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Surviving war, working for peace: The journey of Noor Ghazi Noor Ghazi, visiting research scholar in the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, is working on a book titled To Bagdad, We Shall Return. Her Ian McDowell actually doing so could be fatal. Contributor “I was planning on visiting last year with my little daughter, so I could show her the region and its historical legacy, the great civilization of Babylon. But my name appeared on the blacklist, marking me for death if I go back. Here, I and others like me are peace activists, but in the country to which we are trying to bring peace, we are considered terrorists, just because we can speak up.” Her place on the blacklist came from her work last year when the Iraqi October Revolution erupted in the country of her birth. “I worked with many peace activists in the U.S. and orchestrated peace protests in 17 different states. It was very successful in supporting Iraqis on the ground. We did what we could from here and cannot return home because we did that. All peace activists are targeted in Iraq. Recently, Dr. Reham Yacoub was murdered in Basra simply because she was a peace activist.” Ghazi knows all too well that she could be murdered here, too. On Feb. 10, 2015, her friends Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha were shot dead in their apartment near the University of North Carolina by their neighbor Craig Hicks, in what the victims’ families have criticized Chapel Hill police for not designating a hate crime. “I was pregnant with my daughter when I learned my friends had been murdered. I started wondering, am I safe, will she be safe? I wondered if I dared give birth to Tala here. Why did we come to the U.S. for safety, if we could be killed for our religious beliefs here, too?” Nor is Iraq the only place where she’s been called a terrorist. “One day in High Point, I dropped my mom off at Walmart and was sitting in my car waiting for her, wearing my hijab. This guy pulled up beside me and started recording me on his phone. Then he yelled, ‘are you a terrorist?’” YES! WEEKLY
OCTOBER 7-13, 2020
Noor Ghazi, visiting research scholar in UNCG’s Department of Peace and Conflict Studies She said she was so shocked she could only stare at the man. “He laughed and said, ‘oops, I’m sorry, do you know how to make a bomb?’” After the man left, she began to weep, “repeating to myself, no, I’m not a terrorist, I’m not a terrorist, that’s why my family ran away from Iraq to bring us here. I don’t know how to make a bomb. We came here to get away from bombs.” And power drills— her father decided to flee Iraq when his cousin was tortured to death with one. When that happened in 2005, her family was well aware of war and death, having survived two U.S. invasions. “My very first childhood memory was of war. And then growing up, it cast its aspect on every single thing in our life. In
our school, in our house, in our kitchen, in our living room. It was everywhere. However, we were just living life as normal people, going day-by-day to survive. The second war came when I was 13, the invasion of 2003. For me, it did not seem much different from the previous war or the economic sanctions. The parents were whispering about this war because we were not allowed to speak up about it.” Things changed after what she called “the liberation or occupation, take your pick.” For the first time in her life, she heard the words “Shia” and “Sunni.” “I was in 10th grade when I asked my parents, am I Shia or Sunni, and what do these terms mean? I asked them because I’d just been asked at school which of
these previously unspoken words I was.” As these new terms were being spoken, new conflict was erupting in the street. “When I moved here three years later, I learned more about how these two wars had impacted our lives, how the economic sanctions had actually impacted not only us as a family, but other families who lost their kids, whether due to war, cancer, or the lack of medication and education due to those sanctions.” Her family consisted of two parents and their three children. “That’s a typical size for an Iraqi household.” She went home and asked the question she’d just been asked in school, were they Shia or Sunni? “My dad said, ‘we shouldn’t be saying that, because we’re all Muslim.’ I said, OK, but I want to understand. And he said ‘I’m Sunni, and your mom is Shia; we never had those differences.’” “After I had my little girl Tala, I gave her the middle name of Fatima. Fatima, for the Sunni people, they say is a Sunni name, but the Shiite people say it’s Shia. We just wanted to give her a name that would show we don’t have many differences. “ She explained how Iraqi family names work. “Noor is my first name. My second name is my dad’s, Abdulwahab, and the third name is my grandfather’s, Ghazi. Traditionally, your last name would be the tribal one. However, when religious conflict erupted in Iraq, you were identified as Shia or Sunni by your last name, and you could be executed based on that.” Which nearly happened to her family during the first step of their journey to the U.S. “When we were leaving for Syria, we were stopped by men who put guns to our heads. They asked us what may seem like a simple question, ‘what is your last name?’ My dad realized they were actually looking for Shia. My mom has a Shia last name, but she hid her ID. They looked at everybody else’s IDs and let us go. But the next family to come through, a family that had left Iraq with us, carrying kids and women, they were all shot dead in their car.” Her father had said the family would never leave— until he had to claim his cousin’s body at the hospital after it was found in the street, perforated by power drills. Like her father’s other cousins, he had already fled to Syria, but had returned for some family belongings and was kidnapped in the middle of the night.
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