The factory that killed 15,000 in 1984 is still poisoning new victims. As survivors march to Delhi, RAGHU KARNAD tells the chilling story of Bhopal's ongoing disaster

THERE IS a face of our democracy that you only see when you follow a 60-year-old woman marching 800 kilometres on swollen knees. That is the distance fromBhopal to Delhi, and she hopes that if she walks for a month, instead of taking the overnight train, she will remind Delhi about something in Bhopal. Not that the gas that leaked from the Union Carbide factory on December 2, 1984, killed 15,000 people. That is world history; that is not why she is marching. Some people remember that the five lakh Bhopalis who survived that night had their bodies ruined. This explains her swollen knees, her painful lungs, the sudden dizziness that occasionally drops her onto the roadside.

Fewer people heard that after being denied a hearing in court, after being denied a humane compensation, the gas peedith are spending their lives being denied medical care they were supposed to receive, being denied jobs they were trained to do, being denied justice. But there is another reason she is marching. Almost nobody ever heard that the factory which leaked poison into the air in 1984 [see box: The Story of that Night] has been leaking it, constantly, into the soil and water ever since.

For 23 years, the chemicals that went into Carbide's pesticide process have been ignored, left to leach into the groundwater. That groundwater feeds tubewells and handpumps from which 25,000 people in neighbouring areas drink. Most of these people were nowhere near the gas leak on December 2. They belong to a new category of victims, the paani peedith, and every year their numbers and their toxicity symptoms increase. Their existence is being denied altoget her. Everyone knows the Union Carbide gas leak killed more than 15,000 people. Almost nobody has heard that the killing never stopped. That is why the woman is marching.

AS YOU READ this, 50 padyatris between the ages of 11 and 82 will be entering New Delhi. For a month, they have been hitting the highway at 5 am, marching until the sun burns the neck like a rash, breaking for a nap, then marching again until Delhi is 25 km nearer. They've been sleeping in school houses, wedding halls, open fields. Most are in ill-health from exposure to toxic gas or water: what keeps them going is sweet tea in the morning, painkillers at night and a fierce desire to hold their Prime Minister to account. This is not the first time they have made the padyatra: it is a Bhopal survivors' tradition. In 2006, a group marched to Delhi and presented their demands to Manmohan Singh.

In essence, the demands were: provide support to the survivors. Clean up the toxic waste at the plant. Give water to the communities whose water it has poisoned. Take legal action against Dow Chemicals, which bought over Union Carbide in 2001. They say the Prime Minister nodded as they read out the first three, and when they reached the fourth, he placed his hands over his ears. He would not endorse any bans or any arrangements for the special prosecution of Dow. Many of the padyatris from 2006 are marching again this year, to remind him of those promises.

There has been a little progress on the first three demands – not much, but enough to put the survivors' movement on its strongest footing in years. But as it turned out, that fourth demand is a wedge under the door. Ever since 2001, Dow Chemicals has maintained that while it acquired Carbide's assets, it did not inherit its liabilities. The survivors are det ermined to see Dow held to account. The Cen tre is determined to see it let off. For two years, the tangled question of Dow's liability has ensnarled progress on every other front.

NATHIBAI, HER HUSBAND and their three-year-old son Sonu left their village in 1990 and moved to Atal Ayub Nagar. This mohalla presses up against the wall of a dilapidated factory, and terrible stories about what had happened there were repeated to Nathibai often. Many of her neighbours were gas peedith – survivors of that night – their lives were pitiful, wasted waiting in lines at the hospitals. The factory still looked desolate, perhaps haunted, but the compound was full of ponds and birdsong.

IT WAS two years before Sonu began having problems. He never learnt to talk, and although he continued to grow, he became uncontrolled and erratic. His mind was regressing; he droo led and was incontinent. Today he is 21, but mentally still an infant. Nathibai is around 50, but looks two decades older. She can never leave Sonu alone. Some times he becomes violent, striking and scratching her. Doctors never explained what was wrong. Something was poisoning the community.

Children who had been healthy for years developed neurological conditions, even regres sed into mental disability. New borns had low birthweight, grew too slowly, suffered from cerebral palsy and deformities. Healthy children began to behave in frighteningly abnormal ways, with disorders like Pica: com pulsively eating mud, faeces, bone, even glass. People who had never been near the gas found their families beginning to sicken, and sometimes die. In two wards – 18 communities– there was a slow escalation of the rate of anaemia, skin disease and cancer. Girls in their late teens had not started menstruating and women in their mid-thirties had stopped. Entire communities sagged under fatigue, nausea and bodily pain. 'Now people here just stay ill constantly,' Nathibai says, 'There is no respite.'

WILDFLOWERS GROW INSIDE the Union Carbide compound; palash trees are in full bloom and look like dynamite suspended

mid-explosion.Cowherds graze cattle on the thick brush until guards come by and threaten them. The rust monsters tower above this pastoral scene, skeletal arrangements of girders, inscrutable valves, disembowelled regulators and long, long intestines of rusted piping. Nostril-singeing chemicals cling to the machinery, especially the huge, corroded storage vats in the processing plant. In the summer, says the guard, the wind blows a stinging scent through their quarters. They develop headaches, and become dizzy on their rounds. He knows the word – dichlorobenzene – even though he was never warned about toxicity when first posted here. He hustles us on, 'It is not good to stay here long.' An hour wandering through the buildings leaves you swooning like a seven-year-old smoking a cigarette.

THREE YEARS ago, all the visible toxic material scattered around the premises was gathered together in one vast warehouse. The guard teases we won't find what we're looking for – it's all been locked up. But he leads us to the building and to a peep-hole in the wall. Hidden under tarpaulin sheets, sackfuls of chemicals are heaped like haystacks, one heap after another, as far as the eye can see in the dim interior light. In any case, the guard is wrong. There is a barren field in the north-east corner, from where you can throw a stone in three directions and hit someone's jhuggi. This is where, in the mid-90s, Carbide made a landfill for the industrial residue excavated from their solar evaporation ponds. It was buried and soil was bulldozed on top.

Today a depression has formed in the earth, where toxic tar is creeping back to the surface. It looks gratifyingly evil, like a small prehistoric tar pit, reliquified and shimmering in the March sun. It is not shallow – place a large rock in the puddle and it is slowly swallowed, until the tar closes over it like a mouth. How is it possible that Ground Zero of the worst industrial disaster in history was left so vividly and potently contaminated?

After 1984, the Carbide management had only one thing on its mind: to get out of India before its liability was fully calculated. This required them, on the one hand, to restrict proof of the extent of damage and, on the other, to unload assets as fast as possible. They did both ruthlessly. For example, Carbide refused to disclose proprietary research that would help doctors understand the physiological effects of gas exposure and treat victims. It disrupted independent research on drugs like sodium thiosulphate, which would have helped detoxify victims but would also have proved that the gas entered the bloodstream and caused multiple- organ damage.

