Posted on 11/20/2004 7:55:08 PM PST by saquin
EVERY room in Tahseen Hassan’s Baghdad home is dominated by the simple but tasteful touch of his wife Margaret. This was where she always felt happy and relaxed.
Last week the house was quiet as he tried to come to terms with the news that, after being held hostage for more than three weeks, she had been murdered.
“That was her chair,” he said, pointing to the empty cottage armchair in the living room, her books by the side table and her reading glasses where she left them the night before she was abducted.
“The house feels cold and empty. I miss her everywhere in this house. I miss her in the study, in her living room, in her kitchen, everywhere,” he said, looking up at the staircase from the library to the bedrooms. “I keep on thinking that she might be upstairs or in another room.”
Tahseen had shown immense self-control in a number of television appeals for her release after Margaret, the 59-year-old local director of the charity Care International, was kidnapped on October 19.
Now, however, he choked with emotion as he said: “I am totally destroyed and distraught. I think of her all the time and it is killing me. I never thought I would lose her this way. Her loss is immense for me. My heart aches with pain and I miss her so very much.”
When he took a private telephone call in the living room — her favourite room — the quiet house echoed with his heart-wrenching sobs. Recovering himself, he reappeared a few minutes later with a mask of self-composure.
“If only someone would give me news on whether she was dead or alive. Not knowing what has happened to her just breaks my heart,” he said. “If only they would give her back to me, dead or alive, so that she and I can rest in peace.”
For Tahseen, Margaret was more than a widely loved charity worker. She was his wife of 32 years, his “twin soul”. They met in 1970 in London, where he worked as station manager for Iraq’s national airline. He was nine years older.
“She was at the airport waiting for a friend of hers to arrive from Australia,” he recalled with a smile. “I just saw her and asked her if I could have a coffee with her while she waited. We talked a bit and then I started to see her.”
They were married in London, and when Tahseen’s posting ended two years later she insisted on returning with him to Iraq. She worked for several years as an English teacher at the British Council and, at the same time, she converted to Islam, learnt fluent Arabic and took Iraqi citizenship.
After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 and the British Council closed its doors in Baghdad, she began working for Care International, eventually becoming its local head.
“She was the only humanitarian organisation that remained,” Tahseen said. “Margaret was a very dedicated woman as well as loving and caring, and she loved the Iraqi people and loved to help them. Saddam’s regime never interfered in her work.”
She feared that the American occupation in 2003 would add to the suffering of the Iraqi people, he said. “What she feared most has indeed happened in Iraq and has caused so much damage to this country, and yet she insisted on remaining to continue helping the schools, hospitals and disabled. She would pay from her own pocket sometimes for someone’s treatment or to help a family.
“She was a unique woman, and I do not say that because she was my wife but because all she wanted to do was to help the people. She was generous with her money towards helping them, totally unmaterialistic and driven by her love for her work, even though she ate little and was of small build.”
“She was a good woman. She was of a strong character as a woman, stronger than me in many ways even though I am the man, and she taught me many things. Mainly how to love unconditionally and how to be loyal and honest to people.”
He said she would return home on occasions and cry over the suffering she encountered. As the security situation deteriorated, he became fearful for her safety, but she insisted on remaining even when her family in Britain pleaded with her to leave the country.
“I asked her to carry her Iraqi ID at all times,” Tahseen said, “in case she was stopped — that she should show them she was an Iraqi, which she was in every sense of the word. But despite that she was kidnapped. I told her so many times that this country had turned into a mess and that she was a soft target, but she refused to leave.”
Days after her abduction he received a call on his mobile phone asking for the phone number and address of Care International’s headquarters. He refused, thinking it was a crank call. It was only later that he noticed the call had come from Margaret’s mobile and realised that it must have been one of her kidnappers speaking.
He waited at home every day for news. Then, 12 days ago, he received word that the Al-Jazeera television network had received a video of a woman’s execution. He was invited to go to its office in Qatar to see the tape but refused.
“I couldn’t go and watch a tape of my wife being murdered. I just couldn’t,” he said. Margaret’s brother went instead and described it to him.
“Apparently it was a 2.2 calibre bullet,” said Tahseen. “It breaks the spinal cord . . . damage on entry . . . Her mouth was taped, her eyes blindfolded . . . her head covered in some way . . . the bullet was fired at the back of her head . . . she slumped to the front . . . there was a sigh from her . . . it all happened and finished in about one minute.
