Madeeha al-Musawi, An Iraqi Heroine

Musawi has two conditions for prospective donors to her relief efforts: that they accompany her to see the need and where the money goes, and that they don’t disclose their political or religious affiliations. “If you want to work with me, you are an Iraqi,” she says. “Keep all those other things outside and come with me, work with me.”Photograph by Didier Ruef/LUZphoto via Redux

In a past life, before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the lawlessness and looting that followed, Madeeha al-Musawi was a seamstress. She found a new vocation by chance, after a violent night in 2003, when several armed burglars stormed her home, demanding money, with her husband and young children present. Musawi, although unarmed, somehow managed to fight them off, sending the intruders fleeing with nothing. During the assault, she sustained a rifle butt to the head, and required stitches. The episode earned her requests to enter the local council elections, which were slated for 2004. Musawi won a seat and became a representative for Karrada, a middle-class district in central Baghdad. She has held the post ever since. Her duties include overseeing the electricity supply—or trying to rectify the chronic lack of it—and, since last year, sheltering the roughly two thousand families that have escaped war in other parts of the country and sought refuge in her district. Across Iraq, more than three and a half million people, about ten per cent of the population, have been internally displaced by conflict.

Musawi, who is forty-four, houses the displaced in unfinished buildings, schools, church halls, and Shiite seminaries, and processes the paperwork for any financial government assistance they may be eligible to receive. That is the extent of her authority as a councilwoman, but that’s not all that she does for them. After her official workday ends, at 2 P.M., Musawi’s second, unpaid shift begins—distributing aid and assistance to the people she’s housed (as well as others). Musawi doesn’t fund the relief effort, but she finds people who can. She has two conditions for prospective donors: that they (or a representative) accompany her to see the need and where the money goes, and that they don’t disclose their political or religious affiliations. “If you want to work with me, you are an Iraqi,” she told me. “Keep all those other things outside and come with me, work with me.”

On any given morning, you can hear Musawi’s high heels along the marble floors of the local council building (a mansion once owned by Saddam Hussein’s youngest daughter, Hala), their click-clacking echoing up to the soaring ceiling. Dressed in a black pantsuit with razor-sharp creases, black hijab tightly pinned at the neck, and a white ruffle shirt, she moves and speaks like a woman in a hurry, but with enough time for those who need it—and these days, there are many who need her.

Most of those whom Musawi helps are Sunnis displaced from areas now controlled by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. One morning in late May, a forty-three year old woman named Noor, who wore a black abaya and hijab, waiting patiently near Musawi’s scuffed desk. Noor’s four-year-old daughter, Shams, was less patient, twirling across the floor and asking her mother when they could go home. Home used to be Mosul, now controlled by ISIS. These days, home is a corner on the carpeted floor of a mosque in Adhamiya, a Sunni neighborhood. The area is well outside Musawi’s jurisdiction, but she doesn’t turn the pair away.

Noor told Musawi that she was divorced, displaced, and didn’t have an income. Her ex-husband wasn’t paying child support, she said. “How are you living, how do you plan to raise your child?” Musawi asked her. The woman just shrugged, and asked if she was eligible for government assistance. The Iraqi government has offered a one-time payment of a million dinars (eight hundred and sixty-eight dollars) to each displaced family, but, Musawi said, it won’t give the money to a woman who isn’t a widow. “They demand that the man, her husband, turn up to accept it because of security reasons,” she told me. Any man who stays in ISIS territory is presumed to, at best, be sympathetic to the group and, at worst, actively fighting with it. This view enrages Musawi: “Even if her husband doesn’t have a nationalist spirit, or is a traitor, or whatever, he will be held to account as an individual. His family shouldn’t be. And what is a million [dinars] going to do anyway?”

Musawi gently but rigorously questioned Noor about her family and friends to determine if she had a support network nearby. It quickly became clear that she didn’t. Musawi offered to call her ex-husband, but Noor, who didn’t finish third grade, said she didn’t know his phone number.

The one-time government payment wasn’t a solution, Musawi told her. “Do you have any skills? You need to rely on God and yourself. We need to get you work. Can you sew? How about cook? What can you make?”

Several men in the room, who had been listening intently and waiting their turn, chimed in, naming dishes. “Dolma?” one said. “How about kibbe?”

