Instead, Iraq fell apart. Although Hanna and his wife never stopped expressing hope for their country, they were waiting for final approval to immigrate to the United States when kidnappers grabbed him, then her, this past May. A message appeared on an Islamist Web site in the name of the Islamic State of Iraq, a front organization for Al Qaeda in Iraq, trumpeting the killing of “two of the most prominent agents and spies of the worshippers of the Cross … a man and woman who occupy an important position at the U.S. Embassy.” On July 8 the U.S. Embassy publicly announced that their bodies had been found and identified. The next day Ambassador Ryan Crocker sent an impassioned memo urging Washington to speed up the handling of immigrant visas for Iraqis. A senior administration official, asking not to be named on such a touchy subject, says the process is so slow because the Department of Homeland Security is creating “a logjam.”
Even vehement opponents of the war in Iraq worry about the violence a pullout would unleash against defenseless Iraqis. Sitting beside Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Crocker made that case last week before Congress. “I am certain that abandoning or drastically curtailing our efforts [in Iraq] will bring failure, and the consequences of such a failure must be clearly understood,” he said. “An Iraq that falls into chaos or civil war will mean massive human suffering—well beyond what has already occurred within Iraq’s borders.” He is hardly alone in his worries—particularly for Iraqis who have tried to help rebuild the country. “We genuinely are concerned about what happens when we leave,” says the security manager of an American contracting firm in Baghdad, speaking on background to avoid increasing the risk to his Iraqi staff. “They’re marked people.” A prominent Baghdad-based human-rights official, who is not authorized to speak to the media, puts it even more bluntly: “It’s going to be a bloodbath.”
The murders of Hanna and his wife capture the moral quandary many Americans are feeling about the war: a better Iraq seems plainly out of reach, and yet a worse one seems all too possible if we leave now. Hanna and Meskoni were the kind of people you would look for to build a nation—smart and stubborn and proud. Violence and fear have driven more than 2 million Iraqis into exile, and the International Organization for Migration says roughly 2.2 million others have been displaced inside the country, but the couple could not stand the thought of abandoning their Baghdad home. “Terrorists will take my house,” Hanna told relatives who urged him to leave. He was especially proud of his huge library. “He built his house, as we say in Iraq, brick by brick,” says Hanna’s former office mate at the embassy, Serwan, who does not want his full name used. Yet just before she died Meskoni told a friend that her “mission in life” had been completed by getting her three children out of Iraq; she herself received a U.S. visa in April, her son says, and Hanna’s was due in July.
From Hanna’s earliest years he had a touch of Ben Franklin or Abe Lincoln about him. When he was 9 he took to reading his schoolbooks by the light of a street lamp outside his home in Mosul. He graduated from high school in 1959 with the third highest marks in the city, earning a scholarship to study petroleum engineering in England. When he returned to Baghdad in 1965, he met his future wife at the Oil Ministry, where she worked as an English translator. Both were Christians, but from rival sects—she was Syriac Catholic, and he was Syriac Orthodox—and her family’s social standing was far above his. Her parents’ big, comfortable house was always full of intellectuals and writers. Still, she fell for the worldly style Hanna had picked up in England. He could dance. And her father could see that the boy had brains.
Hanna took his wife with him when he returned to England in 1969 to earn his Ph.D. Their son was born there in 1971. An English friend of Meskoni’s from those days, Wendy Raybould, fondly recalls the tiny, pale Iraqi’s irrepressible nature: “At the christening, there I was, swanning around with this baby, while Emel was tearing around the house, making food, doing the washing up, making sure everyone had what they needed. She was a multitasker par excellence.” A year later the couple took their son home to Baghdad, where their first daughter followed in 1974 and a second in 1976. (The family has asked that we not give the children’s names.) Those were the family’s happiest years, before Saddam took over as president in 1979. Then Hanna began getting bypassed for promotions even though he was one of the best-educated technical advisers at the Oil Ministry. American technical journals published his articles, but he refused to join the ruling Baath Party.
The family grew increasingly desperate. In 1992, after Saddam’s disastrous invasion of Kuwait, the couple managed to smuggle their son safely out of Iraq. He spent the next few years earning a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in Texas. Hanna quit the Oil Ministry and sent his résumé as far afield as Singapore and Australia, but his expertise was 20 years old. The couple talked about applying for asylum, perhaps back in England, but decided against it. “They had their dignity and did not want to just sit there collecting income support,” their son says. “They felt this was a polite way of begging.” Hanna finally landed a teaching spot in Libya, where he spent two years alone, sending his pay home to Meskoni and their daughters in Baghdad. When he returned home in 1997, Meskoni became the breadwinner, taking work as a translator at the Sri Lankan Embassy.