The Indian Council of Medical Research began a study on the impact of the gas on the next generation – this was mysteriously cancelled when results began to point to extreme damage. Satinath Sarangi, 54, is one of the principal leaders of the Bhopal survivors' movement. He abandoned a doctorate in metallurgy at Benares Hindu University to arrive in Bhopal the day after the gas leak. He co-founded the clinic that ran the improvised sodium thiosulphate trials –
until it was raided by the police and every single datasheet confiscated. Today, by compulsion, he is a self-trained physician, lawyer and detective.

'Carbide had the best emergency response you could imagine for bringing down the appearance of damage,' Sarangi says. 'It was like there was a Department of Dirty Deeds dedicated to this, a system in readiness – and it involved scientists and researchers, which makes it seem even more evil.' Sarangi can spend hourslisting the ways the company co-opted the government to suppress evidence of damage. 'First it happened with the gas deaths, then with the gas injuries, now with the contamination.' Carbide was relieved of all civil liabilities after paying a $470 million settlement – leaving each bereaved family with Rs 63,000, and each injured person with Rs 25,000. Warren Anderson, Carbide's CEO, could not be extradited, so their criminal liabilities were immaterial.

WHAT THAT left was the actual factory site. A month after the gas leak, the gates were padlocked, the factory abandoned in suspended animation. The dial for tank E-610, which had released the lethal methyl isocyanate (MIC), stayed stuck on Overload. All the chemical ingredients of Sevin, the pesticide end-product, stayed exactly where they had been that night – in warehouses full of iron drums and sacks, inside the pipes and the tanks of the actual plant. Residual waste sat in solar evaporation ponds. For a decade, only time touched the factory: the sacks ruptured and the pipes corroded, loosing the chemicals onto the ground.

Pesticide is a form of poison, so it should come as no surprise that its ingredients, like MIC, were highly toxic: mercury, dichlorobenzene, hexachlorocyclohexanes, lead. On nights of heavy rain, the factory became a toxic marsh. The land had been given to Carbide on lease by the state government; in order to relinquish it,Carbide needed the Madhya Pradesh Pollution Control Board (MPPCB) to certify the land was not contaminated. In 1989, and then again in 1994, the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) of Nagpur was asked to measure soil and water contamination.

Carbide had been privately testing their own samples, and found high levels of naphthol and Sevin. But NEERI's reports summarily acquitted Carbide. It said the soil in the area was clayey and impermeable, and would keep contaminants from reaching the groundwater table for at least 23 years. It declared that 'the water meets the drinking water quality criteria.' This was such cavalier logic that even Carbide's consultant, Arthur D. Little (ADL), found it insupportable. In a private response to NEERI, they urged: 'The sentence 'The groundwater appears to be suitable for drinking purposes' is too strong,' and, 'The conclusions regarding travel time to the water may significantly underestimate the potential for contamination… clay is only present to a depth of 6.1 meters… The worst case scenario travel time would be 2 years.' But NEERI's final report included none of ADL's revisions.

The MPPCB, a body so corrupt it was fired en masse three years later and its chairman arrested, looked at the flimsy report and discharged Carbide's lease: the land became the problem of the Madhya Pradesh government. Since then, the NEERI report has been the touchstone for both Carbide and government officials. Both use it as proof that there is no groundwater contamination, or if there is, it is not on account of the factory waste. They steadfastly ignored the multiple studies that found contamination present and growing – that was to be expected from pesky activist groups like the Boston-based Citizens' Environmental Laboratory and Greenpeace. In 2002, the Delhibased Srishti environmental research group found heavy metals, the pesticide HCH-BHC and volatile organic compounds (such as dichlorobenzene) in samples of soil, groundwater, vegetables and breastmilk collected in the areas. But the NEERI report overrode all contrary indications. The issue of cleaning up was mothballed. The official response became: of course, people in these areas are sick. The poor always are.

THERE WAS little urgency for the first 20 years about planning the 'site remediation'. According to Digvijay Singh, the CM of Madhya Pradesh from 1993 to 2003, the main issue during that span was funding.'There were very few experts, and the foreign firms we contacted wanted to charge 30 million dollars.' Singh also believes that the contamination issue 'is being played up by activist groups for publicity and funds.' Scepticism persists among the state officerswhose support matters most.

Ajay Vishnoi, the BJP Minister of Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation, denies the contamination firmly. 'A total survey has just been conducted, but it has not been announced yet. What has been reported to us is that there is no contamination of the groundwater in any of the tubewells in those areas,' he said, adding, 'beyond tolerable limits.' Arif Aqeel, the former Minister of Gas Tragedy Relief, has an even slicker response to claims of water contamination. 'While I was the Minister, the locals were complaining. They asked me to come drink the water myself,' he says, chuckling, 'I asked, this water is bad? And I drank two glasses right in front of the entire media, in front of the public. If there had been something wrong with it, I'd also have had the problem – but nothing happened at all.' Sarangi was there to watch Aqeel drink the water. He swears in all seriousness that the Gas Minister excused himself straight away, went around back and vomited it.

OUT OF THE factory gates, and a few minutes later we are in Atal Ayub Nagar, across the wall from the tarpit. It is one of 18 communities ranged around the factory's northern perimeter, collectively home to 25,000 people. Ninety percent of residents, including Nathibai's family, draw water from its wells. It tasted like phenyl was mixed into it, and often it had an oily sheen.'But what other water was there?' Nathibai explains,'Eventually we stopped tasting it.'

It is eerie to be a visitor in a community of illness. The adults suffer diseases that are mostly internal and invisible. Some, from foot to knee and hand to elbow, have skin that burns and is cracked so deep it bleeds. But the horror is what has happened to the young: every alley has households with children with developmental problems – like five-year-old Amit, who cannot walk or talk and whose parents are still praying; older ones, like 32-year-old Munni Bai, who was a normal teenager before 'her mind was lost.' She can no longer feed herself.

ONLY IN the last few years have state officials been compelled to acknowledge that this is happening. At first, all that happened was that workers came through, painted the hand-pumps red, painted – 'Paani peene yogya nahi hai' – and left. In 2004, the recalcitrant MPPCB admitted it had found pesticide in water-samples from around the plant. IIT Kanpur found high concentrations of endosulphan in the breast milk of mothers. The same year, acting on a contamination report from its monitoring committee, the Supreme Court directed the state government to provide clean drinking water to the contaminated areas.