Musawi picked up one of the three cell phones on her desk and made a call: “I have a sister here,” she told the person on the line. “Her husband isn’t helping her. What can we do for her? Do you have any courses for her? Sewing? Thank you, God bless you. I’ll send her to you.”

Musawi scribbled her phone number on a piece of paper and passed it to Noor, telling her to call at any time and to stay in the mosque until Musawi could help her find a more private accommodation.

Musawi’s phones ring or buzz constantly. She hasn’t changed her main number since 2004, in case any of the thousands of displaced she has helped over the years need to contact her. In 2008 Musawi was selected as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. A short piece, written by Queen Rania of Jordan, described Musawi’s charity work as treading “the line between activism and heroism.”

Her work, unsurprisingly, comes with dangers. In 2012 she was kidnapped at gunpoint, snatched in broad daylight from her car on her way home from the local council. She was held for two days and warned not to present the findings of an investigation she’d conducted into corruption in the local electricity sector. The next Monday she presented her report to the council. “I’m not the type to be scared,” she told me. A fervent nationalist and devout Shiite, she quoted Imam Ali to explain why she continues to work so unceasingly for others: “Live this life as if you were going to live forever, and work for the afterlife as if you were going to die tomorrow.”

On the day I accompanied her, Musawi’s second, unpaid shift began at 5:25 P.M. We drove to the Okath school, in Zafaraniye, where she has sheltered forty families from ISIS-controlled Tal Afar, in northwestern Iraq. The council provided the building, half of which still functions as a school, and the donations that Musawi collected helped fit it out with air conditioners, televisions, water tanks, and mattresses.

“When are we going to liberate your lands?” she joked to a group of men in the playground, who all stood to greet her, as a few boys kicked around a deflated soccer ball. “If I form a brigade, will you fight with me?” she said.

“With pride!” several men replied as she bounded past them in her high heels (“I don’t know how to wear flats,” she told me). She pushed aside a blue tarpaulin sheet that sectioned off the classrooms housing the families. A group of women in colorful dresses and bright headscarves rushed to greet her. They were from the Turkoman minority, and mostly spoke broken Arabic. Afraa, a twenty-one-year-old woman who wore a pink ankle-length dress and hot-pink hijab, told Musawi that she wanted to marry the twenty-nine-year-old Jawad, one of the displaced young men also housed in the school.

“O.K., the hotel is on me,” Musawi said, “but where will you live?”

One of the men asked if the couple could have the administrator’s locked office, a request that Musawi denied because it contained the school records. She had a better idea—she would build a temporary room, an extension to the school, like several wooden structures she’d already funded that extended into the playground.

Afraa, her mother, and the women around them were giddy. “There’s going to be a wedding!” Musawi said, to much clapping and laughing, before she quietly took aside the bride-to-be and asked her what clothes and other personal items she had and needed. Musawi wove in and out of every classroom, listening to complaints, snapping photos on her phone of empty cans of baby formula and prescriptions that needed to be refilled, and of medical records she wanted to forward to doctors. One man needed an operation for glaucoma. She told him to call her in a few days, when the doctor she had in mind would be back from vacation.

By 7 P.M. she was back in the white Nissan Navara pickup truck that a friend was driving for her. The back seat was full of bagged groceries, which she hadn’t had time to drop off at home. Her phones kept ringing. A man called from the school that she’d just left, complaining that she hadn’t asked after him. “Next time I’ll come especially for you,” she said. “I’ve been out since 7 A.M., I’m sorry. No, no, no, don’t think that somebody told me not to see you. You’re all my children.”

An hour later Musawi arrived at her destination, a swank two-story villa in the upscale Mansour district, where a friend was hosting an early dinner to break a religious fast. Fashionably dressed women sat around two tables covered with stuffed cabbage rolls and other vegetables, salads, rice, and meat, in a lush garden concealed from the street by a high wall. Although she didn’t know most of them, Musawi dominated the conversation, highlighting the plight of the displaced. She was, in effect, pitching them, telling them about children who needed surgery, about the female-headed households whose rents some donors were helping to cover, about the need for diapers and baby formula. The women listened intently, clucking their tongues in sympathy, expressing disapproval at the conditions that the displaced were forced to endure, shaking their heads. By the time the baklava was placed on the table, several had offered to donate to Musawi’s relief efforts. At 10 P.M. Musawi said her goodbyes and left the dinner, armed with a plate of leftovers and Facebook friend requests from a new set of potential donors.