"I cry whenever I talk about Iraq. I want my ground. I want to know, when I walk, that this is my country, to wake up in the morning and go out in my garden for a cup of coffee. To have the neighbor come and say, Assalamu alaikum, and then you offer him a coffee and then a cat jumps in your lap. I lived that. I was a sociable man. I would open my house to everybody. I used to put plastic chairs on the sidewalk in front of my house, where I planted some flowers.
If I could speak with Paul Bremer, I would say, 'Thank you for taking the cotton out of our mouths, now we can speak, but you put it in your ears."
"My husband was high in the party. He was known and talked about in the news. He used to have cars and bodyguards. He was threatened by the Kurds, by Talabani and Barzani, because he had been in the government and working against them. Then he had a third threat, from the Shiites.
I said we have to leave because I am in constant fear. But he had no passport, so I went to the British consulate on Haifa Street. A white Land Cruiser drove up, and two guys in the back seat opened the window and said something to the man who had been following me from the consulate. He put a gun to my ribs. I tried to get help from some people on the street but they saw that the men in the truck were all armed. They made me put my head down, and I heard them saying that there were too many checkpoints to take me out of Baghdad so they would take me to the al Shaab district. The roads were bumpy. They put a cloth over my eyes and pushed and shoved me into a room, locked the door. I remained there for 17 days.
They tied my hands to the ceiling and burned my left arm, my stomach, my back. They were kids, 15, 16 years old. Their 'sheik' was about 23 years old. Then, one day this 'sheik' came in and a boy came with him, and he looked up at me and said, 'Sheik Omar, that's Auntie. We know this woman. She's a friend of my mom's. His mom used to help me as a cleaner, doing ironing and washing clothes, helping with the family. So they let me go."
"I would be glad if they had replaced Saddam with order and stability and better life. With the invasion, I thought maybe America would at least reconstruct what was destroyed and what we couldn't reconstruct because of the sanctions. On the contrary: America had absolutely not intention of reconstructing anything."
"Once when I went to visit my sons in England, the British consul in Baghdad asked me if I would stay in England. I said even if all of England was to be mine, I wouldn't stay there, because I don't have a social life. I did my duty. My sons are all grown up. Now I'm going to live my life, get together with my friends and drink coffee and smoke and gossip.
I got pessimistic when those people with the turbans won the elections. I knew that would be the end. I was the only one without a veil in my neighborhood. Every girl, even as young as 9 years old, started wearing them. In fear of being killed, they put them on. They want us to go back to the time of our great-great-grandmothers! One shopkeeper told me, 'wear something to cover your hair.' I said, 'I only have four hairs. Let God take care of the women with lots of hair.' But I was afraid. I didn't leave my neighborhood where everyone knew me."
"I returned home one day and my daughter said, 'Dad, they want to kill us.' It was a neighbor who threatened. The other neighbors said, don't let it bother you. But from that time on, I didn't go to work. And from that day, I said, I want to sell my house. I took 70,000 dollars for it although it was worth 300,000. I built that house with my own hands and I did everything, the electricity and a water treatment system. Everything was first class. But what can I do? Money is nothing to me. I want to save my daughter and my son.
You know Babylon and the Chaldeans? It is our land. So when you leave these places, you leave your life. But what can we do?"
"I cried all the way from Baghdad to Amman. I knew I could no go back again. My house in Baghdad was next to my mother's house and in the middle we have a couryard with a big date tree that my father planted. We tried to keep this tree as a memory of our father and to remind my children about their grandfather. It came up to the second story. From the roof of the house there were specialize people who would come and cut the dates. I used to collect the dates and deliver them to my relatives. Now when you go to Google Earth it is like this tree is embracing the house."
"On the street where I had my clinic, there were ten doctors killed and one kidnapped. One of the doctors was 82 years old. Most of them were Sunnis and some were Shiite. But they make no distinction between Sunni and Shite. And you didn't know who was going to be the one who would put a bullet in your head. They might enter as a patient and then shoot the doctor."
"Before the war I used to work at a beauty shop. But after the war I didn't work. Those people, the ones who say they are religious, they announced that all coiffeurs had to close. They said it was against religion to put on henna or trim your eyebrows or style your hair. Even the barbers shut down. It was never like that before. Before I didn't fear anything. But those people started raping and kidnapping. Women and girls, especially those living alone, were targeted.
I began to hear stories of the Mahdi army entering the houses of Christian girls and saying, either you become a Muslim and marry one of those guys, or else. I'm Muslim, and I know there's nothing in Islam about that. So I came to Jordan. But people in this society look at Iraqi girls, especially those who live alone, and they consider them cheap. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I'd be humiliated like this. I've always been independent and had a mind of my own. I just want to leave, to immigrate to any country. Enough is enough."