This is from my good friend and Columbia classmate, Sarmad Ali, who has written a follow-up piece to his story from last February.
I wasn’t there in Baghdad; I couldn’t be there. I am an Iraqi citizen caught between two worlds. I’m a guest in the U.S., where I have lived since 2004, studying and working for this newspaper. But I have no U.S. travel documents. And my Iraqi passport has been invalidated.
More unsettling, more disruptive than the possibility of my father’s death has been the uncertainty about his fate. I mourn close friends who have been killed in Baghdad’s violence, but sometimes I envy their families for being able to bury their loved ones.
My experience — the distance and uncertainty that corrupt my ability to grieve — isn’t unique. Many people have fled Baghdad and left family behind to survive in a war zone in which people go missing and casualties are often unidentifiable.
Over the past year, my relatives in Baghdad have continued to look for my father without me, his oldest son. I have grown more distant from them, and strains between us have deepened.
