Escaping old fights from a world away
Urgent. Khalil receives a phone call asking him to go to his brother’s house. They live 10 minutes apart in Baghdad.
When Khalil arrives police are all over the place. He asks what is happening. He gives them his name and said he has come to see his brother.
“I’m sorry,” an officer said. “Your brother has been killed.”
Khalil is led inside. His brother, who is married and has four children, is leaning back in a chair in the shop he runs at home selling vending machines. He has been shot between the eyes. A Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, is on his chest, covered in blood.
Police take pictures. In a sign of respect, one of them asks Khalil to handle the Qur’an. After he takes the body to a mosque, Khalil cleans his brother’s house for three days.
So it goes in Iraq. Khalil said 53 of his relatives have been killed, including three of his wife’s brothers.
“Why?” he said. “Women. Children. Why? “Why?” For almost 1,400 years, Muslims in the Middle East have lived in a divided house, disputing who should be their religious leader. Sunnis are on one side, Shiites on the other.
We see the blood on TV and hear about the fighting in the news. The nameless faces seem a world away. Their culture is different, their battle foreign. We don’t live that life, but listening to Khalil, you can feel their story.
Khalil was raised in Baghdad with three brothers and four sisters. Their father was a tailor. By 12, Khalil knew how to drive. He played defence in soccer and learned chess. At 16, he discovered girls.
“In my country, the first question asked is, ‘ Are you Sunni or Shiaa?’” said Khalil, a Sunni.
Iraq is cloaked in suspicion. Bullets do the talking. A war against Iran in the 1980s deepened the division between the sects. Iran is mostly Shiite.
The Gulf War followed in 1990. The Iraq War started in 2003. While oil and money and power are motivations, a secular separation between Shiites and Sunnis cuts to the heart.
By 2008, Khalil felt staying in his house in Baghdad was dangerous, the situation explosive. For two years he and his family lived in the airport where he worked as a manager in a duty-free shop. Having the terminal guarded by U.S. marines made him feel safer. This was a life without freedom, though. He wanted out.
“I went to a friend to say goodbye,” Khalil said. “I said I leave tonight.”
In late 2010 he loaded a bag of clothes. With his wife and three children he went to Syria. The International Organization for Migration fast-tracked his hope of finding a different country and making a fresh start. After six months in Damascus, he moved to Canada with his family and $800. That was their life possessions.
Khalil settled in Saskatoon last July.
He wants to distance himself from the past, yet continues to follow what is happening in Iraq. He reads news from Baghdad on the Internet. He plays clips from the Middle East on YouTube. In order to Google easier, he has added Arabic symbols to the English letters and numbers on the keyboard of his laptop.
He carries a small medallion he had for security and identification when he worked in the Baghdad airport. On the face of the medallion are the flags of the United States and Iraq.
“I don’t have a country anymore,” he said. “Iraq and Iran are now one country. Mine is gone. I hope my country is going to find good, but I don’t think anything will happen as long as Iran is there. If I’m in government, the first thing I do is draw a line between Iraq and Iran. Second, I tell the people from Iran who are in Iraq to go. Leave. Third, if anybody says they are Sunni or Shiaa…” He paused. “I’m Sunni, but I don’t care about these names. I don’t even have a Qur’an in my house. My sister’s husband is Shiaa. He is a good man. I have a friend in Iraq who is Shiaa. He is a good man. They are good men with good minds.”
Khalil’s son is five. The other day he sat in the front seat of the car with Khalil and said he wanted to learn how to drive. He looks like he can already handle the steering wheel, turning it smoothly with his hands, not wrestling with it.
Watching his son reminds Khalil of when he was a boy in Baghdad.
Khalil said one afternoon before he was a teenager he borrowed his dad’s car keys and went for a spin as his dad was sleeping. When Khalil returned home, he told his dad what he had done. He apologized. He promised to never sneak away with the car again.
Khalil met his first girlfriend at 16. They were in the same grade and same neighbourhood, going to different schools. He stopped seeing her at 17 because his dad didn’t approve of the relationship. In the Muslim religion and Arabic culture, parents decide who sees who.
“He cried when I told him about her,” Khalil said. “He said, ‘I think I’ve lost you.’ I said, ‘No, I’ll leave the girl.’ I did that for my father. Our connection was very special.
“With my son I’ll tell him this is not about your father, it’s about you. Go Christian. Go Jewish. Go Muslim. Don’t think about religion. Just go. This is your life. Live.” He stood up. “See this?” he said, pointing to his dark corduroy pants. “I tailored them.”
He smiled.