When Huda Ahmed was named IWMF’s 2006-07 Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow, her mother told her to “keep this happiness in your heart” in order to “keep your head on your shoulder."
Ahmed, an Iraqi reporter for Knight Ridder, accepts this reality. Many of her cousins have been kidnapped or shot to death, targeted because they worked for foreign companies. She knows at least five translators or drivers who have been killed for the same reason.
“The cards are shuffled here,” she said. “You don’t know who’s your enemy, who’s your friend. And it’s hard to know how to solve this.”
So Ahmed especially looks forward to her fellowship, which will allow her to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other Boston-area universities, and possibly spend time at the Boston Globe or New York Times.
Ahmed said she looks forward to learning more about U.S. goals for Iraq and the Middle East. From the Arab street, she hears only the negatives of U.S. policies, of mistakes made over and again, not just in Iraq, but also in Palestine and Lebanon. She wants to “understand the point of view of the American government, with Iraq and the whole Middle East,” she said, beyond promises about democracy and human rights.
Ahmed worked as a translator for more than a decade before becoming a reporter for Knight Ridder in 2004. During the time that Ahmed shifted from interpreting words to reporting on events, the dangers facing both reporters and translators and the turmoil confronting ordinary Iraqis also shifted.
In the early days of the Iraq war, it was easy to get interviews with insurgents, even to go to their homes for the interviews. “They wanted the media to convey their point of view,” Ahmed said. Today, she said, insurgents look at translators and reporters as prey. “They want to just kill you.”
Scheduling an interview with a militia leader, said Ahmed, involves a cat-and-mouse dance that involves hiding her U.S. media affiliation.
“If I say I work for an international agency, they say ‘oh so you work for a RICH agency – they’ll pay thousands and thousands of dollars for you…You’re a good catch.’ I say, ‘No, I’m worth nothing because I’m a local. They won’t pay you anything.’”
Life on the street has become extraordinarily dangerous, too, prompting a backlash from Iraqis who say “they don’t want democracy and freedom anymore. They long for security…They want to have a life like people in other countries, to take their children to school and protect them, to have some ice cream….There is huge frustration. They can’t trust the police or the Parliament or their own neighbors.”
Ahmed is one of seven children from a Shi’ia family. Her father encouraged her as well as his sons to read widely in literature, politics and history. Ahmed got a degree in languages from Baghdad University in 1992 but, because of the harsh sanctions following the 1991 Gulf war, left Iraq and worked as a translator in the United Arab Emirates, Tunisia and Libya. With her father ailing, she and a brother took charge of supporting the family and she sent much of her income back home.
When Ahmed visited Iraq in 2002, she was trapped there by the start of the current war. She began translating for The Washington Post and then Knight Ridder. By then, she had studied reporters up close.
“I watched, through our interviews, what they do and how they asked questions, how they phrased them and what they focused on,” she said. She got a sense of what journalists considered a good story idea and saw how their stories changed as they made it into print.
“I had an eagerness inside me that I want to write,” she said. She always had wanted to write but, under Saddam Hussein, it was too perilous for her family. She had written overseas for some Arab publications. But, with Saddam and his police state gone, she wanted to report on the people she knew best, “their desires, their fears,” to tell “what horrible times they’ve been through. And their hope.”
Ahmed said her Knight Ridder bosses welcomed her ideas and her initiative. She began to write about Iraqi women seeking their rights and interviewed women’s rights activists from other countries. She wrote about widows and children stranded with no economic base after their husbands died in the conflict or were gunned down by insurgents. She wrote about Iraqi policemen and their own peculiar isolation. “Because the insurgents are tracking them, they can’t go to restaurants and eat like everyone else. Their presence is a danger for others.”
Ahmed also began to cover the militias and their role in society and to write about the sectarian standoffs that began to be a dominant factor in Iraq. She anguishes at what she sees around her.
“Before, we used to have no problem between the sects; the Shi’as and the Sunni lived together…And now, in three or four years, this hostility has come from nowhere and nailed us down,” she said.
Ahmed said that Iraqis have a horrible life and called Baghdad “a dead city; we have a curfew that starts at 8:30 p.m. until 6 a.m.” She does not see the current situation as an opportunity to rebuild Iraq. Instead, she said, “I think we are losers today.”