Fourteen crores were allocated to pipe water in from the Kolar reservoir; in none of these areas has that arrived, but some are serviced by tankers or water piped from the Rasla Kheri bypass. The day we visited Annu Nagar, the Rasla Kheri water was cloudy pink. Where the tankers go, each family receives less than four litres per day. On days when the pipes are empty or the tankers missing, residents return to their handpumps, and mothers urge their children not to drink. As we crossed from Atal Ayub Nagar to Annu Nagar, we passed a child pissing on the railway track, his urine almost orange.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, VS Sampath, secretary, Department of Chemicals & Petrochemicals as well as Chair of the Central Task Force on Bhopal, addressed a CII conference. In his speech, he said that India needs to attract Rs 80,000 crore of investment in the petrochemical sector. Sampath refused to be interviewed for this story. But one could guess that he does not consider this a good time to antagonise the world's second-largest chemical manufacturer. On the contrary, the government has been most patient with Dow's errors. For example, last year Dow disclosed that its Indian subsidiary, DE-Nocil, had slipped more than Rs 80 lakh under the table to Indian officials to get approval for three pesticide products – including one called Dursban. Local people were charged with bribery and criminal conspiracy, but no action was ever taken to revoke the product approval.

Dursban was banned in the United States in 2000, after it was found that exposure to it caused headaches, vomiting, and diarrhoea, and risked permanent neurological damage to children. It is still manufactured and sold here. Dow has already begun investing in major new projects, including an R&D facility in Shinde-Vasuli in Maharashtra, where it is already embroiled in controversy. Civil society groups claim it concealed information about 20 hazardous chemicals it would manufacture at the plant. Last month, the residents of Shinde- Vasuli dug up their own roads to keep out Dow's construction teams.

IT WAS A SMALL, upstart motion that finally gave the issue of site remediation a shot in the arm. In 2004, a PIL filed in the Jabalpur High Court requested that the Court direct the government to get on with the clean-up. The Court's proactive instructions in this case had two effects: they threw a new momentum behind the survivors' efforts to haul Dow back into the picture. They also revealed the Central government's determination to keep Dow out of it. Among the Court's first actions, it directed the formation of a Central government Task Force to implement the clean-up. To advise it, the Court constituted a Technical Sub-Committee, which included the eminent biologist PM Bhargava.

When the Sub-Committee drew up a list of recommendations, the topmost was that Dow be made responsible for taking the surface waste and contaminated soil out of country for disposal; and that it should pay for the long-term decontamination of the water, which might take upto 20 years. This was endorsed unanimously.'My strong view is that there is simply no alternative to Dow doing this,' Bhargava says. 'No one in this country has the expertise to evaluate the waste, and we have no capacity to incinerate waste of this kind and quantity. Besides, the principle is simple – the polluter pays.'

Mysteriously, when the minutes of the meeting were presented to the Task Force, the suggestion involving Dow had fallen from first to last in the order. The Task Force ignored it, preferring instead a proposal to incinerate some of the waste at an industrial incinerator in Ankleshwar, Gujarat, and to bury the remainder in a sealed tank in Pitampur, MP. Preparations for this went ahead full-steam until the end of last year, when the Gujarat Pollution Control Board took stock of its facility and suddenly refused to participate. 'It's very clear that the government isn't interested in Dow's responsibility,' Bhargava says, 'but the incineration in Gujarat could have been another disaster.'

The Gujarat PCB's rejection has not yet sunk in – in Bhopal and in Delhi, officers insist the plan is moving ahead. There has been no talk of an alternative. The Jabalpur High Court put in motion another chain of events, which again revealed that on questions of Dow's liability, the government had its hands over its ears. This time its soft spot for Dow was not just the Central Insecticides Board or the Task Force on Bhopal. It was the most powerful men on the Union Cabinet. When Alok Pratap's PIL was registered, Dow found, to their horror, that they had been named as one of the respondents. This was the first time since their acquisition of Union Carbide that Dow had been impleaded in a case relating to Bhopal.

To represent them, they secured the services of Abhishek Manu Singhvi, the Congress Party spokesperson. The High Court was restless to see action on the clean-up front – but who was going to pay? To general surprise, in an application in May 2005, the Union Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilisers (MoCF) coolly suggested that Dow pay the government an advance amount of Rs 100 crore. Work could then begin. They could pay the difference afterwards.

THIS WAS exactly the kind of payment against which, for years, Dow had barricaded itself with deadly seriousness. "' We all ask the same question: 'Why isn't this site cleaned up?' "says Dow's spokesperson Scot Wheeler. 'As owners of the site, it is the government of Madhya Pradesh that has the ability and, more importantly, the authority to clean up the site.' Ever since it bought out Carbide, Dow has emphasised that it never owned or operated the Bhopal plant. 'Union Carbide Corporation had stopped doing business in India long before Dow acquired UCC's shares in 2001,' says Wheeler. 'UCC remains a separate company, which manages its own liabilities.'

In the United States, however, barely a year after completing the acquisition, Dow settled an asbestos-related lawsuit that had been filed against Union Carbide in Texas. The MoCF proposition was a nightmare sprung to life – not because Dow, which made Rs 11,600 crore in profits last year, was daunted by a pay-out of Rs 100 crore, but because of the precedent such a payment would set. What might litigants expect them to pay for once their gates of liability were cracked open? For further clean-up costs, if the Rs 100 crore were to fall short?

Last year Yashveer Singh, the officer incharge of the MoCF Bhopal wing, guessed that final costs might reach Rs 500 crore. What if Dow were asked to pay compensation and medical expenses for the victims of the groundwater contamination? Where might it end? It was time for lateral thinking. The MoCF was dragging Dow into the harsh light of liability because it needed the money. If the money could somehow be arranged, the MoCF would relent and Dow would be back in the clear. Dow made its move around the time of the high-powered US-India CEO Forum in New York, in October 2006. The Forum, a bilateral government initiative to encourage trade and investment, is co-chaired by Ratan Tata, the benevolent giant of Indian business. Dow CEO Andrew Liveris was a member as well.

On July 9, months before the Forum began, Tata wrote to Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, about resolving the'legacy issues' of Bhopal. In his letter to the FM, he made a striking offer: 'We should be concerned about the lack of action on remediation of the old Union Carbide disaster site… I believe that responsible corporates in the private sector and in the public sector might be willing to contribute to this initiative in the national interest and Tatas would be willing to spearhead and contribute to such an exercise.'

At the Forum, Dow held a meeting to discuss its liability problem. Afterwards, Ratan Tata resumed the correspondence. In another

letter from him to MS Ahlu walia, copied to the PMO:'It is critical for [Dow] to have the MoCF withdraw their application for a financial deposit by Dow against the remediation cost, as that application implies that the GoI views Dow as liable in the Bhopal Gas Disaster case… My offer for the Tatas to lead and find funding… still stands. Perhaps it could break the deadlock?'

