I met a pair of sisters this afternoon — I’ll call them Amira and Farrah* — whose lives, even in thumbnail-sketch form, capture much of the complexity and tragedy of the contemporary Iraqi experience.

Amira, the younger of the two, is 53 years old.  In Baghdad, she worked for an investment bank and raised her four children alone.  (Her husband died before the war.)  Her eldest son, Samir, was trained as an electrical engineer but started working as an interpreter for the U.S. Army when the war began.  Within a year, the threats against his life had escalated to the point where he had to leave the country.  Now he lives in Florida and works at a gas station.

Back in Iraq, the insurgents who had threatened Samir were undeterred.  They kidnapped his younger brother Ali instead and beat and tortured him, leaving his genitals so badly damaged that he will never be able to have children.  His mother fears that he will never overcome the psychological problems he developed after the kidnapping, either.  Today, Ali lives with his mother and sister in Lebanon, where their lives are in limbo until they can join Samir in Florida.

Amira in Beirut, awaiting resettlement in Florida, where she will be reunited with her son for the first time in three years

Meanwhile, Amira’s sister Farrah  still lives in Iraq.  She is only in Lebanon temporarily, to undergo radiation therapy for breast cancer.  (Cancer rates among Iraqis are alarmingly high, most likely from the use of depleted uranium munitions by Americans during both the 1991 Gulf War and the current one.  A similar trend appears to be emerging among U.S. troops who served in Iraq.)

Farrah is married with three children, and her life in Iraq is extremely difficult.  Her husband goes to his job as a schoolteacher every day, but otherwise, the family leaves the house only when absolutely necessary; the streets of Baghdad are simply too dangerous for all but the most crucial errands.  When I asked Farrah whether she wanted to stay in Iraq or, like her sister, resettle somewhere more stable, she replied that it was up to her children.  If they wanted to go, she would go; if they wanted to stay, she would stay.

It takes money to get out of Iraq, and leaving your homeland out of necessity is an acutely unwelcome prospect: frightening, exhausting, lonely, sad.  Still, even with the financial and emotional difficulties of leaving, it’s hard to imagine, at first, what could possess people like Farah and her family to stay in Iraq.  But consider this: her son just finished medical school — a famously rigorous six-year training program that entitles him to enter a well-paid, well-respected, meaningful profession.

So here is the dilemma facing Ahmed — and by extension his whole family, and by analogy the whole of Iraq.  He can stay in a country where his cousin was kidnapped and tortured, where violence remains so omnipresent that his own life has narrowed almost to the walls of his house — and where he has a newly-minted degree in a prestigious and lucrative field that he loves.  Or he can leave Iraq, wait in limbo in Lebanon or one of the other refugee holding-pins around the Middle East for eight to ten months (the average length of time a refugee resettlement takes, according to the U.S. State Department), after which he can go to Florida and live in safety — and file away his medical degree and his dreams to work with his cousin at a gas station.

Idiomatically, this is called a Morton’s Fork: a choice that consists of two equally bad options.  For Ahmed and millions of other Iraqis, it appears, for the time being, to be the only kind of choice they have.

* All the names in this post have been changed.