Lemon and Creepie, sisters of Baghdad: «Our rebellion in colour»

This article is published in number 1 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until January 3, 2023

“We want to overthrow the regime”, “we want a homeland”, “neither Iran nor the United States”, these are the slogans of the young Tishreen (October), who in that very month of 2019 occupied the squares of Iraq, with their bodies, their sleeping bags and their tents: Baghdad, Basra, Najaf, Babel, Nasiriyah, Amara, Muthana. Almost all under the age of thirty are part of the largest movement born between the Tigris and the Euphrates since the US invasion of 2003, which forced the resignation of Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi and led to the reform of the electoral law. And which cost the lives of almost eight hundred young people killed by the regime or made to disappear, thirty thousand injured, three thousand arrested. The slogan that strikes me is “we want a homeland”: in the last thirty years Iraq has known a dictatorial regime, the First Gulf War, the American invasion, the fall of the regime, the installation of puppet governments, a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, a second between the central state and Isis, and finally the protests of 2019. What their national identity is is also unknown for them, divided between Russian influence first, American and then Iranian.

So they, the two sisters, have the date of the beginning of the protests tattooed on them: October 25, 2019. I wonder if they know that they are contributing to writing a piece of history, not only of Iraq but of the Arab world. The wind of protest that ignites Iran today would not exist without the wind that burned Iraq three years ago. And after all, the Iraqi one also derives from the Arab Spring of 2011, which had already agitated Iraq partially liberated by the Americans. There too, in the Maghreb, women, always women, move the revolutions. «Risk it risk it to get the biscuit» smiles Creepie, cover name of the twenty-three year old girl who is sitting opposite me, next to her sister Lemon, twenty two years old, on the sofas in the lobby of the Baghdad Hotel, the oldest in Iraq. It’s impossible not to notice them, when they walk they attract a trail of looks, men and women, even if they don’t show off: their hair is dyed in bright colors, deliberately showy; Creepie is purple, Lemon is yellow/green. They dress western style, ripped jeans, short T-shirts. They are beautiful, I think they know what they want, but they are not sassy.

“Hair like this is a risk, every step outside the house is a risk,” says the older sister, in a country where after protests suffocated in mid-2020 following the killings, kidnappings and arrests of leaders, sixty women out of a hundred still wear the hijab, and the other forty do everything to go unnoticed. Before the protests, however, the ratio was eighty to twenty. Now it’s Lemon who speaks: «Last Saturday, when I was leaving work, I was attacked by some policemen in Mutanabbi Street, in the city centre, what was the bookshop district before the wars. They yelled something about my physical appearance, then loaded me into the car and confiscated my cell phone. In the end they let me go, but it’s a bad sign, this country is becoming more and more the regime it was every day”. I ask why they keep their hair like this since it’s a risk. “It’s a way to feel free, to wrest ourselves from the regime’s control, and from that of our father, who knows nothing of our colors, he only sees us in the house with the hijab.” So I ask for the second time if they are convinced of publishing their photographs. «Yes, we want to appear, put our bodies in it, as long as the faces are covered. After all, we are fighting against the Islamization of Iraq, for the freedom not to wear the hijab, for that of women to walk alone on the street or to meet male friends without repercussions. We fight against corruption and against the muhasasa ta’ifia (division on a religious and sectarian basis), the political system introduced by the United States after the ouster of Saddam: the division between Shiites and Sunnis which sparked the civil war of 2006-2007. We protect ourselves, but losing our lives doesn’t scare us.”

Also because, because of their father, they have already risked their lives once. That October 25, 2019 is not only the day their “awareness” began, as the boys here call the protests: that day Creepie in Tahrir Square met Ali, who shortly after became her husband. They were still going to get married, but Creepie’s father, a Shia fundamentalist, accelerated. «One morning she receives a photo from a friend of hers in which we are without a veil and together with two boys, we still had normal hair. That afternoon, dad calls us and threatens: if you don’t marry the two boys within three days, I’ll kill all four of you». It wasn’t a figure of speech. In Iraq, a girl cannot appear in the company of a man if that man is not her husband. If that happens, the only way the father can restore the family honor is to kill his daughter. He loads it into his car, crosses the alluvial plain of Mesopotamia where civilization was born and takes it to the desert, on the border with Syria. A witness is needed, usually a brother of the girl, or an uncle. They make her kneel down, if between sobs or impassiveness it is not known about her, and they shoot her. Then, calmly, they bury her body, and with it the shame. I have to make a strange face, because they are keen to underline that there “a life is not worth what it is for you”. Maybe they’re referring to the Kalashnikov escort I’ve been assigned. Within a very few days, Creepie and Lemon get married. «The day I got married is the same day I colored my hair, it was the protests that gave me the strength. So that everyone remembers that protests, even if stifled, will never end. Never”.