The Cabinet leapt at Tata's overture. Chidambaram gave his support. So did Cabinet Secretary BK Chaturvedi. MS Ahluwalia said: 'The Chairman of Dow indicated that they would be willing to contribute to such an effort voluntarily, but not under the cloud of legal liability.' Minister of Commerce & Industry Kamal Nath came right out with it: 'While I would not like to comment on whether Dow has a legal responsibility or not, as it is for the courts to decide, with a view to sending an appropriate signal to Dow Chemicals, which is exploring investing substantially in India, and to the American business community, I would urge that a group... look at this matter in a holistic manner.' The idea quickly fizzled out after the press and activist groups caught wind of it.

By January 2007, the Tatas were playing defence. They released a statement regretting the 'considerable misalignment and misunderstanding' of Tata's offer, which was 'no different from any public-spirited initiative to clean a polluted river or a site damaged by some abnormal phenomenon.' The Tatas' reputation for philanthropy did not incline the survivors to believe in Ratan Tata's public spiritedness. In their eyes, Tata's corporate responsibility only arrived in time to relieve Dow's corporate liability. A clearer picture never emerged about what motivated Ratan Tata to offer his shareholders' money to clean up the Carbide site – and to enable Dow to contribute voluntarily to a cost it might have to pay involuntarily if the court finds it liable. But it was made quite clear that key Cabinet Ministers are ready to work to keep Dow out of trouble in the 'holistic' interest, even to the extent of helping it evade judicial process.

If a national economy could accept a bribe, this is what it would look like. Then again, would it be so terrible if somebody else cleaned up the plant? At this point, many officials say, the survivors are their own worst enemies. Their desire to see Dow's atonement is limiting the scope for quicker alternative solutions. Ratan Tata's consortium might have begun the clean up already. Arif Aqeel has ideas about why the survivors pursue Dow, even though it prolongs their poisoning.'What I'm saying is clean it up! Let Dow do it, let the Indian government do it, let a foreign country come and do it,' he says. 'But once the chemicals are gone, certain leaders will be unemployed, they won't have anything to do without their zindabad-murdabad.' The government wrings its hands and says the same – why are they making this so difficult?

The answer to that depends on another question: who are these people? Two views contend. Either they are the typical poor: exploited and misled, as always, but this time by activist leaders who are careerists or ideologues. Or, they arepeople in whom tragedy and poverty, and also education and leadership, have realised a potential for participatory citizenship. Survivors talk about 'moral responsibility' less often than the media makes it seem. More often, they talk about deterrence – making sure Bhopal never happens again.

Their insistence on Dow's liability is not vindictive; it is to ensure that their own personal justice becomes a precedent for wider justice. Jabbar Khan, who is marching with his daughters, says: 'If Dow is let off now, it will go somewhere else in the country and Bhopal will be repeated. We don't just want to be paid off. We want justice to be done. Even if we have to wait another 20 years.' Many of the survivors, whether or not they articulate it this way, are insisting on corporate and industrial liability.

That is why they have allied with other groups – mercury survivors from Cuddalore, Endosulphan survivors from Kasargode – people even more obscure and powerless than them. Some of the marchers – like 82-year-old Shantha Bai, who marches with her sari hitched up above her sneakers, and with a pace so fierce they call her the Bhopal Express – may not survive to see vindication even if it comes. Their fight stopped being about personal recompense a long time ago. To a great extent it is about the lives of their children, and their children's children. There is also a whole country to be saved from contaminated lives.

As you read this, the padyatris will have entered Delhi, carrying 20 questions to put to their Prime Minister. They can anticipate what his answers will be. Reaching Delhi may not mean the end of their road. But neither will it mean the end of their tether. If your swollen knees have carried you 800 kilometres, they will not fail you when it is time to stand your ground.

I see people now as strange. If this is heaven, which kind of heaven am I in? Because I ran away from heaven. I ran away from my life.

Let me ask you, in your country, the person when he died in the street, nobody cared about him? In your country, the people die because they carry a hundred dollars? In your country, a person is killed because you have a good car? Or because you are a manager? A doctor? Or because you are happy? Happy in your life? In my country, you don’t know who your friend is; you don’t know who your enemy is. You walk in the street and you don’t know what time you will die and for what reason? Every morning we start our day, we go to work and we say goodbye to our family and we leave the house and they are sure, the family is sure that you may not come back. And so they say «be careful». Everyday they remind you to be careful. The problem is you don’t know - be careful from what? Your friend is dead. One call and your friend is dead. Is this possible in your country? Your friend is dead, your cousin is kidnapped, and they say you or your neighbor is a spy. Your friend is dead. For me this day is finished. Do you know the first time I heard my friend, a friend is dead? How many times alone, I stayed alone? I try to forget, the people around me say this is normal, people here die everyday. But there is a first time, a first friend and for me this is the first person I know he is dead. It takes me three days, after three days, I come back to the life again. I come back to the life because my area has been attacked. The area where I work and live has been attacked. I want to see, to see what happened, I go to work to see what happened to the people I know. To the people I knew. No day is the same from the other.

They took Ahmed today. I watched, he cried, I stood and watched. I stood against my car and I watched. People come and go and I don’t know what to do. Maybe they think I know him, this is dangerous, but for me he is a normal person. I don’t know why they took him. I’m just looking. I want to hear something, some reason. I keep looking at his store - they come out, men with guns - he’s a man and they carry him like a baby. They throw him like a plastic bag into their car.

He cries to anyone who will listen, but no one listens. His eyes are locked onto me. I don’t know how much time passes. Time is not important. They took Ahmed today. The day finished, the next day, they find him, they find the body of Ahmed in the morgue. Ahmed was 25 years old, not married. He worked in the market to make good money, to marry; he had a dream to have a house, a family. For three days, the market is quiet; nobody has a mind to work because we don’t know who is next. That’s what happened one time.

Freedom, we cannot change any letter from this word. Now I sleep with­out fear, now I sleep like a normal person. I’m not scared, no one will come and break my door to steal from me or kill me with my family for no reason. The police won’t come to catch me or my neighbor to gather us together, to question you or to take you. So I can sleep. I close the door and I take off my clothes, and I sleep naked. I smile because I feel light. It’s a nice feeling, I didn’t feel it before.

I stand in front of a red brick immigration building in Stockholm, Swe­den. I’m wearing all of the clothes that I brought to heaven, I shaved. What do I tell them? Who am I? What will happen to me when I go inside this building? Who will I be? Or what, to them?

I know my truth, but how many times have they heard the truth from thousands before me and not believed them. What truth are they looking for? All I know to be true is that my life was no life but I am not alone in this.

I follow a woman from immigration to a storage closet of mattresses, blankets, pillows, some clothes (second hand), shoes, she hands me a blanket and pillow and a blue plastic bag. I still have this blue plastic bag. Somewhere under a bed you’ll find this bag, it’s the first sign, first mark that we are refugees, that we are strangers. I don’t know why no one throws it away, they keep it, it’s a memory, a first memory of living outside of your country. Something changed, my life changed when I accepted this blue plastic bag.

