Voices from the Field - IRC Blog

November 9, 2007, Zarqa, Jordan

The first time Isara and her three boys fled was after her husband was shot dead in his car while driving home from work in Baghdad. They packed up a few belongings and moved to the house of a relative in a Sunni district on the outskirts of the city.  She thought it would be safer there.

But in the coming months, the area near her boys’ new school became a battleground between U.S. troops and suspected insurgents.  The intense bouts of fighting would force the closure of the school and litter the neighborhood with unexploded ordnances. During periods of calm, the school would reopen and her children would return to class.

“The bombs they throw look like toys to our children,” Isara told me, shaking her head.  She almost didn’t need to continue the story. I knew what was coming.

“One afternoon,” she went on to say, “my sons and group of their friends were playing in the school yard.”

She said they noticed something colorful in a garbage container and ran over to see what it was. One of the boys picked up the object and then there was a loud explosion.
“My sons watched as the legs of six classmates were blown to bits,” she told me, her eyes welling up with tears.  “One of the boys died.  He was a friend of my sons. I can’t tell you how my boys suffered after this.”

At that point, Isara said she knew it was time to leave.

“I don’t want my children to grow up in a place where they are surrounded by all this darkness.  I don’t want these pictures to remain in their heads forever.  I came here to Jordan to replace those terrible memories with better things,” she told me.

In October of 2005, her family settled in Zarqa, a small Jordanian city about 40 minutes away from Amman, where thousands of Iraqi refugees were fleeing.  A Jordanian neighbor found Isara a part-time job as a cleaner in a salon, which helps pay the rent for her small apartment.  She finds other random cleaning jobs to afford school fees, food, and other necessities.  She ekes by, but barely.

Her biggest concern is being found out. When she works, she does so illegally and she and her children, now 7, 8 and 10 have all overstayed their visas.

“When my boys go out I tell them to be very quiet so that no one hears their Iraqi accents,” she told me.  “We must be very careful so that we are not sent back.”