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By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, April 29, 2003; Page C01

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He always promised he'd be back.

For years the subject would come up in telephone conversations stretched from Reston to Baghdad. It was strange how the brother who was free could just pick up the phone and talk to the brother who was not.

"Why did you guys leave me?" his younger brother in Baghdad used to say.

"One day I'm coming back," he would promise.

And that was how Hayder Alhamdani, the exile, left it with his brother, Mohammed, the one left behind in Iraq.

The bombing knocked the phones out. But the bombing was good. It was going to reunite them.

Hayder sat on the edge of his couch in his Reston living room and watched the war, sleeping little. Shock and awe flashed into the suburban apartment via Abu Dhabi television and Al-Jazeera. Then sandstorms and ambushes in the south. Then the quick advance, and the statue toppling in Baghdad.

Word came: His family survived the war.

Then on April 18, nine days after the fall of Baghdad, Mohammed was driving his blue Volkswagen Golf on a residential street with two friends. He was headed to his electronics store where he sold and rented DVD and CD players and discs. He was going to see if the store had been looted.

At an intersection, heavy-caliber machine-gun rounds hit the Golf and the vehicle directly in front of it. The one in front exploded. A bullet struck Mohammed in the chest and he died at the scene.

The friends escaped. They scrambled to find Mohammed's sister May. They told her the shooting had come from a U.S. Marine tank. She went to the scene and saw her brother's body. The Golf was riddled with large bullet holes.

Since the phones were still down, she went to the Palestine Hotel and found someone with a satellite phone who would let her use it for one minute. She called another brother in Sweden and told him that Mohammed had been killed. That brother relayed the news to Hayder.

She did not dare tell their ailing parents, for fear the news would kill them. They still do not know their youngest boy is dead and buried at a shrine in Baghdad because it was too dangerous to take his body to the family burial ground in the city of Najaf.

This is the account Hayder has pieced together from witnesses and family members in Baghdad. Details are sketchy. He initially heard the tank was shooting from two miles or more away. But a Marine spokesman says rounds from the .50-caliber machine gun on a tank would be unlikely to hit a target at that distance.

"I don't know what happened, exactly," Hayder says.

Except his little brother is dead at 26.

"I haven't seen him for 13 years, and now he's gone," says Hayder, 33. "I'm not going to see him again."

Hayder, a writer and translator with the pro-democracy Iraq Foundation in Washington, had watched the war with the mixed feelings of many exiles. He wanted Saddam Hussein deposed and he supported the invasion. But it was rough seeing explosions light up the skyline, knowing he had family there and in southern Iraq. He invited a Washington Post reporter to watch the early war news with him, his wife, Alyaa Mazyad, 24, and their son, Laith, 18 months.

In a story published March 22, he said he knew the invasion would have some cost. He tried to imagine what it would be. Now he is devastated. "We want to get some answers," he says. "My family and I blame the Marines."

Capt. Shawn Turner, a Marine spokesman at the Pentagon, said he was unaware of the incident. He said if Mohammed died in an episode that violated the laws of war, the family can file a complaint with the Department of Defense, and it will be investigated.

Hayder says he still supports the aims of the invasion, but he says the United States has botched the aftermath by allowing chaos to reign for too long. He says resentment is spreading among Iraqis in Iraq.

"We appreciate what they've done to remove Saddam, but on the other hand these people are not seeing security," he says. "This was a surprise for me. I thought they'd have a good plan for that."

He adds: "They had a goal to go to Baghdad and knock down the regime. Other than that, they didn't really care. This is what it seems like."

Hayder fled Iraq at 22 in 1991, after participating in the doomed Shiite uprising in the south, and became an American citizen. His two older brothers also left -- one settling in Sweden, the other in California.

But Mohammed was only 13 at the time -- too young for exile. He stayed in Baghdad with their parents and his sister May. Two more sisters live in southern Iraq.

Mohammed graduated from the Baghdad Technical Institute, where he studied auto mechanics. The responsibility of taking care of their increasingly frail parents fell on his shoulders. Their father, a retired shopkeeper, has high blood pressure, their mother a heart condition. Mohammed never married.

A voice on the phone, Mohammed would prod his brothers from time to time about leaving him behind.

"He always said, 'I'm alone, why did you guys leave me?' " Hayder says, the closest in age to Mohammed. "The responsibility was huge for him."

If this were a Frank Capra movie, Mohammed would be George Bailey, the brother who stayed home while his siblings saw the world.

Only it wasn't always a wonderful life.

"The country was devastated by the sanctions," Hayder says. "He would say, 'When you guys come back, I'm going to Europe or America and study, or have a business. When you guys come back.' All of his life he's waiting for us to come back. To do something to change his life for the better."

Hayder says he intends to visit Baghdad soon. To see his brother's grave. To gather evidence about how he was killed. To keep a promise.

But he feels tortured. "When I go back, what am I going to say to my mother and my father?" he says. "Now I'm a U.S. citizen. They're going to say, 'Your army killed your brother.' "

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Direct Link:
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