We Iraqis, we are foreigners in our own country and now we are foreign­ers in exile.

In my room in the refugee camp there is Hussein who is a Kurd from Baghdad, who refuses to say he’s Kurdish, he says, «I’m Arab». To the Swedish, he’s an Arab. Hussein cannot speak Kurdish well and his ac­cent in Arabic is not good either. If he speaks with Arabs, they think he’s Kurdish and if he speaks with the Kurdish, they think he’s an Arab. He lost who he was somewhere along the road to Sweden, maybe we all have.

In Iraq you can’t save yourself, you can’t save your son, so you send them away. You cannot save your child. In my own family, my cousin’s 12 year-old daughter slept alongside her parents, on the roof one unbear­ably hot summer night to escape the heat of Baghdad. There was no elec­tricity, no air downstairs so the family slept on the roof. In the summer, you sleep on the roof or in the garden. This is what we do. On this night, a bullet came from the sky and found a place to settle deep inside her skull. The little girl made a sound, they say like a cat and the family woke. They woke to check on her and this sound. Blood stained her face. She made no more sounds. Her family carried her down the stairs to the car and drove to the nearest hospital. At first, they thought the blood was coming from her nose, they didn’t know at first that there is a bullet in her head. At the hospital, her head was shaved and they find a hole in her head. She died within two hours. Before one day, she told her mother, «If I die, give the people Pepsi and bananas». During the three days of mourning, our tradition in Iraq, we make lunch and dinner for the people. During these three days, food was prepared and her mother served Pepsi and bananas. Why she died, we don’t know. A bullet came from the sky.

Do you know loss? Loss that takes everything, every sense is assaulted, everyone is a victim, do we ask to be victims? No, we ask for our lives. It’s no simple matter to leave your country, to leave your life, your family and friends. We are Iraqis, we are proud of being Iraqi, we don’t leave our families, we don’t give our families to stay alone without us. Now, if we stay, our families are more in danger, more in danger if we stay than if we run away. This is how we keep them safe.

In your country, are the police kidnappers and kidnapper’s police? In your country, when you see a man in a police uniform, driving a police car and there’s a checkpoint, a police checkpoint and you stop, you stop for the police does it ever occur to you that you’ll be kidnapped? That the police aren’t the police, aren’t who you believe they are? That the police in your country, are the kidnap- pers, aren’t who you think they are, will never be who you think they are, never to you, never again? You’ll never trust a uniform, never trust your neighbor, never trust your country, that it will keep you safe, know that it can’t keep you safe. Where do you go from there, knowing this? Living this? Where do you begin again, can you begin again, can you trust again or will it be in the back of your mind? For how long? When will we have back our country? Our lives? Our families?

At some point, we all run, you too would run. Maybe you would run before the troubles, or after they’ve broken, your body or you learn to live in fear and you wait. You wait inside your home behind locked doors and drawn curtains and dim candlelight, you wait in the heat, a murderous heat. You listen to each sound outside your door, each whisper can throw you in panic. We spend a lot of time learning our sounds, we memorize sounds. The sound that the front door makes or a car door, how one drags their feet or searches for their keys. We know the sounds of our own footsteps, how each one approaches the home. The women of the house know these footsteps. Your never late to come home. If your late they watch the door for some sign they recognize pulled from the endless days they wait by the door. Then they cry, they cry because they know you won’t be coming home. Our women they know these things. Hold these images. But now do you understand, now do you begin to see, there is no safe side, no one is who they say they are. Once we were normal. Remember, once we were normal. I too was normal, I’m not sure anymore.

I’m from Baghdad, I was. I believe in the Holy Koran, which says, If you don’t feel or you don’t find your life in this ground go to search for your life on another ground. When your country doesn’t want you anymore, why should you want her? In my country, I saw death too many times to face her again. I faced my own death as I lay bound hand and foot in the truck of a car. I was scared, I tell you, I’m still scared. So, I ran.

April 28, 2007. I was kidnapped today. Eat. Sleep. Wait. This is my life, my new life. I watch others watch TV. I watch others watch me. The television sits in the middle of the apartment. It’s always on. We stopped talking with one another, the television speaks between us. It speaks for us. We watch the news of Iraq as if we are in a theatre, an audience sitting quietly with no attachment to what they see before them. Life in a camp, a refugee camp is boring. There is money, but not enough to do more than feed you. We receive money every month. In another country, the money would go farther. In another country, one could go farther. But here in Sweden, I live in a country, which for Europeans is expensive but what about for a refugee? I cannot take a bus to the next town less than 30 kilo- metres away, it is too expensive to travel. I cannot buy bread in the local supermarket, it’s too expensive. So, we bake our bread and we smoke cigarettes from an Arabic shop nearby where a pack is less than half the money than in a Swedish store. I am not complaining, I have no right to complain. I only wonder, what life will I find here in a country that is too expensive for Europeans and impossibly expensive for me and others like me. You see, the last four months, I have not moved from within a one kilometre circle and I have walked this same circle daily, to change the air I breathe. But the Swedish do not speak to us, they have seen enough of us pass through their small town. The others have been here longer than I. The others eyes are out of focus, they stopped going to Swedish classes long ago, they never go outside except once a month to a local disco where they stand on the edge of the dance floor and look at the blonde haired Swedish girls who they know will never speak with them. You learn this quick here that if you have black hair, the locals do not talk with you, it is that simple. Everything’s simple really, black and white. We are black, they are white, our hair is black, theirs is white.

Imagine I’ve come from a prison and now I’ve found that I didn’t escape the prison, I’ve only moved into another room in the prison without my knowing it at first. Each day, my mind narrows, each day I watch the others around me and see their blank faces, they lost their expression months ago; they have been here to long. Here too long without family, without something familiar to hold to, it’s become too expensive to call home to Iraq, we lose a lot of money on the telephone. We lose a lot on the telephone. Boredom deadens you; it has deadened those around me.

I am sure one day it will deaden me. Everything is strange to me here, everything. Every street, the language, the people how they look and act, how they react to me. I see people now as strange.

Where do I begin? Every time I face the West, I find myself facing my own self ... upon my first encounter with Western literature as a teenager, I created a heroine who lived in a cor­ner of my soul, a heroine who was a collage of all the heroines I had met upon the pages of books, with unique characteristics from all the female protagonists from the Western novels I read. I don’t know when I made her, nor where, nor why, but she contained all the coincidental mistakes, games and fears of an adolescent who dreamt of a far-away, unattainable world. I don’t know why my mind has not glazed over the details, and on winter nights in Berlin a month ago, the thought would cross my shivering mind that I was going to meet her, perhaps in a dark bar, or a nearby restaurant, or even at a café, and in the dim lights I would feel the fantasy transformed into a cold, cruel, loneliness, and feel that a childish entertainment that had popped up in my imagination while I read had transfor­med my life into something of a sorry mess, exiling my great hopes into nothingness, not because I will never find that woman, but because I haven’t found the place where I wanted her to be.