“He told me he was certain it was Margaret, but I have a feeling she might still be alive despite what everyone has said about her death and what they have seen. I must keep — a person must have hope in life.”
Desperate for a call with news of his wife’s whereabouts or directions to her body, he has not left their home since news of the tape surfaced. He clings to the hope that, although Margaret was no actress and would most likely have refused to enact her own death for a video to please her kidnappers, she might have been forced to do so and could well still be alive.
“Everyone thinks she’s dead but I still have some hope,” he said. “I miss her presence, chatting with her, sitting with her. She was my second soul.”
He said he had managed to maintain his composure throughout the weeks, making appeals to his wife’s kidnappers, because that is how she would have wanted him to behave.
“I had to for her sake. She would not want me to behave in any other way. I am certain if the roles were reversed this is how she would personally behave. I know she would want me to be strong for her and so I have tried to be so,” he said.
But alone now, Tahseen cries and turns to the Koran for comfort. “I read it out loud for her soul and for mine. I cry and sometimes that relieves me. I am not ashamed of that, for what is a human being but a bundle of emotional nerves?”
While he insisted he would never lose faith in his religion, he found the people who had been carrying out such killings in the name of Islam repellent.
His eyes wandered towards the chair where Margaret would sit in the living room at the end of the day, either watching television or reading a book when nothing on TV was of interest to her. He would join her there.
“We would talk about work, but without either one interfering in the other’s,” Tahseen remembers. “Margaret devoted herself to her work and to the people in Iraq, whereas running the house and a travel agency was my territory. She had all the freedom to carry on with her work. I never interfered in it and neither did she in mine.
“I never expected that one of these days I would lose her so quickly like this. I cannot bear to be here without her. If she is dead I am not staying in this house. Her stamp is everywhere. It feels so cold and empty without her.
“I will find somewhere else . . . far away from anything near the Middle East, Arab or Muslim.”
National Socialists (IE Nazies) are not on the extreme right. They are actualy just barely to the right of the Communists, just barely.
I believe he's already there, the article says their house in Baghdad. He's also about 60 years old. Maybe he sons or nephews who can do the "dealing"? The article doesn't mention any sons though.
They believed in state control of the economy. The only way they differed from the communists was that the Reds believed in state ownership of industry, the Nazis settled for control. The Nazis believed the people were to serve the state, same as the Communists. The fight between Hitler and Stalin was not much about ideology, but rather personality conflicts and nationalism.
Well, if the west falls, would the last one out punch in the targeting coordinates and key the launch, please?
Let's see, I am in Baghdad, Iraq, surrounded by a million people whose religious creed requires killing my a$$, I am also a BRIT (second only to Americans as white devils and infidels.) I never thought this would happen.
I am so sorry for this poor lost man and the pain he lives with. But his wife sealed her fate when she turned her back on God and converted to that filthy cult.
The Dutch and the rest of Europe are finally awakening to this fact.....................But when will the left in our ''own'' country get it?
Also, photos on Getty Images.
The idea of being able to bug the dems more thrills me to no end.
Besides, it's a nice looking sticker!
http://georgewbushstore1.cybrhost.com/201-6000.htm
The photos on Getty Images are the most realistic of Iraq. I check there every few days just to see what our boys are having to endure. The photo of Hassan's "body" is covered in a bloody blanket ... but the street it was found on was pitiful. Fallujah was clearly a hellhole.
LOL! Obviously I didn't click on your name first, or I would have realized that the sticker would be a VERY bad idea for your car!
I forget sometimes that Texas is a whole different world practically.
Thanks for telling me about Getty Images. I feel the same way about looking at the pictures of what they are going through.
I read every battle story available for the same reason. I'm sure you do too.
We owe them that.
Oops, I forgot to ask....what search terms do you use on Getty?
I'm not finding very much.
.....................But when will the left in our ''own'' country get it?
...when one of their media "favorites" (like Michael Moore, who is the equivalent to Van Gogh in Holland) is murdered on Venice Boulevard and is found with an Islamic threat pinned to his chest by a knife. And, I predict, not until then.
Then "EDITORIAL SEARCH"
Then search images for "Fallujah"
If you wanted when they found Margaret Hassan search images for "Fallujah Woman" since they did not know who it was when the body was found.
They have some very touching photos there today. A lot of searching from house to house.
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