Hanna’s outlook changed soon after September 11. He was sure America would soon be looking for a new source of oil outside Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 hijackers, and Iraq’s dilapidated and largely untapped petroleum industry seemed just right for the purpose. After the U.S. invasion, the couple sent jubilant e-mails to loved ones and went looking for work. Meskoni found it first. A friend of hers had been hired as a translator at the Coalition Provisional Authority and immediately recommended Meskoni, who was quickly put to work sifting the dictatorship’s vast files for evidence of Saddam’s crimes and anything else that might speed Iraq’s transition. It didn’t take long for her to suggest that the CPA could use a man like her husband, with his English and oil expertise, to help make sense of the technical Arabic that cluttered the old regime’s documents. When the U.S. Embassy opened the next year, they were among the first Iraqi employees to be sent over. Meskoni became an administrator; Hanna, one of the embassy’s top translators, was responsible for the Iraqi Constitution and draft oil law.
As the insurgency began to spread, the couple, like others who worked for the Americans, began taking elaborate precautions to avoid being spotted as embassy employees. They would drive partway to work in their 1980 Toyota, always by different routes, before parking and finishing the trip by taxi. They kept their embassy IDs hidden at all times and wore their shabbiest clothes to look unemployed and inconspicuous. They could have quit their jobs, they said, but staying home had become practically as dangerous. Early this year, after pressure from the media and Congress, the embassy’s Iraqi employees were finally promised U.S. visas, based on seniority. The couple promptly filed for theirs, and they wasted no time sending the last of their three children out of the country. (Their older daughter had already left before the war.) They wanted at least the option of going to America.
On the morning of May 21, they took a particularly dangerous route. A friend who had left the country had asked them to withdraw some money from his account at a bank in the notoriously unstable neighborhood of Amariyah. He said they should make the stop only if they happened to be in the neighborhood on other business, but they worried he might be low on cash. U.S. officials say the two had left the bank and were driving out of the area when a gang stopped their car. The men grabbed Hanna and let Meskoni go. A few minutes later, the men called Meskoni on her husband’s mobile phone and brazenly told her to come back. When she did, they grabbed her purse and sent her away again. The purse held the couple’s embassy IDs.
Meskoni spent the next week haggling with the kidnappers by phone. At first they demanded a $250,000 ransom, but she talked them down to $30,000. She finalized her will and asked friends to pray for her and Hanna, but she never told her children what had happened. The day after the kidnapping she e-mailed her son: “Hi, How are you and how is the new flat? We are okay here and remembering the good days that we spent together last year. We pray to God to meet again soon. Everything is fine here. Take care and talk soon.” The Americans reminded her that U.S. policy forbids ransom payments. Friends urged her to avoid the embassy and to deal with the kidnappers through a local cleric instead. “The Americans are behind me,” she said. Her son says the kidnappers finally told her to come alone with the cash to a spot near the 14th of July Bridge, just across the river from the Green Zone, at 10 a.m. sharp. “If you come at 10:30, he will be killed,” the voice warned. Meskoni was not seen again.
About a month later, police found their two bodies and took them to the morgue. They apparently were killed the day after Meskoni disappeared. U.S. officials say no U.S. government employees or contractors had anything to do with the ransom payment. There are unconfirmed accounts that an Iraqi guard was killed and another was wounded trying to protect Meskoni from the kidnappers. Her son is convinced she would have faced the kidnappers with or without armed backup. “At a certain point she decided, ‘To hell with it. I am going down the grave with him’,” the son says. “She was determined.” What mattered most, she told a friend in one of her last phone calls, was that she had gotten all three of her children out of Iraq: “No one can say I didn’t do that.”
In one respect, Hanna and Meskoni had been better off than most of the estimated 100,000 Iraqis who have worked for the American military, contractors and civilian companies: embassy staffers had the chance to apply for U.S. residency. Although Jordan has taken as many as 750,000 Iraqis and Syria some 1.4 million, the United States will have approved only about 1,700 asylum requests by the end of September, according to a Homeland Security estimate. In late February the State Department notified its Mideast embassies of a program to give priority visas to Iraqis who had worked for the Americans and passed screening by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, but few U.S. officials in the region were made aware of the program. The UNHCR approval process alone takes up to nine months; countries like Sweden are able to process Iraqi asylum seekers in two weeks. U.S. officials say they need to make sure no terrorists sneak in disguised as refugees. But Iraqis have to pass security checks before the U.S. government hires them, and then they are subject to regular polygraph tests. Embassy translators seemed stunned to hear last week that the idea of letting them into the United States more quickly was at all controversial. Critics believe the White House doesn’t want to send the wrong signal by freely admitting that Iraqis are no longer safe in their own homes.
And the United States can hardly afford to lose the services of Iraqis like Hanna and Meskoni—good translators are harder to replace than good diplomats. The sad conclusion to their sad tale is that even in death, the couple could not remain in Iraq. The embassy paid to have their bodies flown to an undisclosed country where their children can visit their graves in safety. Their son says the family is grateful.
