Last letter left on daughter’s pillow

AS HE prepared to leave his home in Baghdad for the last time, Abu Fahed, 37, gazed down at his sleeping three-year-old daughter Noor, torn between love for her and hatred of the American soldiers who had killed her mother.

He suppressed an urge to wake her, hug her, kiss her and stroke her hair. Instead, he placed a letter on her pillow explaining that his desire for revenge was stronger than his duty to look after her.

Then he turned his back on his “angel” and walked out of the house into the pale light of dawn. This was the day Abu Fahed had resolved to die. All that mattered to him now was to take as many American soldiers with him as possible.

Later, as Abu Fahed took part in a blitz on the northern city of Kirkuk in which he and six other suicide bombers killed 27 people and wounded 97, his sister-in-law found the child asleep, the letter by her head.

She opened the envelope and started to read the lines he had written on four sheets torn from a notebook.

“Forgive me, my daughter,” the letter began. “I did not want to wake you to kiss your hands. It was sufficient for me to kneel by your small bed and bid you farewell. My journey this time is to eternity.”

The sister-in-law, who asked to be named only as Huda, suddenly understood why Abu Fahed had seemed so preoccupied and irascible in recent weeks. She knew that if he had been deciding to “martyr” himself, the fate of his soon-to-be orphaned daughter would have weighed heavily on him.

Reading on, she saw that his guilt was vividly articulated in the letter. “Will your little heart ever forgive my crime against you?” he had written.

“Will you forgive my neglect as I busied myself with jihad? Will you ever forgive my love for Iraq, which in my heart superseded my love for you?”

In Huda’s eyes, he had turned from a devoted father into a “monster” in the two years since his wife Ahlam, 32, had been shot. The letter was a final effort to justify his decision to avenge her death, even though that meant abandoning their child. He gave full vent to his rage with the occupying force that had shattered his family “They killed your mother and crushed my dreams and hers – and you were the victim!” he wrote. “One day you will understand that my sorrow for Baghdad is stronger than . . . the dream of a happy life with you playing in front of me.”

The letter, written in classical Arabic that suggests he may have sought the help of an educated confidant to express himself, provides an extraordinary insight into the conflicting emotions of a suicide bomber and into the demons driving him.

Born and raised in Kirkuk, Abu Fahed became a soldier in Saddam Hussein’s elite Republican Guard. He was on a tour of duty in Baghdad when he met Ahlam, who was working in an orphanage. “You are the mother of all orphans,” he told her as they fell in love.

Theirs was a mixed marriage – he was a Sunni, she a Shi’ite – but such unions were common before the war. After their wedding in January 2003, they rented a house near Ahlam’s family in the district of Baghdad al-Jadida.

Ahlam soon became pregnant but their joy was shortlived. During the US-led invasion of Iraq in March of that year, Abu Fahed was embroiled in the fighting for Baghdad’s airport and suffered severe burns to the face.

The Iraqi army was disbanded and Abu Fahed started work as an electrician. But not long afterwards, Shi’ite gunmen began targeting former soldiers on the street, drawing particular satisfaction from the murders of Republican Guards.

By August, the couple had concluded that they could not bring up a family safely in the capital. They moved to the relative peace of Kirkuk to start a new life.

“We dreamt of having a beautiful daughter we would call Noor [Light] and you, my daughter, were the embodiment of our life’s dream,” Abu Fahed wrote in his letter.

“You were the light through which we saw hope for Iraq . . . Our dream began with a home uniting our family despite the religious differences – one in which you would be the manifestation of a united Iraq.”

On the evening of September 21, 2004, when Noor was approaching her first birthday, she fell ill. Her temperature rose so high that her parents thought she needed to go to hospital.

Because an American offensive was under way in the area, it seemed foolish for Abu Fahed to venture onto the streets at night. They decided it would be safer for Ahlam to take the baby to casualty. The hospital was only just down the road.

But as she walked in pitch darkness, someone must have mistaken the bundle in her arms for something more sinister than a sick child. There was a shot. Ahlam crumpled to the ground. Nobody could help her. She died where she lay.

“We don’t know why the sniper shot her,” said her first cousin, who gave his name only as Zeid. “The American soldiers must have thought her suspicious, carrying something they may not have been able to identify.”

At home, Abu Fahed was starting to worry about why Ahlam had been out for so long. When he finally went to look for her, he found his wife dead and his daughter alive beside her.

The shock changed him for ever. “He turned from being a simple man whose sole concern was to make ends meet for his family to a brute whose sole aim was revenge,” said Huda, the sister-in-law.

For Abu Fahed, the death of Ahlam (Dreams) meant the end of his life in Kirkuk. After he had buried her in Baghdad, he rented a house near her family’s home and found consolation where he could – in his daughter.

