys – “her hair buckles, her
first-birthday candle, her crayons, soft toys that she hadn’t even played
with yet”.
“I then packed my suitcase and left”.
Ghunnam stayed with an elderly neighbour until her husband arrived with a
Shi’ite sheikh to divorce her. She took her husband’s hand, kissed his
fingers and begged him to change his mind, she said. But he snatched his
hand away, telling her she was no longer his wife and had no right to kiss
him any more.
Distant relatives were unwilling to take on a disabled woman who walked with a
crutch and needed regular visits to hospital, so she concluded that to
obtain the treatment she needed to stay alive, she had no choice but to
leave.
“I sold what gold I had – my daughter’s gold and some of my clothes.
Eventually I sold my mother’s wedding ring when I needed money to survive.”
In Jordan, she stayed in a hostel but it closed down. Forced to spend the
night on a pavement, she consoled herself with the thought that nothing
could be as bad as losing her child or being abandoned by her husband.
“I walked the streets in Amman and laughed at myself because I didn’t know
where I was or where I was heading,” she said.
A street vendor briefly took her in and a Catholic charity gave her the money
to rent a cold, damp storeroom with no windows. At least it was a refuge
from the streets, where she would win-dow-shop for her daughter, thinking
how beautiful she would have looked in this skirt or that dress. “Sometimes
I wonder what shoe size she would have been now,” she said wistfully.
Those who have brought children out of the war zone to the Jordanian capital
are thankful they have survived, but increasingly apprehensive about their
prospects.
None more so than Raed Abdel Bager, a retired journalist, and his wife Sarmad,
whose son and pregnant daughter-in-law were blown up by a suicide bomber in
a Baghdad restaurant as they celebrated New Year’s Eve, 2003. The elderly
couple were left to bring up their grandson Khattab, now 6, who was born
with a hole in the heart.
A Sunni family, they found themselves targeted by Shi’ite gangs as sectarian
violence took hold. A son-in-law was kidnapped for a £20,200 ransom. A son
received a death threat. Then came word that the gangsters were planning to
abduct Khattab.
“He is our sole legacy from our dead son and I could not risk his life any
more,” said Bager. He sold a piece of land and, with his wife and Khattab,
made the perilous 10-hour drive to the Jordanian border in January last
year.
But by now Jordan was reluctant to accept a relentless flow of Iraqis into a
country of just 6m people. The family was refused entry.
Six months later they flew to Amman, where they were granted visas for just 48
hours and told to forfeit their passports for collection on their way back
to Baghdad. Like hundreds of thousands whose visas have expired, they now
live illicitly.
“I am 67 years old and sometimes I am afraid to go outside for fear of being
caught by the police,” said Bager, who is disabled following a stroke.
As a result, neither he nor his grandson is receiving much-needed medical
care. Khattab, who had a heart operation a year after he was born, is pale,
weak and unable to run around like other boys of his age.
The plight of the six-year-old Mahmood triplets is no less desperate. Mustafa
Mahmood has learning difficulties and needs special care; his sister Tuhama
requires continuous treatment for a kidney disease. The third child,
Ibrahim, is healthy but the triplets share a room with their parents and two
elder brothers.
When their father Raed, 40, takes on carpentry jobs, he does so illegally. With
no residence permit, he does not have the right to work. His wife Iklhas
relies mainly on handouts, such as left-over chicken from neighbours.
Last week an aid organisation paid for some gas to keep the family’s heater
going. When it runs out, Iklhas Mahmood will have to wrap her children in
blankets to keep them warm during the day.
She is particularly concerned about Tuhama, a bright girl with a dazzling
smile whose kidney condition makes her body swell and ache. At least she has
a place at primary school, where she recites the alphabet with pride. The
Jordanian government gives head teachers discretion to admit or reject
children, case by case, depending on the space available.
Medical services, however, are largely limited to emergency care.
Four-year-old Hareth Dagher, who suffers from leukaemia, is one of
relatively few to receive free treatment.
Last week his father Yahya, 42, and mother Mayada, 36, soothed him as he
moaned in hospital after completing his third round of chemotherapy.
Hareth was granted six months’ free care after his father asked the offices of
the Jordanian royal family for help. “Without this I don’t know what I would
have done and probably Hareth would have died. May God prolong the king’s
life for being generous to my son,” said Dagher.
Yet because he has outstayed his visa, he fears arrest on his daily 40-minute
journey to visit his son in hospital. “I feel like a humiliated person,
chased by the authorities simply for seeking to live safely with my family,”
he said.
Queen Rania of Jordan, who is known for her work with refugees, said late last
year the large influx from Iraq had placed strains on the country, which has
accommodated 50,000 children in schools alone. “This is not an issue for any
one country to deal with,” she said. “It is the responsibility of the
international community . . . The humanitarian situation for Iraqis is not
given enough attention.”
The UNHCR said yesterday while it aimed to resettle the most vulnerable
Iraqis, the numbers it could help depended on the willingness of countries
to accept them. Of the 4,575 resettled by December 1 last year, Britain took
only 24, according to the UNHCR. The largest number – 2,376 – was accepted
by the US.
It was just last week that Mona Ghunnam heard that her application to go to
America had been successful. Other refugees envy her but understand the
anxiety that gnaws at her as she contemplates another journey to a new
country, this time further away from the body of her daughter.
Little wonder, then, that she cannot muster any hope for the future. “I tell
God you have tested me and you don’t need to test me any more,” she said.
“If I cannot have my old life back, please let me die. Enough of pain.
Relieve me.”
Additional reporting: Holly Groom