This woman is more responsible for my upbringing than the environment I grew up in. She is the one who’s always watching me and critiquing my behavior, and I see her at all times standing in front of me picking out my clothes, helping to brush my hair and making me into someone different. This difference, perhaps this difference alone, has led me to feel this oppressive misery, and to escape from many of the questions that confront me about my own identity.

This is not because my behavior, life or thoughts developed in an environment totally different from the one I found myself in, and belong to the long-lasting hours of reading and dreams rather than the reali­ty that I existed in, but it’s that I found myself after a while participating in creating a history that exi­sted despite my wishes, having to belong to a society where I was already a stranger and an exile. I had dreamt of a place that would change and become one of the most civilized and developed of the world’s metropolises, stable and unchanging, and I find myself here in this place that is constantly agitated, and I must carry a weapon, be a soldier and fight, I must be a part of a society that I was always escaping from into books, hours of reading and dreaming of a woman who was simultaneously there and not there.

Baghdad collapsed a long time ago, ceasing to be a global center, but its wounded narcissism caused this country to create perceptions of itself that far transcended reality. This desolate place, which used to be a center of a world that stretched all the way to the Great Wall of China, has succeeded in attracting the world’s attention once again. The fact that it has found itself in a position that doesn’t match with its historical role has created an adolescent who breaks plates just to gain others’ sym­pathy, and made him stray on the streets committing destructive acts. This is perhaps one way to see this unceasing movement, this constantly moving soul that rushes through Iraqis at a dizzying speed: it is a kind of feeling of being in the wrong place, a feeling of the collapse of an old empire and the sorrow resulting from great poverty and destruction. I was looking out from the river onto this city that is rotting in its darkness and gardens and buildings fading from dirt and rust and filth, thinking to myself again and again how unfair it was for me to be in this place, and to live in this corner of the world, in this patch that breathes destruction and is being destroyed by its sadness and feelings of marginalization, insisting on remaining buried under the ashes. I wondered about this fate that never changes, about this fate that makes me be like this in this place, feeling just a little angry and rather worried when I read, shuddering, about incredibly beautiful and wealthy capitals, or about Baghdad when it was the unmatched metropolis of the world beaming its rays of science and literature across the world, unstoppable.

A real mental confusion has occurred in Iraq as the result of the revolutions, hesitations, break-ups, and splits. It is the desperation of a murderer who no longer has any hope of receiving a logical trial, since politics is the only yardstick; an option of resentment, cruelty and hatred that has imposed degenerate values upon a society that no longer distinguishes between the ethics of politicians or gangs. It has imposed breakdowns and unending abuse as well as confrontations ruled by nothing except the deification of chaos, irrationality and perversity. It has imposed an incredible reverence for the forces of instinct and mysterious blood. Saddam Hussein was a my­sterious current toyed with by the spirit of revenge and violence and brilliant cunning, and his insanity could only be materialized through the picture of the eternal enemy, first the commu­nists, then the Iranians and after that, the Westerners. Iraq as an existing nation and entity was only defined through its enemies, which is how he changed it into a vessel that moved without caring where it was going, a blind force that rolled about aimlessly before collapsing into the abyss of certain destruction, a force of insane speed. The west was pushing it into battle after bat­tle, from invasion to invasion, in order to create the empire of malice and opportunistic masses who would go on to eat up the nation, the nation, the future and the past, leading to this massive distortion of reason, this madness, and unlimited violence and ceaseless, unstoppable, motion.

Life became, not recently, but a long time ago, rather Dostoyevskian in its harshness, reminding me of an event that has remained in my mind from a while back whenever I see the scenes of terror, damage and destruction in Baghdad: Saddam Hussein mentioned three times that he had read Dostoyevsky as a young man, claiming that he had read him while spending time in prison in the 1960s. I didn’t know then whether or not Saddam Hussein had loved Dostoyevsky’s characters and spaces. The only time I saw him was when I was awarded the badge of courage following the Basra battles against the Iranians. Fate alone allowed me to see him up there, his tanned face infused with a specific shade of yellow. I was not a hero, and was more interested in the enormous bookshelf behind him than in the person himself. The shelf was stacked with numerous magazines, and my eyes kept returning to an expensive red leather-bound volume until I made out with some difficulty the name Dostoyevsky on the spine. The name was a key, and after the ceremony, I went to the Semiramis Bar on Sa’adoun street with a friend of mine for a beer and a chat, and there I wondered whether Saddam Hussein was so passionate about Dostoyevsky’s characters that he wanted to create fates for the Iraqi people si­milar to those of the great Russian author, this brutality mixed with a special tinge of cruelty, and an attraction to everything violent and crazy which gave the Iraqis the same excessive emotional range as Dostoyevsky’s characters. An unbounded propensity for extreme hatred, and love that leads them to dumb submission. Upon following it, one finds a resemblance between the narrative of Saddam and his victims and Dostoyevsky’s plots, he leaves them to their own choices, submitting them to humiliation and insults in utter sadism and cruelty, sparing them only to be able to chase them down again later, or else exterminating them ruthlessly only to cry passionately over them afterwards. Even as Saddam stood at the gallows a few months back, I recalled the scene that Dostoyevsky had written of his fake execution.

I stood there, unable to explain this extremism of rancor, malice and hatred, sometimes unable to explain this terrible cruelty without finding it in the past, or in the Islamic heritage of state-formation. But this extremism is also present in the Western nation-state model, and modern Iraqi culture was very much influenced by Western culture... It is true that there was a tangible slide into an Islamic-influenced state with the rise in ethnocentrism, sectarianism and tribalism which stunted social-class formation and led to the creation of power legacies and a regime which used the military as a crutch and distributed rank and privilege to its entourage, but the Western model was always present for in­tellectuals, politicians, the educated elite, artisans and the Baghdad middle classes; thus you find that politicians attempted to emulate western models of forced integration, such as the Bismarck model, and intellectuals tried to imitate Western cultural models in all their phases. The Bismarck model’s failure to produce a nation was doubly painful for Iraqi intellectuals; on one side, there were constant accusations of betrayal of their nation and on the other there was a particularly strong attraction to Western culture dictated by the historical position of the West and its culture. You are aware that the first conception of an intellectual was developed in Baghdad during the Abbasid reign, a model that the West only developed in the modern period. However, Islam in its imperial context proved incapa­ble of melding the philosopher-intellectual, poet, author, historian and critic with the man of the cloth, as happened during the Christian era in the west. Thus, the intellectual was doubly confronted caught between the preacher on one end and the sultan on the other.

