Iraqi Is Safe From War, But Fears for Family

Halfway ‘round the world from the Gulf War, in the safety of her uncle’s home in Rancho Palos Verdes, Zainab Rasheed is in terror.

In a quiet hillside neighborhood where American flags fly from porches and yellow ribbons are tied to trees, she is far from harm, yet still a casualty of war.

It has been three weeks since the soft-spoken native of Baghdad has heard from her family there. Not that she has given up hope. But at 21, the Iraqi citizen remembers eight years of one war in her homeland. And now, she knows, her parents and brothers must endure another.

Her family’s brick home, in the middle-class neighborhood of Al-Mansur, is near a military airport and other government buildings. And the bombing of those sites, she knows, has brought death to civilians. It did in the war with Iran. It must have in this war.

Looking out a window at a panoramic view of Los Angeles, she says in tears: “Just imagine this peaceful scene with war and fire. That is what I remember” in Baghdad.

“Even if they are accurate, the bombs kill innocent people because houses surround these facilities,” she says. “I remember the missiles in the war with Iran.” One struck a neighbor’s home at 4 a.m. “My brother’s friend was killed in his sleep. He was just 10 years old.”

Rasheed also remembers the nighttime thunder of warplanes jolting her from her sleep. “I was so scared. All of us were so scared. We would pray before we went to sleep and tell each other goodby. We didn’t know if we would wake up in the morning. This is how we were living.

“Please, I don’t want this to happen again.”

Last June, Rasheed left her family to visit California for the summer. Her father is a 50-year-old retired Iraqi Airways pilot. Her mother, a 43-year-old high school science teacher. Her brothers, 11 and 17, both bright, both good in school.

The trip, one of many she has made to the United States, was aimed at furthering her command of English before graduating from Baghdad’s Al-Mustanisiria University, where she majored in foreign language with hopes of becoming a translator at the United Nations.

Two months after her arrival here, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, she thought of returning home. But her family, she says, persuaded her to stay with her uncle, Razzak Salman, an Iraqi-born developer who has been a U.S. citizen since 1978.

As time passed and tensions grew in the Persian Gulf, Rasheed begged her family to let her return. But they resisted, convinced that the conflict would pass, that her return should be delayed.

“They told me: ‘Just stay there. At least we will know you are safe.’ They said, ‘As soon as everything is OK, you will come back.’

“I wish I never listened to them.”

It was not until December, when Rasheed knew that it was too late to fly to Iraq, that her family’s mood turned somber. During telephone calls from Baghdad that grew increasingly shorter, Rasheed says her family spoke fatalistically of danger.

“Whenever my mother called me, she said this may be the last time we would talk,” Rasheed recalls.

The last time they did talk was Jan. 12, four days before the war began.

During that call, Rasheed says, her mother told her about her will. “The last thing she said was: ‘Don’t forget the principles we taught you and don’t forget to be a good girl. Don’t forget we love you.’ ”

Their conversation lasted two minutes.

Since then, Rasheed has consoled herself with prayers, virtually confining herself to her uncle’s home so she can be near the telephone and the television news. When she has left, it has usually been to visit a library to read or a mosque to pray.

“I am so confused. I don’t know where my life is,” she says, her hands folded on her blue jeans, her dark eyes staring at the floor. As she sits on her uncle’s large living room couch, beneath oil paintings of Baghdad’s marketplace and mosques, Rasheed is visibly uncomfortable with the safety of her surroundings.

“Sometimes, I am even blaming myself for the normal life I am living,” she says. “If I sleep, I wonder if they can sleep. If I eat, I wonder if they can eat.”

Those thoughts, she said, merge constantly with her image of Baghdad. What it looked like. How it must look now.

Staring at a map of Iraq, she spoke of Taasesea Elementary School in Baghdad, where she first learned English, and her university, which many of her friends have left for war.

Lake Habania, where she and her family often spent sweet, leisurely weekends, was just a tiny blue circle on the map. Baghdad, a black dot.

“As a child, they taught us in school to draw our country. They taught us to love it,” she said. “I just can’t believe it is being destroyed.”

Through Rasheed’s eyes, the reasons for that destruction remain blurred.

“I don’t know politics and all these things. I just know that this is not the way. That there are so many ways to solve problems. We shouldn’t kill people. We shouldn’t have innocent civilians die,” she says.

Many of those she has met here agree with her, she says. “Most of the people are very kind to me, especially the Americans.”

But sometimes, Rasheed adds, she has been stunned by the lack of knowledge about her country and it’s people. “Some of the Americans, when I tell them I’m from Iraq, they think we live in tents with camels and all of these things. And my aim is to let people know that we don’t live like that. That we do live like them, that we look like them, that we feel like them,” she says.

During a candlelight peace march in Westwood before the war, she says, she found others in America who shared her opposition to war. One of them was a young Iranian girl. “When this war happened, she was the first person to call me. That is something I will never forget. For years, I thought the Iranians were my enemies,” she says of the girl who has since become a friend.

Today, she says, she knows no enemy except war.

On Jan. 20, at a mosque in Los Angeles, she joined with other Iraqis and Iraqi-Americans in calling for a one-day cease fire in the war--a break that would allow the International Red Cross access to Iraq to assess casualties.

“That is what I am praying for now, and I am only one. There are thousands who feel the same way. There are thousands who want to know what has happened to their families,” she says.

“I beg the American people to help me.”

In the meantime, Rasheed thinks of her home. “I would die just to hug my mother, just to hug my father, just to be in Baghdad now,” she says.

Times staff writer Laurie Becklund contributed to this report.