NOOR GHAZI, visiting research

Noor Ghazi, visiting research scholar in the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s Department of Peace and Confl ict Studies, is working on a book titled To Bagdad,

Ian McDowell We Shall Return. Her 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 di erent 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 o 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?’”

Noor Ghazi, visiting research scholar in UNCG’s Department of Peace and Confl ict 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 fl ee 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 fi rst 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 di erent 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 fi rst 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 confl ict 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 di erences.’”

“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 di erences. “

She explained how Iraqi family names work. “Noor is my fi rst 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 confl ict erupted in Iraq, you were identifi ed as Shia or Sunni by your last name, and you could be executed based on that.”

Which nearly happened to her family during the fi rst 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 fl ed to Syria, but had returned for some family belongings and was kidnapped in the middle of the night.

Noor Ghazi posing with children during her visit to Iraq

“My dad told my mom to pack and that we were leaving. He said he’d seen how human life no longer had value in Iraq. His cousin was drilled to death. Another person was repeatedly run over by a car. Another was burned, another was cooked to death. He said, ‘I can’t let that happen to any of you.’ We left the next day.”

Her father told the family they would probably be able to return in a few weeks when the confl ict settled down and when people came to their senses, but that never happened.

“Fourteen years later, we’re still here. I lived for years in that hope of returning to Bagdad, but when I visited in 2012, I did not feel at home anymore. I was crying for that feeling that my family would all return together, but that will never happen; we are all married and have families now— we’re not children being taken care of by my parents. This idea of home still exists in my memory and my feelings, but will I ever be able to live it again? I don’t think so.”

She has traveled to Iraq once more since then.

“When I left at 16, the ideal was to return to the fl ourishing and amazing country we were promised after the invasion or liberation, whatever people choose to call it. I imagined returning to a country with tall buildings and people living lovely lives. I wanted to visit a favorite city of my childhood, Mosul, that was occupied by ISIS from 2014 to 2017.”

She did so in 2018, just months after it was “liberated.”

“Mosul had been beautiful, a historic city with the shrine of the prophet Jonah of the whale, blown up by ISIS in 2014. Far more destruction was done by U.S. forces trying to drive ISIS out. Everything was rubble and trash. I wondered how we could call this liberation, killing that many innocent people while trying to force killers out. I met with many families and many kids. One invited me to what he called a playground. He said, ‘come, let me show you something, auntie,’ which is the respectful way they address older women. He showed me a kid’s corpse, and said ‘I don’t know, but we were trying to guess whether this was a boy or a girl.’ I sat in that street and cried.”

“We are killing the childhood of these people. What do we want these children to grow up thinking? How do we want to rebuild? How do we want to stop the confl ict in Iraq, the destabilization of the whole Middle East? How do we expect to

Noor Ghazi and her daughter, Tala Fatima, at their home in the United States

rebuild peace in those cities, where kids have no school— kids who either studied under ISIS or never studied because their parents were hiding them from ISIS? How do you break this cycle of violence when we have a whole generation that either grew up studying under ISIS or never studied at all?”

This question is why she became a scholar of peace.

“I never imagined it really existed as an academic study until I came to UNCG and saw those words, Department of Peace and Confl ict Studies. Then I knew what I wanted to do. I received my Master’s in Peace and Confl ict Studies last year and gave the graduation speech. I gave part of it in Arabic to honor my parents and the country that helped me become who I am today. Living through this confl ict made me who I am and pushed me toward peace.”

When video went viral in Iraq she was approached by the Iraqi Al-Amal Association. “They asked me to be involved with them in building peace studies in Iraq. I have worked with them on translating Preparing for Peace: Confl ict Transformation Across Cultures, by the imminent scholar John Paul Lederach.”

And then there’s the book she’s writing, with the title that describes something she cannot do.

“I started writing To Bagdad, We Shall Return three years ago. I want my book to speak to any Iraqi who carries it and reads it. I want that reader to say, I’ve been through that, I’ve lived that story. So, it’s not only about what I’ve experienced but about all the Iraqis who’ve died crying for justice. I tell the story of the 1,700 cadets killed in Camp Speicher. I tell the story of Atwar Bahjat, the journalist who was murdered in Samarra. I talk about those little kids who died under the economic sanctions of the ‘90s. I tell the story of my grandmother, who died looking for her brother, forced into the war between Iraq and Iran when he was very young, and her dream of meeting him again and learning what had happened to him. That is the case of millions of women in Iraq. I write of the feeling of war that hangs over every single person who lived in Iraq. It’s not about me, but all the Iraqis who have lived in war and confl ict, and who are still living that way.” ! IAN MCDOWELL is the author of two published novels, numerous anthologized short stories, and a whole lot of nonfi ction and journalism, some of which he’s proud of and none of which he’s ashamed of.