Allow me to tell you about Bab Touma, the neighborhood I currently live in, in Damascus: Bab Touma is the Christian area of old Damascus, characterized by the ancient architecture of its buil­dings, its smells and its way of life. It is my favorite place in this area, and this isn’t due to the fact that my home looks like an ancient Roman convent, or to the fact that the place is Christian in an Eastern way. No, it’s - maybe - because it’s crowded with Europeans… Europeans enchanted by the East, as you described them in your letter. You can see them wandering around with their backpacks, wearing simple clothes, walking the streets day and night. This is a neighborhood of narrow, winding streets that intertwine; there are no straight roads, all the roads fold in upon each other in strange ways. These Europeans walk around these narrow winding streets as if they’re looking for something that they can’t find. They roam these labyrinthine streets constantly, and when they get tired they sit in one of the small bars that dot the place, bars that have no equal, since they are a bizarre mix of rowdy Eastern bars and dark European ones. To me, the thing that makes this neighborhood magical are those peo­ple who rent out small rooms in houses with large inner courtyards and fountains: Christian Syrians, refugee Iraqi artists, and Europeans who have come here to search for parts of themselves that they still have not discovered.

We Iraqi artists here in Damascus seek out Westerners naturally, and this is crucial - Easterners love Westerners more than the West, whereas Westerners prefer the East to Easterners. I said this to a Fren­ch friend of mine, who had asked me frankly why Arabs flocked to Pigale, Paris’ red-light district. As I drummed my fingers upon the table, I told her that Westerners like the East as a place, as desert, water, architecture, and ruins, wanting to forcibly remove the people who inhabit it. Westerners come to these places - I’m not saying “our” places - and don’t even glance at the people there. They stare impassively at the places where people live and at the people themselves with blank faces that become animated as they look at stones and ruins. They look to the left at an old building, and turn their heads right to look at another one, and erase those who inhabit them from their vision; or, they take folkloric pictures of these people - but these pictures are cold, sterile and ancient. On the other hand, Easterners are fascinated by Westerners, and because they can’t get to them personally, they take the easy route and interact with the West through Western women, which is why they crowd Pigale!

I am sure that those who come from Europe to Bab Touma are not after our oil, or seeking to oc­cupy our land - the our here is important, since we are talking about us and them. I don’t believe that people in general believe that they really own things on earth. The our and theirs is important as long as Europeans speak of culture and say our culture, and speak of modernity and say our mo­dernity. Even if we only witnessed Western modernity at the end of the 19th century as the Ottoman Empire weakened, you should know that the struggle over moderni­ty was bitter; brilliant intellectuals paid heavy tolls for it. An enthusiastic elite fought for what they saw as dignity and life, and were dragged into a bloody fight with the religious establishment and the political authorities. Some went to the gallows for this, feeling that a true enlightenment was coming from the West. But they were shocked by the second-rate treat­ment they received at the hands of Westerners, and the humiliation they were forced to bear. Did you know that the bloodiest revolt against colo­nialism in Iraq was not over petrol, but over dignity - the 1920 revolt in Iraq against the English, the largest in the colonies, took place because a British officer had slapped an Iraqi man held in high esteem by his family. I have never felt that I own something on this earth. What makes me oppose the West is not the petrol that we don’t own, and not the land that we don’t own either, but disappointment. The Iraqi intellectual is like the intellectual in your countries, feeling that culture has a role to play. Western culture, from Gramsci to Sartre, is planted in the heart of every Iraqi intellectual, and intellectuals here use the same discourse as intellectuals there: semio­tics, sign, image, simulacrum. Western culture is a treasure trove of ideas that intellectuals here plumb ceaselessly. Our intellectuals have entered a new era with the West, don’t think that the majority of them are still looking for something in Western culture: they know full well that the anthologies of the past have collapsed, and are gone for good, and that the return to re­ligion, or the Islamic awakening as you in Western newspapers call it, was caused by the West itself, which has really brought us up against a wall.

The Islamic movements in Iraq were supported, and sometimes even crea­ted, by the West to fight communism, and this has led to us being massacred with their swords these days. We paid a really hefty price because the West doesn’t want any genuine intellectuals in Iraq, and did not respect those who hungered for the spirit of independence, freedom and justice, since these values and principles did not coincide with interests of large corpo­rations. We were being shoved towards the West, which - as we imagined - was the source of reason and enlightenment, and these great humani­stic values naturally stoked our enthusiasm. But the Western support for Islamist movements, reactionary regimes and foul dictatorships gave our consciousnesses multiple personality disorder. Was the continent of reason - which is what we called Europe at the time - truly reasonable? We shouted as loudly as we could: Faust! Faust!

We were famished for the Faustian values, wanting to free our societies of the Holy and we wanted to liberate our societies with Justice and Law. But, on the other end, we came up against the Western wall, which was supporting all those movements that glorified the blood instinct, which murdered us with Western weapons. Our societies are experiencing so­mething akin to the terrifying explosion of the forgotten vows of history, and those of us who had lived a sort of cultural hybridity in Baghdad, due to the intermingling cultures and meanings, now have all developed multiple identities. And, what a disappointment it was when we found the continent of reason treating us despotically with extreme bigotry, showing only one face to us: either Saddam Hussein and stories of him blotting out an entire nation or the news of Islamists, who have become the true representatives of Iraq’s people, with their immensely rich and diverse culture. We - this latest generation of Iraqi intellectuals - realized after it was too late that the West does not want real intellectuals from this country, but what it really wants are servants and shoeshine boys. The war here, is a war of values, and as you see religion is invading Iraq, but don’t believe that Iraqis believe in absolute Truth. This is more a search for objective parameters to balance their lives, since some of the magic of the world they used to inhabit has gone. Iraqi intellectuals were sturdier, due to their sturdy relationships with their culture, but their relationship to Western culture distanced the magic of their culture and their surroundings. And this is why you can see, despite his high culture, the Iraqi intellectual has begun to suffer from a spiritual void. He lives in two separate minds, his present mind deprived of modernity and his other mind that is issued from the modern world - and, I wonder, how can this void be filled? Gilles Keppel’s statement that all Islamists want to get re­venge for their gods does not apply to them at all, but I believe that some of them - at least, some of the intellectuals I know - do not want to stand midway. In the beginning, there was a strong trend towards modernity, or a certain idiosyncratic type of modernity, and when they hit the Western wall, some decided to return to religion in its most primal form, which is impossible, since the world has totally changed. I am certain that they will soon come around.

Under-age and trafficked out of Iraq, girls as young as 11 and 12 are sold as dancers in nightclubs and casinos, virgin brides and as prostitutes to the illegal sex markets in The Gulf, Yemen, Jordan and Syria. Organized criminal networks operating in the sex trade further jeopardize the precarious financial state of Iraqis at home and living abroad.

