Desperate for Work, Blind to Dangers

Inter Press Service
Dahr Jamail

AMMAN, Jun 7 (IPS) - Ahlam Najam just needed a job. At 25, she had a
university degree in education but could not find work as teacher.

When Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), subsidiary of the U.S. firm
Halliburton offered her a job as a security guard at a U.S. base in
Iraq, she took it.

On May 18 last year she was shot twice in the head as she waited for a
taxi to take her to work. Her injuries left her blind, and she lost her
sense of smell.

”Many people were working with the Americans, so I felt it would be
okay,” Najam, now at a Saudi-funded organisation in Amman that assists
blind Arab women told IPS.

”My two bosses at KBR, Mr. Jeff and Mr. Mark used to be very good and
gentle with me,” she said. ”They told me it wasn't dangerous to work for
them.”

Najam worked for KBR three months before she was shot. She was taken to
hospital in Hilla, about 100 km south of Baghdad, and kept there several
days. But her good bosses never contacted her, she says.

She was later moved to a hospital in Baghdad. Here she was told there
had been a call from ”Mr Jeff” (she was never given the last names of
her bosses). She was too much in pain to be able to take the call. Her
employers never called again. Attempts to find their last names, email
addresses or phone numbers have been fruitless.

”I sent two emails to the KBR public relations person last June. But
they never replied. I don't know what to do now, I can't go back to Iraq
because it is too dangerous.”

Najam feels hurt in many ways. ”I was very good with them. Always on
time, never left early, and they were happy with me. But when I needed
them most, they were not there.”

KBR has an email address where questions about employees in Iraq are
said to be answered within 12 hours. Emails to that address were not
returned.

Ahlam Najam went to work as a security guard in a country where
unemployment is more than 50 percent and prices are rising. Like Najam,
many have no choice but to work in situations of grave danger. And the
security situation is getting no better.

Car bombings and other attacks have killed at least 80 U.S. soldiers and
more than 800 Iraqis in the last month alone.

It does not help that U.S. President George W. Bush sees it differently.
”I am pleased that in less than a year's time there's a democratically
elected government in Iraq, there are thousands of Iraq soldiers trained
and better equipped to fight for their own country (and) that our
strategy is very clear,” Bush told reporters in Washington.

In the last two weeks at least 35 U.S. soldiers have been killed in
Iraq, with 1,670 killed since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Vice-President Dick Cheney, who used to head Halliburton which has been
awarded massive contracts in Iraq, has also offered an upbeat
assessment. He said during an interview on CNN that insurgency in Iraq
was in its ”last throes”.

But after a meeting with U.S. military commanders in Iraq, Senator
Joseph Biden from Delaware said, ”The idea that the insurgents are on
the run and we are about to turn the corner, I did not hear that from
anybody.”

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