And it is to be believed, also because, in the country which has the fifth largest reserves of crude oil in the world, there are only between five and ten hours of electricity a day, and often no source of drinking water. In summer, especially in southern Iraq, it exceeds 50 degrees, salty and contaminated water comes out of the taps. Added to this is unemployment: in a country where half of the population is under 19 and 60 per cent under 25, one in four is unemployed. Lemon bustles as a make-up artist, Creepie as a graphic designer and artist, her husband Ali as a translator, magazine contributor and whatever happens to him, but there is no one, apart from those who somehow fit into this or that political party, which has a stable job. I wonder how they camp. I haven’t figured it out yet.

Although Iraq is one of the world’s richest oil basins, no one has benefited from this wealth since the US occupation. All proceeds go to US banks which then distribute the royalties to Iraq. Although, actually, there are some exceptions. Some bigwigs of the opposition to the Sunni regime, after the ouster of Saddam, broke into government buildings and raided them. This was precisely the case of the father of Lemon and Creepie, right arm of one of the most ferocious and fundamentalist Shiite leaders and imams, Muqtada al-Sadr, who led the most powerful party in the country for ten years. Thus the father, the day after April 15, 2003, while the American helicopters landed in Baghdad, Saddam left the capital and the imams warned the nation that the country had been occupied by the coalition forces, with a supply of men and weapons entered the State Mint and stole one of the machines that print banknotes. “He was filthy rich in a matter of weeks. We became filthy rich,” Lemon says. “It looks like a TV series, but it’s reality. Our father, a captain in the Mahdi Army, al-Sadr’s army, who would kill who knows how many Sunnis in the civil war that would break out three years later, is rewarded by God and becomes very rich by printing his own banknotes». I laugh. We laugh together. The idea of ​​printing money, even if I don’t want to, goes to my head.

They remember little of the years of Saddam’s regime, they were small, but they are full of stories they listened to: about the fact that the dictator was a man of good looks and charisma, a great communicator who knew how to make the crowds love him, nationalist and despotic . Everyone here in Iraq assimilates him to Nero: hated and loved, the black soul of an entire people that is not black. I have perhaps never met people with such lively intelligence, people so ready to laugh at every aspect of life. The writers I’ve met these days (I’m here for the Arabic translations of my novels) have a sharp talent. And no one can forget the harshest consequence of Saddam’s regime: the embargo following the defeat in the First Gulf War of 1991,
after the invasion of Kuwait. It was the United Nations itself that supported the attack by a coalition of 35 countries led by the USA on Iraq and on the pan-Arabist and socialist claims of Saddam and the Baath party supported by communist Russia. “Since then, and for twelve years, until the US invasion in 2003,” Creepie says, “we were starved. We had a card with which we went every month to collect sugar, tea, flour, rice, but the supplies ran out after two weeks. Everything was missing, there was even a ban on female sanitary pads ».

After the US occupation, resistance began, which lasted eight months: extremely violent guerrilla warfare. “During the bombings, many fled the cities into the countryside. Not us, Dad was a big shot in the Sadrists and he had amassed such a fortune that he was made one of the most respected and feared men in Baghdad. He soon began to invest in construction, in companies. He bought everything. Our home was a castle. But we never wanted his money, it’s made in blood. Until one night the American soldiers entered the house and arrested him. They locked him in the bathroom and interrogated him for hours. We were in the dining room, terrified». Of course, the fundamentalist Shiite Muqtada al-Sadr, who ruled Iraq from 2012, when American control relaxed, until August 2022, was disliked by both the Americans and the Iranians, and so the arms right of him. “So for a while we were without our tormentor. The Americans had arrested our father, but we were already attracted by their freedom at the time».

Not long after, the Americans released him, installed the first government and imposed the division of parliament between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. «Before, no one paid attention to whether his faith was Shiite or Sunni, also because almost all families are mixed. That American government laid the foundations of the civil war, each of the factions began to receive political and economic support from opposing foreign forces”. This is why one of the most powerful images of the protest is that of young people tearing down the T-walls, the reinforced concrete walls built by the Americans, which have transformed the urban planning of Baghdad: walls erected to enclose entire districts and separate the population based on religious belief. I think David Petraeus, the former commander of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan who came up with the idea for the wall, must be a genius at fueling conflict.

«But it is the other civil war», continues Creepie, «the one from 2014 to 2017 against the Islamic State made up of former officers of Saddam’s army, the one that we remember best. Ali, my husband, has been very active. He went back and forth to Mosul to bring food, blankets and toys to the children who had been made homeless by the bombs.’

I ask how they see the future. They answer me together. “Get out of here.” Is it just an idea or do they have a plan? They have a plan. Thanks to some Canadian relatives, Lemon’s husband can perhaps obtain a visa, but only if he stays there alone for three years. “Three years is a long time to live apart,” I say. Lemon smiles: «No, then there’s a whole life».

To subscribe to Vanity Fair, click here.