When the body of her sister was dumped at the door of her Baghdad home, the life of Aishiq, changed forever. It was 2003, she was 12.

Prior to the war in Iraq, she lived with her mother, sister, and brother. The family lived in a simple two-room traditional Arabic style home in the eastern part of Baghdad. Her father died two years prior from natural causes. The loss of the head of household dealt an emotional & financial blow to the family. The future now uncertain, their home falling into disrepair, the remaining members of this small Shiite family moved from their Baghdad home to a $200 a month rental apartment in the holy city of Kerbala. Aishiq’s brother first found work as a day laborer in Kerbala and the family relied on the charity of Shiite and Sunni neighbors for any essentials not covered by the boy’s income. «After the death of my father we were very poor and even with my brother’s money it was not enough. We spent a lot of time without good food. My sister suffered from bad headaches, my mother begged neighbors to feed us.» Financial struggles and stress complicated the mother’s health, dying one day of heart failure while praying in the Imam Hussein Ibn Ali’s mosque in Kerbala. The three siblings, without parents, managed to survive on the sole income of the son. With the aftermath of the war in Iraq, Aishiq’s brother found new work. It is one of the most dangerous civilian jobs in one of the world’s most dangerous countries: translating Arabic for the U.S. military in Iraq. Late one night, Aishiq found the body of her brother, shot in the chest, slumped against the door of their family home, murdered by Wahabeen (foreigners). «There was a noise at the door, I opened it and found my brother shot in his chest. His eyes were open, I closed them.»

Her sister would shortly suffer a similar fate. First beaten, raped, then murdered, the body dumped at the family door, this time by five local men. She was 15 years old. «They kidnapped her in front of our house. My sister told me she was going to study. She was at the front door and five guys came and took my sister - her voice starts to break. She knew the men who killed her sister - these guys take pills.» Scared for her life, Aishiq fled her family home to an uncle living in the same city. Yet, her uncle’s wife refused to take the girl into their home. Without family, a home to return to and her own life endangered Aishiq joined a multitude of Shi’a pilgrims congregating outside of the Imam Hussein Ibn Ali mosque in Kerbala. It was the first night of Ashura, the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a time of mourning and religious observation for Shi’a Muslims. Exhausted and with few options before her, she lay down on the pavement alongside the mosque and fell asleep. She wouldon’t remain asleep for long. A woman shook her awake, «Aren’t you the daughter of Umm Saddam? Aren’t you Aishiq?» The girl nodded, yes. Kissing both her cheeks, she told her «come home with me.» In the women’s home were two young Iraqi girls orphaned in the aftermath of the war. They told Aishiq that they were living in a Baghdad orphanage when this same woman and a man posed as prospective parents looking for children to adopt. Aishiq explains, «If someone goes there (to the orphanage) and says my wife doesn’t bring children they will give the child. They don’t know how the children will be used.» She is visibly saddened when remembering the two young girls, she describes as thin, one with green eyes, the other with hazel. They girls 11 and 12 years old at the time. The threesome would soon be trafficked out of Iraq. Aishiq sent to work as a dancer in a Dubai nightclub and the two girls would be married off to men in the United Arab Emirates. In the coming months Aishiq would be brought in and out of Dubai three times on trips to and from Syria where the woman’s family was living on the outskirts of Damascus in Sitt al Zeinab. On the return trips to Syria, she worked as a dancer in nightclubs and casinos as she did in Dubai. «There were a lot of girls - But she says she was the youngest - The others were older 16, 17, 18, 20…»

This work did not last long, however as these places are regularly checked by the Syrian police for girls working under the age of 18. The woman who first trafficked her out of Iraq and would today be the go between for prostituting Aishiq decided to sell her most valuable commodity: the girl’s virginity. Living in Damascus, an elderly Saudi man entered into a temporary contract marriage with the young girl. Contract marriages, also commonly called pleasure marriages are permitted in Shiite society but there are conditions: «The girl must be an adult, must have agreement of the mother and father, and cannot be a virgin must be a widow, it must be because of war or other things like that.» The woman sold her off to the Saudi. The man paid 200,000 Syrian pounds (4,000 USD), the going price for a virgin. «When I married I had no period, I was 12. I was a virgin.» The Saudi gave her gold bracelets and earrings, she says he took good care of her and she became fond of him. Yet, it wasn’t long after the woman had the money for Aishiq in hand that she calculated how to get the girl back under her own roof. One day while shopping in a local market in Damascus, two of the women’s sons kidnapped Aishiq. «They put their hands over my mouth and forced me into a car» she says.

After the kidnapping, a doctor was brought to repair the girl’s virginity by reattaching her hymen. «I was crying, it hurt too much - she says. Aishiq goes on to explain that - men want virgins.» Following her kidnapping, she was once again whisked away to Dubai alongside of the woman. The girl was put to work as a dancer once again in a casino. While working she met a young Emirati man, she says they fell in love. The woman again arranged for a contract marriage between the Emirati and the girl. Aishiq lived with this man for 3 or 4 months. Yet, it wasn’t long before the woman who contracted this second marriage again soon realized that if she lost the girl, she also lost income. The woman threatened the young man that if he didn’t return the girl she would call his family in the Emirates. The shame and dishonor would be too great to bear, he agreed to return Aishiq. The young girl was sent back to Syria and forced this time into prostitution In Syria, she lives with the woman who first trafficked her out of Iraq, the women’s two daughters both prostitutes, one of the woman’s sons and his wife. The woman, now Aishiq’s pimp, has two other sons who live in a separate apartment nearby; one of the boys is the girl’s minder and accompanies her when she is sent to a client. She says she sees the second son every three days when he comes to force sex upon her. «One time I refused and he struck me, blood came out of my nose and mouth.»

Aishiq’s body is a roadmap of torture. A knife cut across her chin paired with a deep slice in the base of her thumb. Punishment by her minder. Her arms and hands are riddled with scabbed punctures to her skin. Some old, some new.

«This family when they punish me brings nails and heats them, tie me and stick the nails on my hands and arms», she says. We ask, «When do they punish you?» «When I ask for money, the money I’ve earned, they become angry and punish me. They won’t give me money.» Aishiq sleeps in a small space between the bathroom and the kitchen on a thin mattress. «They provide me with a little food and a place to sleep. The woman sends my money to Iraq to build a house in Kerbala.» She then pulls down her t-shirt and bares her scarred chest, mutilated by cooking oil thrown at her after she asked to buy a cream to sooth her itching skin. «They were cooking fish and threw the oil on my chest.» In the past when her injuries were too severe to treat at the home, she was taken to the hospital. In the hospital she was threatened that, «if you say something, we will kill you.»