BAGHDAD — Iman Kadhim felt the contractions at 2 a.m. on March 20, 2003. The streets of Baghdad were deserted; people cowered in their homes awaiting the threatened U.S. invasion. But the baby wasn’t going to wait.
Nothing was easy that night. Kadhim heard the baby’s first cry before dawn and held him in her arms. Then they heard the first explosions that heralded the arrival of the U.S. military.
She named him Harb, Arabic for “war.” His full name, Harb Zaid, translates as Zaid’s War.
Neighbors joked that the child named War would only bring damar, or destruction. She worried about him, the boy with a difficult name and an uncertain future.
“I was scared. We didn’t know how our life would go forward,” she said in her small home in New Baghdad. “We didn’t know the future.”
War’s six years have been scarred by violence and a new, often broken, political system.
On his birthday and the anniversary on Thursday of the Iraq war, which began March 19, 2003 in U.S. time zones, Kad him’s uncertainty about the future remains that of six years ago. No one knows the future of the nation or the boy.
The tension has eased a little, however. The family has taken to calling the little boy with black eyes and a shy demeanor Taqawi, a nickname that has no burdensome meaning. It has no meaning at all, really. His older brother called him Taqawi one day and the nickname stuck.
It’s enough that reminders of war are right outside their door: the rusted coils of concertina wire that snake through the city, the high concrete walls that divide and contain neighborhoods to protect the population, the bullet scarred buildings and the Humvees.
War wears Spider-Man T-shirts and loves soccer. But the dangers outside his parents’ home often force him to stay inside, where he’s glued to a computer screen.
His favorite game is “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.” Most 6-year-olds aren’t allowed to play “Grand Theft Auto.” It’s too graphic. But War has seen real blood.
In 2006, he went with his brother to pick up kebabs when an explosion tore through the market.
His father ran to the market when he heard the blast, barefoot and frightened. A neighbor saw the boys and pulled them away from the carnage.
War recounted the tale to his father, Mohammed Abd Badr, without a trace of fear.
That same year, War sat in the car as his dad drove down the dark streets of his neighborhood one night. A car stopped in front of them, and members of the Shiite militia, the Mahdi army, pulled a man from the trunk of the car and shot him.
Badr got out of the car to see if it was someone from the neighborhood. Some boys distracted him briefly and warned him not to approach the body. When he turned, his son was gone.
War looked into the face of the dead Sunni man.
“What are you doing?” his father asked, running up to the little boy.
“Look, baba,” he said. “Poor man.”
