Their acquaintance grew into friendship and then engagement while sharing patrols and lengthy down time. She helped him with Arabic and he improved her English. But it was when militia members threatened her with death, suspecting she was an interpreter, when her love for him was cemented and the future she wanted was clear. “Just, I need my life to be safe. And (for) my family,” she recently told NEWSWEEK . She clarifies that family now includes the soldier she loves.
In reporting the Iraq side of this week’s magazine story about American-Iraqi couples, I came across four couples still in the country and heard about several others, mostly involving American contractors. For couples still in Iraq, the excitement of their attraction is tinged with dread that they could be discovered. Their stories varied – from yuppie fiancées who could fit in well in the U.S. suburbs where they plan to live, to a working class couple starting a family in the Green Zone. But they all keep their relationships secret so the women’s families won’t be identified by insurgents and their spies who infiltrate American bases.
In each case, the American men stood in contrast to the coarseness of most other Americans in Iraq. They chafed at the way they had seen Iraqis treated by bosses, soldiers and immigration bureaucrats. Most Americans here delve little into Iraqi culture. The American men in mixed couples were learning Arabic and picking up Iraqi customs even before they fell in love. The men’s tendency to be unconventional among their peers may have met midways with a similar streak in the women. Most were older than the usual young age when Iraqi women wed and they seemed too independent – they all studied in universities - to stand for the traditionally second-class role of wife in a Middle Eastern marriage.
The underground nature of their partnerships serves to test their commitment. Amid the secrecy, they’ve worked to build the trappings of normal courtship. Sometimes it’s in the smallest ways, like saving their frequent text messages on their mobiles or building phone connections with in-laws.
An American plumber, working for a private firm in the Green Zone, and his Iraqi wife got to know each other over walks and lunches in the lawns of the vast Republican Palace, which is the main branch of the U.S. Embassy. “If anybody hears about this, they will kill or kidnap you!” the Iraqi woman remembers her mother shouting when she heard about the new boyfriend. The American has never been to the Iraqi woman’s Baghdad house, though a Green Zone cleric arranged Iraqi guards to take him to a local courthouse for an official conversion to Islam. The woman says she fell for the hardworking man and is sure he won’t lie to her as did two Iraqi men who proposed to her in the past. In July, 2005, they went to Amman, Jordan, so they could get married amid a few hours of normalcy - she posed for photos in a wedding dress and they went out to dinner. The plan was for her to live there but the assertive bride could not watch her new husband go back to Baghdad alone. “I told him, ‘Why am I married to you?’” says the woman.
They moved into a dilapidated Green Zone house, where the handy husband rewired, re-roofed and added on. It is crowded, as in-laws have now moved in. But they decorate it with a small Santa statuette, teddy bears and posters of an alpine scene and little babies. That’s because they have their own son now, whose birth was a classified affair. A hospital was chosen for its safety and discretion and the mother hid the father’s identity. Relatives were sent to scope out hospitals for safety and discretion. The pregnant mother arrived at the one chosen in time for the labor and kept her husband’s identity secret. Despite a rocket strike in their backyard, they plan to keep living in the Green Zone, where she can exchange calls of reassurance with her relatives whenever they hear a bomb blast. He puts in long hours plumbing and she takes interpreting work.
For another couple, the courtship resembled a normal white-collar office romance. He is a typically meticulous accountant, trim, clean-shaven (where beards are common among contractors) and thoughtful, and she’s a bookkeeper with a computer science degree. They spent months just a few feet from each other in the office, talking over everything as co-workers do. Their early dates – if you can call them that – consisted of drives between the checkpoints and gates of the Green Zone in his SUV.
When the daily commute from her house to the Green Zone became too dangerous, the Iraqi’s company found an apartment for her and she moved in. Her family told neighbors she had left Iraq. But inside the Green Zone they have a modicum of freedom, enough to have a splashy engagement party in which he got on one knee and proposed in front of a banner that read, “Will you marry me?” His relatives in America posed for a photo with another banner welcoming her to the family. They await her visa and will then travel to the American southwest and marry within the 90-day time period required to keep the visa valid.
An American security contractor met his Iraqi wife at a weekly Green Zone barbecue in 2005. Those social events have dwindled amid tightening security regimes. She had come with a friend who worked inside. The American was struck by her beauty and asked for an introduction. His interest in local culture and his protective nature convinced her he was different from the Americans she had seen on television, raiding houses and detaining her countrymen.
Before long, he was sending Iraqi friends on intricate missions to bring her for more Green Zone visits. They used appointed pick-up locations that would keep her address secret even from her chauffeurs. They were married, after a thorough search for a trustworthy Iraqi judge to perform the ceremony, in the living room of his villa a couple months later but they still face obstacles. They plan to live in another Arab country, where he has an expansive home but that has been tough to arrange because of region-wide restrictions now on the masses of Iraqis leaving their homeland. As they travel, other Arabs call her a “spy” for marrying an American. “I don’t care,” she says.
