She will marry a man who beats her and have children who cannot read.
-- Tahseen (Book II, Chapter 1)

Importance: This is the response of the team interpreter when Mason asks what will happen to Al-Zawba'i's young daughter after the former officer in Saddam's elite personal defense force is arrested for leading a violent anti-American, Sunni insurgent cell. His son had already been tortured so badly by a gang associated with Baghdad's Shi'a militia leader that the boy received some kind of neurological damage as a result. No boy that age would be safe in such a war zone where anyone big enough to hold a weapon is perceived as a deadly threat. With this quote, and the context of the conversion, Klay shows how the innocent victims of war are caught in a crossfire between antagonistic ideologies that all promise only more conflict and oppression. Although this occurs early in the Iraq War, the fracturing...