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Iraq’s Aid Crews Lead Secret Lives

BAGHDAD (AP) — They use aliases and keep no business address. Only their immediate family members know what they do.

This is the secretive world of Iraqis who work for private aid groups - and feel constant danger from extremists whose targets include Western agencies and their local staff.

"We are the people who do good but, like thieves, we work in the dark," said George, an Iraqi running logistics for a group that assists needy Iraqi women. "The thieves, on the other hand, walk the streets with a swagger. No one dares mess with them."

He agreed to speak to The Associated Press on condition that he be identified only by his first name. He also refused to be photographed and said his Western aid organization could not be named.

The grim irony - humanitarian workers living in fear for offering help - highlights the insecurities facing nearly any endeavor in Iraq. Often, the perils are elevated for local staff who must commute to guarded compounds.

Iraqis working in a range of posts - from building firms to media outlets - try to maintain the lowest possible profile such as dressing in common street clothes or using pseudonyms on the job. But extremists still strike. In one of the latest slayings, an Iraqi journalist for The Washington Post was shot to death Oct. 14 while on assignment in Baghdad.

Aid groups flooded into Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, but the rise of the Sunni-led insurgency led many agencies to pull out or sharply scale back. Iraqis quit in droves, fearing militant reprisals for working with outsiders.

There are no accurate figures on the number of non-government aid groups now working in Iraq, but they are believed to be a few hundred - many based in the relative safety of the Kurdish region in the north and some parts of the Shiite-dominated south.

George is part of Iraq’s Christian minority, which isolates him to a degree from Sunni-Shiite violence. But that is only a thin buffer in a country where militants or kidnapping gangs have struck everywhere: academics, doctors, journalists, artists, athletes and army and police officers.

George first spoke to the AP in a telephone interview. Later, he reluctantly agreed to talk over a two-hour lunch in a busy Baghdad restaurant.

He became angry when asked whether he would agree to being photographed - even without showing his face. Still, George was by comparison more forthcoming than others doing similar work. Several relief officials declined to be interviewed face-to-face.

"Please, I will be happy if you can send your questions by e-mail," one relief official wrote back when asked for an interview.

George said he has no business card - it would blow his cover - and does almost all his work at home. Co-workers at offices outside Baghdad call him Ali or Ahmed for his protection.

His organization has suspended all activities in Baghdad, where it no longer keeps an office. It now operates only in southern Iraq, providing loans and basic skill training to women uprooted by violence or victims of domestic abuse.

Only George’s immediate family - his parents and four siblings - knows what he does. It’s even a secret from his best friend and relatives who have emigrated to places as far away as Canada and Australia.

"The word can get back here in Baghdad by e-mail or telephone," George, wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt, explained as he munched on a plate of kebabs.

"I am tired of lying and I am tired of staying at home," he said. "I thought of taking a job with the Americans that pays well but my parents threatened to disown me."

His father’s monthly pension - 750,000 dinars, or about $500 - was enough to pay bills and put food on the table for one week, according to George.

During the years of the U.N. sanctions, the father sold his books, some furniture and gave private English lessons at night to feed the family.

"I stood and watched as people came to our house and took away books that I loved and furniture that I had grown attached to," said George, who makes $750 a month. "I must continue to work to make sure that we never see a day like that again."

Another relief worker living in exile in Jordan - who communicated with the AP by e-mail - told of a colleague who was shot dead while sitting at a cafe in the northern city of Mosul.

"He was killed by gunmen who walked up to him and told everyone in the cafe that he was a ‘traitor’ and an ‘agent for foreigners’ before they shot him dead," said the worker, who also declined to give his name for publication because of fear of attacks.

He said he wanted to quit his job after that, but felt a responsibility to the nearly 1,000 families who were receiving meals through his organization.

"The risk becomes justified when you see the happiness on the faces of a family that you take food to," he said of his work with Iraqis displaced by sectarian violence.

But finally he received a direct death threat by telephone and a note delivered to the door of his home. He fled to Jordan, where he works for a European group sending humanitarian aid to Iraq.

Umm Mohammed, a 44-year-old widow and mother of four, takes a different approach.

She did not flee when the head of the relief group she works for received a threat. Already, she had given up a 20-year career in newspaper journalism because she feared for her life.

Umm Mohammed lives in a Baghdad neighborhood widely controlled by Sunni militants who enforce a strict Islamic dress code and frequently stop residents to ask them where they headed and what they do for a living.

Beside her work for the NGO, she translates from English to Arabic for academics and some of the city’s newspapers.

"In my neighborhood, even women working in the government must hide that," she said.

News from The Associated Press | Iraq’s Aid Crews Lead Secret Lives

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