Forbidden romances bloom in the Iraqi desert

BAGHDAD — Fatin may have fallen in love with her soldier the very first time she saw him.

She was part of the desperate line of Iraqis trying to get into the hotel where foreign journalists were staying. He was manning the checkpoint, a figure of authority and strength clad in military camouflage.

“He was not like the other soldiers; he was trying to help people, to solve their problems,” said Fatin, an Iraqi Kurd who speaks perfect English. “And John was so beautiful, so patient. It took a long time to get inside, but I just watched him at work.”

In the weeks after the fighting subsided in Baghdad, Fatin and her soldier had the only kind of relationship possible under the circumstances: discrete, delicious and chaste.

He would scan the morning crowd to find the dark-haired translator with the dancing eyes. She would hide love notes in the handbag he was obliged to search.

“We would talk and talk, in the Palestine [Hotel] lobby or the coffee shop,” said Fatin, 32. “I didn’t want to be more alone with him. That is not the way here. But it was like we were all alone when we were together. He is my first love, so you see how painful this is.”

John — she doesn’t know his last name, his rank nor his military unit — was ordered by an irate captain to stop seeing Fatin. When he told her goodbye, she cried for hours.

“I was saving my dollars to fly to Georgia,” she confided miserably.

Fatin and John are certainly not the only romance to bloom during the Iraq war. But in a conservative culture where even the most progressive women do not talk to strange men, rarely date and must not dream of marrying non-Muslim men, their flirtation is an exception to all the rules.

Iraqi women in their 30s and 40s are among the most educated, liberated and accomplished in the Middle East. Yet many of them are not married and have few illusions about the possibility.

Despite Islamic religious injunctions and a deeply conservative social culture, many Iraqi women find themselves swooning for the blue-eyed U.S. soldiers in clunky battle fatigues.

Privately, some Iraqi women ask how to catch the eye of an American man. But publicly, the tone is one of tsk’ing disapproval.

“In Islam, in the Arab world, we have rules against women talking to strange men,” said Suhair Adil, 24, demurely swathed in a white headscarf. “The Americans are strangers. There is nothing we need to talk to them about. We should let a man give them directions or whatever.”

But a good man is hard to find here, in a culture where couples marry young and parents often negotiate the match.

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