IHT : In life of lies, Iraqis conceal work for U.S.

In life of lies, Iraqis conceal work for U.S.

By Sabrina Tavernise | October 8, 2007

BAGHDAD: For Hamed, a forklift driver at an American military base, life has become a series of disguises.

He has been a cabdriver, a man who does not understand English, and most recently, a laundry worker. None of those identities were true, but all were necessary to hide his ties to the United States.

So when someone he knew handed him a bag of dirty clothes last month, Hamed, a mild-mannered 33-year-old father of two, had no choice but to wash them.

"I said, 'It's my job,' and I took them," he said. He spoke on condition that his last name not be used out of fear for his and his family's safety.

For the tens of thousands of Iraqis who work for the United States in Iraq, daily life is an elaborate balancing act of small, memorized untruths. Desperate for work of any kind when jobs are extremely hard to come by in Iraq, they do what they must, even though affiliation with the Americans makes them targets.

The Iraqis have stories for their scars, stories for nights away from home, stories for what they do outside their neighborhoods all day. Most often the stories are told to neighbors and acquaintances, though sometimes they are told to children as well, to ensure that the truth about a job stays strictly within the family.

In the early days, Hamed's truth was not hard to hide. He drove around in a beat-up Toyota and slapped a plastic 'taxi' sign on top of it when he wanted to go to work at the base in the morning. Coming home was trickier. He needed to return to his neighborhood with a customer in the car to avoid suspicion.

As his neighborhood fell under the control of Sunni militants, fewer people wanted to go there, and once he spent more than two hours driving around looking for a fare. "What should I do?" he said. "My life is more important than the fuel."

The real trouble began last fall. An envelope with two bullets was left outside his front gate. He said it contained a note: "Spy," it read. "You will be killed." A few days before, someone from his neighborhood had seen him leaving work at the base, a friend told him. He and his family left his home immediately.

He rented an apartment for his wife and children, and then traveled to Lebanon. There, he applied for refugee status, encouraged by an announcement by American officials that immigration quotas for Iraqis would be raised, but ran out of money after waiting months for his application to be processed. Unable to work in Lebanon legally, and faced with a choice of bringing his wife and children into poverty there, or living apart in Iraq, he decided to return to Iraq, forfeiting his application.

Now he lives on the third floor of a cheap motel in a poor neighborhood in Baghdad, away from his wife and children. He sleeps on a thin foam mattress and padlocks his door at night.

"My economic situation controls me," he said. "I have nothing now."

The squat, dingy, five-story motel is filled with Iraqis leading double or even triple lives. There are many varieties: Police officers who encountered trouble in their neighborhoods, interpreters for the American military, and laborers like Hamed. They pay $80 a month for a room.

Almost everyone there is someone else. Hamed shares his small room with his brother, who tells residents that he works in an electrical shop. Another resident, Felah, a 42-year-old former sports coach who works at the same American base as Hamed, says that he is a carpenter. He says he works for a company that makes desks for schools, a story he chose because he had some carpentry experience and could bluff if confronted.

Each detail of his life must match. He portrays a scar on his hand, from when he tried to free an American soldier whose leg was trapped under a forklift, as a wound from a wood sander.

His cover was threatened when an elderly resident asked him to repair a bed. Felah liked the man and handled the task well, but that only invited another request: Could he make a table? Busy with his job at the base managing an Iraqi work team, and not skilled enough in carpentry, Felah decided against taking the job, but could not tell the man. "I'm thinking to go buy this from a store, and tell him, 'I made this for you,'" he said.

"Our life, it makes you laugh, but it's a tragedy," said Felah, a bowlegged Shiite man with a tired look, who has lost six close relatives, including a brother, to Sunni militants, and whose wife and children have been forbidden to see him by a bitterly sectarian father-in-law. "We feel that we are not telling the truth, but what can we do?"

Children can pose a problem. One couple trained a young son never to tell anyone about his father's job at an American base north of Baghdad. A family friend, who knew about the job at the base and knew the son had been coached, tested him this summer, trying to break him down, the boy's mother said. The friend asked the boy repeatedly where his father worked. The boy was distraught, but never revealed his father's occupation, his mother said proudly.

Lies are required when trust breaks down, and even casual conversations with strangers can be dangerous. Ahmed, a 27-year-old interpreter for the American military, was riding back from work in the Green Zone on his motorcycle when men at a checkpoint in his neighborhood stopped him. They asked about his occupation. He replied that he fixed power generators, a story that was helped by his appearance: he had repaired his motorcycle before setting off, and grease was smeared on his hands and shirt.

The crisis, it seemed, was averted. But several days later, a group of men came to his house.

"They ask me, 'If you repair generators, why don't you work in your neighborhood?'" Ahmed said. Then, he said, "They gave me small generator to fix."

Panic set in. Ahmed asked to be excused, saying he needed to go to a hardware store. He slipped away to the house of his friend, who coached him and told him what tools he needed.

"It's very scary, but what can I do?" he said. "If I don't do this, they will kill me."

But after fiddling with the generator as his friend had instructed, he managed, miraculously, to fix the problem. The men left satisfied. "I'm feeling happy because it looked I was saying the truth to these people," he said.

No one has come back since.

Hamed has told the hotel resident that he must pay for the laundry service from now on, pretending to be a worker whose boss would not allow him to clean loads of clothes free. He has not seen his children in months. They live in the western Sunni outskirts of Baghdad; he lives on the east side of the city, where Shiites dominate. He calls them so they do not forget him.

Felah wants to live on the base, where he would be safe, but he said the military did not allow it. Soldiers come and go — from Kentucky, from Georgia — but Iraqi workers stay. Some of the Americans are fond of him. One gave him a watch. But no one has helped him emigrate.

"I feel myself as a lost person," he said. "I have no family now. I have no home. Do you feel my difficult situation?"