The Wake of War: Encounters with the People of Iraq and Afghanistan

319 Pages·2006·0.96 MB·English

by  Anne Nivat

Th e Wa k e o f Wa r
Encounters with the People of Iraq and Afghanistan
Anne Nivat
translated from the French by Jane Marie Todd
Beacon Press
Boston
Beacon Press
25 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892
www.beacon.org
Beacon Press books
are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
© 2005 by Anne Nivat
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First U.S. Edition
09 08 07 06 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper
ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.
Text design by Patricia Duque Campos
Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nivat, Anne.
[Lendemains de guerre. English]
The wake of war : encounters with the people of iraq and afghanistan / Anne Nivat ; translated
from the French by Jane Marie Todd.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8070-0239-9 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. Afghanistan—History—2001– 2. Iraq—History—2003– I. Todd, Jane Marie II. Title.
DS371.4.N5813 2005
956.7044(cid:1)31–dc22 2005011586
First published in France under the title Lendemains de guerre:en Afghanistan et en Irakby Librairie
Arthème Fayard.
To Lucile, my mother,
who so loves nuance and detail

Contents
Introduction ix
Part I
In Iraq, after the U.S. Military Victory of April 2003
1. The Proscenium 3
2. En Route to Erbil 6
3. A Kurdish Family 9
4. A Young Leader 19
5. The Major Holidays 28
6. A Turkoman Family 39
7. En Route to Baghdad 50
8. Baghdad 53
9. A Dominican Friar 71
10. A Resistance Fighter
and a Former Fedayee 76
11. In the “Sunni Triangle” 84
12. En Route to An Najaf 94
13. A Shiite Family 97
14. A Former Admiral 121
15. A Man of the Theater 146
Part II
In Afghanistan, after the U.S. Military Victory of December 2001
16. En Route to Kundu¯z 157
17. A Teacher 160
18. En Route to Badakhsha¯n 167
19. An Engineer 171
20. A Gynecologist 181
21. En Route to Maza¯r-e-Sharif 194
22. A War Chief 196
23. En Route to Kabul 207
24. Kabul 209
25. En Route to Kandaha¯r 218
26. A Former Taliban 222
27. En Route to Khost 248
28. A Governor and Former Commander 250
29. The Minor Holidays 261
30. Detour through Peshawar 276
Conclusion 280
Acknowledgments 286
Notes 288
Select Bibliography 304

Introduction
On September 11, 2001, I found myself in the company of seventy-four
passengers, most of them Americans, aboard a plane flying from Paris
to New York. The aircraft, already too far out over the Atlantic to turn
back, was diverted by international air authorities to Halifax, Nova
Scotia. There we stayed for nearly fourteen hours, without anyone both-
ering to inform us of the catastrophe in New York and at the Pentagon.
The locked doors and the stress, combined with the lack of an explana-
tion, gave rise to countless rumors. When we finally learned the horror
of the crashing planes and the collapsed towers—one of the passengers
heard it from someone on his cell phone, which, miraculously, was still
working—some of the women onboard burst into tears, and most of the
other passengers shook their heads or shrugged their shoulders, forced
to believe the unbelievable. The whole world was watching the tragic
images being transmitted in a running loop by every television chan-
nel. And there we were, locked in a metal cabin at a remote airport,
waiting—in some sense—outside time.
“One thing’s for sure, it’s the work of the Palestinians,” some de-
creed, rather too quickly. “Or else of Saddam Hussein,” said others. I
no longer remember whether Osama bin Laden’s name came up in our
aimless discussions. In any case, the United States had been attacked on
its own soil, and that is how the American citizens aboard our plane
felt. An oppressive silence gradually set in in our restricted space. Wa-
ter and food had to be rationed until the Canadian authorities, obvi-
ously overwhelmed, could bring in fresh supplies.
The response to that terrible attack was not long in coming: the war
ix