A Disappearance in Damascus by Deborah Campbell

father. It was him she would think of as she rosefrom her bed at first light, as she took on the labour of tending their orchards and fields. She had known nothing until then about back-breaking farm work.
    Slowly, watching the other girls, who laughed at her clumsiness but were eager to teach her, she learned to scythe the hay and load it onto the back of the donkey. Awkwardly, but growing in physical strength, she shimmied up the date palms to pick the golden fruit. Neighbours came to watch. “Look at the scholar!” they gloated. “A lot of good your education has done you. What a waste of time.”
    Her tongue was as sharp as the scythe that cut her untrained fingers. “Education is a weapon!” she shot back, echoing her father’s words. “I’ll use it when I need it.”
    “And that,” she told me, smiling broadly, “is what I did.”
    —
    She dreamed of becoming a flight attendant and seeing the world. But she couldn’t afford the bribes for such a career, and wouldn’t have been hired anyway: a country girl with no connections who wasn’t about to sleep her way into a job. She thought of working at an embassy abroad, though the same contraventions applied. But when the world came to Iraq she could meet it. In the years between university and marriage, eager to give her mind something to do, she took English classes at the British Council in Baghdad.
    That stopped when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990. Everything stopped and went into reverse. The people were told it was a revolution in Kuwait, not an invasion. When a friend burst into her house to tell her about the revolution she went to turn on the radio. There was no news, no signal, no BBC Arabic, nothing but static. Then, suddenly, the markets were filled with looted Kuwaitiair-conditioning units and Kuwaiti furniture. A cousin returned from the war with hair that had turned completely white. People ran out to buy all the food they could find because they feared another war was coming.
    I had been in the region during that war—I was a foreign student taking Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thinking he had a green light from the United States. He did not. Throughout the Gulf War that followed, when his Scud missiles sputtered towards Tel Aviv, I carted around the gas mask all students had been issued, sealing up the cracks of my dorm room with packing tape whenever the air-raid sirens sounded, waiting for the chemical weapons we feared would be deployed by Saddam Hussein. The campus was all but empty—everyone bunkering at home with family or having caught the first flight out—except for me and one other student who lived upstairs. Staring out of our gas masks, we watched the bombing of Baghdad on CNN as a series of flashes against green-glow night-vision cameras, the sound of our own breath roaring in our ears. When the war ended, and the news moved on to other stories, we returned to our studies and forgot Iraq.
    But for Iraqis the international trade embargo imposed by the United Nations Security Council from 1990 until 2003 was an extension of the battlefield, with ordinary people on the frontline. Hunger and disease swept the country. Corruption and smuggling became normal, even essential, laying the foundations of the mafias that would flourish after 2003 when the dictator and all restraints were gone. 20 Where a schoolteacher’s salary had been US$1500 a month, it was suddenly worth $2—enough to buy a plate of eggs—soa stupid rich boy could now pass his classes without bothering to show up. Any crime could be cleared with a small payment to police, so only the poor and the political were jailed. As the state’s authority withered, people depended on family to survive. Ahlam learned to roll cigarettes in newsprint. The mushrooms sprouting in her yard tasted like miracle food.
    The sanctions were supposed to force Saddam Hussein to disclose the non-existent weapons of