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U.S. Troops Shelter an Unlikely Survivor in Baghdad

Johan Spanner for The New York Times

Staff Sgt. David D. Highsmith took his turn with little Fatima, who was found under a metal sheet after her mother was killed. 

Published: August 13, 2007

BAGHDAD, Aug. 12 — Fatima Jbouri should be dead.

Nine months old, underweight, malnourished, fatherless and half Sunni, half Shiite, she already had enough deadly handicaps growing up in Saydia, a battlefield suburb that has become one of the worst sectarian killing zones in Baghdad.

On July 25, a death squad shot her mother and uncle — each three times in the head — in their dilapidated half-finished squat. E.J.K.’s, in American military shorthand: extrajudicial killings.

Fatima’s 7-year-old brother fled and flagged down a joint patrol of the Iraqi National Police and American soldiers. The Iraqis found the bodies and collected up Fatima’s siblings from neighboring houses. But the 7-year-old kept asking, “What about my sister?”

Outside, in the garbage-strewn yard, they found the whimpering baby, hidden under a metal sheet in 120-degree heat.

Fatima survived. She is in the American military’s 28th Combat Support Hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Nurses say she weighed less than half the normal weight of a 9-month-old, but she is recovering well.

The identities of the killers, like their motives, remain a mystery. Saydia, a middle-class district, was once a peaceful home to both Sunnis and Shiites but has, residents say, degenerated over six months into a lawless free-for-all. Hundreds of families have fled, and many fell victim to killing squads from both sides of the sectarian divide. “Whichever car happens to be driving past,” sighed one American officer. “Whichever car.”

Was Fatima’s mother killed because she was a Sunni? Or because her late husband was a Shiite?

Further, who hid Fatima beneath the metal? Her mother, hoping that she would live? Another member of the family? Or the killers, hoping that she would die?

Capt. Mushtaq Hassan, the Iraqi policeman who found her, said he believed that Fatima’s mother hid her. However, the American patrol leader, First Lt. Eric Laflin, wrote in an e-mail response to a reporter’s questions: “I do not think the mother hid the child to protect her. By looking at the murder scene, the two were killed very quickly. The bodies were close together, I do not think anyone would have had time to hide the baby. It is very possible the baby was left to die.”

Such is the unconstrained sectarian hatred here that even a baby is assumed to be a target. Accordingly, Maj. Andy Yerkes, an American police adviser who happened upon Fatima in an Iraqi police station the next morning, decided that the girl also needed yet one more piece of luck: not to be sent to an Iraqi hospital.

Fatima is a Shiite name. (The Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima married Ali, who Shiites believe should have led the Islamic world instead of the Sunni Caliphate.) But the widowed mother and uncle were Sunnis, and the baby had their surname, Jbouri.

Painful experience had already taught Major Yerkes that Sunnis would not be safe in the health care system because it is under the control of Shiites loyal to the Mahdi Army militia.

In the two months before Fatima’s discovery, the major had handed over three Sunni insurgents to Iraqi policemen for medical treatment, only for them to be killed on arrival at the hospital.

“It’s a harsh area,” said Major Yerkes, a 39-year-old from Cincinnati. “I was more naïve then.”

For now, Fatima Jbouri has had a narrow escape. “I don’t think she would have lived very long, not in this heat,” said Capt. Nhan Ngo, 32, the head nurse on her ward. “Someone like her, it doesn’t take long to lose.” American soldiers and Iraqi policemen pay her visits, and the hospital staff members coddle her. No one knows where she will go.