“Your beautiful face reminds me of her when I met her for the first time,” he wrote to her. “She remains the dream of my life even though she’s gone.”

Each day he would drop off Noor at her grandparents’ house in the morning and collect her on his way home from work. But then he found a fresh source of comfort and inspiration at a nearby mosque. He began reading the Koran.

His wife’s relatives cannot say at what point he joined the insurgency but they realise now that when he was leaving Noor with them overnight, he was probably out on operations.

Abu Fahed’s letter recalls a day when Noor burst in while he was meeting fellow insurgents and he lost his temper.

“Strangely, you did not get upset with my shouting, nor run away from me in fear. Instead you ran towards me, your eyes filled with the innocence of angels and, dear God, you proceeded to kiss my hands and face,” he wrote.

“Who taught you such forgiveness and who placed in your heart such mercy? Where did you get that from, my little one?”

By now, he was already preparing to become a suicide bomber. The private thoughts revealed in his letter are of rejoining his wife, restoring her dignity with his “martyrdom” and avenging not only her death but those of tens of thousands of Iraqis.

The family saw that he was becoming more religious, more reflective, but had no inkling of how he planned to die and no idea of his struggle to come to terms with the impact on his daughter.

In reality, he was berating himself for the distance he had already placed between them. “How beautiful your eyes are as they drown in children’s dreams. I look at you and regret flows in my body,” he wrote.

“I only wish now that I had kissed you . . . I never carried you on my shoulders, my arms never lifted or embraced you and I never called you so that we could play together.”

When he failed to drop Noor at her grandparents’ house on the morning of September 17 last year, Huda let herself in through the unlocked kitchen door.

“I realised immediately that it was all over, that he had gone and would not return,” she said last week. “But I kept hoping he would change his mind at the last minute and come back to his girl – that he wouldn’t leave her bereft for a second time.”

The mayhem was starting in Kirkuk, however. The suicide bombers sent by insurgent groups that have never been identified drove up to their targets in cars packed with explosives. They blew up Iraqi police and civilians but no Americans. Abu Fahed’s dying wish for revenge evidently went unfulfilled.

The following day a strange man knocked on the family’s door in Baghdad. He claimed to be bearing the “good news” that Abu Fahed had carried out “a martyrdom mission against an American convoy” and had joined his wife in heaven.

The Sunday Times has found no report of any such attack on the Americans in Kirkuk that day, but there are plenty of photographs of the civilian dead. They include a little girl in a yellow T-shirt covered in blood. She could not have been much older than Noor.

Huda insists she and her parents are proud of what Abu Fahed did. But she also lives with the consequences. She tells Noor her mother and father are in heaven with God, watching over her and sending her kisses.

But the void in the child’s life is all too obvious. She still waits for her father at the front door, holding a little ball that he gave her and calling out “papa” to men she sees in the street.

It remains to be seen whether Noor will heed his advice to offer up her own children one day as “sacrifices for God and country”.

“I want to meet you in heaven, God willing, as a mother of men who liberated Baghdad,” he wrote.

But when she is old enough to understand his letter, she will be in no doubt as to the truth of its conclusion: “You will pay the price, my little one, when you look for me all over our house and find no answer . . . when you do not find anyone you can call Father . . . You will pay the price every time you look for an embrace.”

Additional reporting: Ali Rifat, Amman

Last words

“Forgive me, my daughter, as I burden your little back with milestones as heavy as rocks and sadness and woes as large and wide as the mountains and land? If only you could understand that the homeland is more precious than your beautiful eyes “Forgive me, Noor, for you have no place in your mother’s lap. They killed your mother and crushed my dreams and hers? and you were the victim! “Forgive me, my daughter, that I was never someone you could be proud of. I was not a doctor or an engineer. I was not even highly educated, but I loved and worshipped you just as I adore and breathe the soil of our homeland. I only hope that one day when you are older and wiser you will be proud of me. This is my wish for you my daughter so listen carefully and understand?You will take on the responsibility of jihad after me. I want to meet you in heaven, God willing, as a mother of men who liberated Baghdad. “There must be a price? there must be a price? and you my little one will pay that price..!

US troops ordeal

The top US commander in Iraq thinks he knows who kidnapped three American soldiers last weekend and believes that at least two of them are still alive, writes Tony Allen-Mills.

Thousands of US and Iraqi troops have been scouring farmland south of Baghdad since the ambush that also claimed the lives of four American soldiers and an Iraqi translator.

General David Petraeus said his troops had identified the kidnapper. “We know who that guy is,” he told Army Times in an interview yesterday.

“He’s sort of an affiliate of Al-Qaeda. He’s the big player down in that area. We’ve tangled with him before.”

Earlier, the US named the fourth soldier killed in the ambush as Sergeant Anthony Schober, 23. Identification of his body had been delayed by burns, leaving all the families in limbo.