For one Baghdad man, love is a battlefield

by Liz Sly

BAGHDAD -- Having two wives at the same time makes life complicated, as many a polygamist can attest. But having two wives in a war zone can be particularly problematic, as Walid Karim has found out to his peril.

Islamic and Iraqi law permit a man to marry up to four times, but the husband is supposed to do so only on condition that he treat his spouses equally. It's an injunction most men are obliged to observe, if not by law then because their dueling wives insist.

In common with others in his situation, Karim, 37, therefore alternates the nights he spends with his wives--one night with his first one and their three children in the house he provides for her in Sadr City, the next with the second one and their child across the city in the neighborhood of Bayaa, and so on.

When he awoke one morning earlier this year with his second wife to find out that fierce fighting had broken out around the home of his first wife, he called to say he wouldn't be able to make it that night.
But she begged him, insisting it was her turn.

"I had to go because she was afraid, and the children needed me," Karim said.

The next morning he awoke with his first wife to find that the violence had worsened and a curfew had been imposed on the entire city.

But the tears of his second wife left him no choice but to venture out, on foot because vehicles were banned.

For the next three weeks, as mortar shells rained down on Baghdad and fighting raged in Sadr City, he shuttled in and out of the war zone between his families, dodging bullets and militia fighters in fulfillment of his responsibilities.

"It was so difficult," he recalled at the CD shop he runs in central Baghdad. "It would be the end of the world with my first wife if I didn't make it to see her, and it's the same with the second one.

"There weren't any taxis so I had to walk, and because there was fighting on the main streets of Sadr City, I had to use the back alleys. It would take me half an hour [to leave Sadr City] and sometimes this half-hour felt like a whole year."

Baghdad is now calmer, and Karim's marital problems have eased too.

His wives have stopped calling each other to hurl insults.

He said he married his first wife in 1996 in a match arranged by a close friend, but after a few years he found that although he liked her, he did not love her. So in 2002 he married again, to the fury of his first wife. "She got used to it," he said with a shrug.

Though having them live on different sides of the city can be inconvenient, the two wives have never met and Karim hopes to keep it that way.

"We have a saying that if your two wives quarrel with each other, it's better for the husband," he said. "If two women agree with each other about a man, it's his end."

In five years covering Iraq, Tribune foreign correspondent Liz Sly has met scores of ordinary Iraqis whose lives have been irrevocably changed by violence. Now, as Baghdad lurches toward a sense of normacly, she visits some of them to tell their stories.