Fern Holland, Salwa Ourmaishi and Robert Zangas came from different walks of life, but they all were unabashed idealists drawn to Iraq by a heartfelt belief that they could make a difference in the lives of the people. Their dreams died outside this city when they were run off the road and shot to death on March 9, hours after Holland, a lawyer from Oklahoma, and Ourmaishi, her Iraqi translator, had arranged to help a poor woman evict a squatter from her land as part of their work for the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Holland and Zangas were the coalition's first American civilian employees to be killed in Iraq. All three embodied the conflicting dreams of Iraqi society. Zangas, 44, was trying to instill the concept of a free press in a nation that had been censored by the Saddam Hussein regime. Holland, 33, and Ourmaishi, 35, were working to bring women's rights to a country that traditionally relegated women to lower status. But those goals clashed with the ideas held by many in Iraq, even after the fall of the Hussein regime.
So did some of their practices. Friends and family said Holland and Ourmaishi rarely wore the traditional head covers used by most women in Iraq, especially those in the Shiite Muslim regions south of Baghdad. Even if she had worn a scarf, Holland very likely would not have blended into an Iraqi crowd; she was a blue-eye blond. Nor did they follow the coalition requirements for safety, refusing to travel in an armored car or with armed guards.
After the attack, coalition officials announced they had arrested six men, at least four of whom were identified as Iraqi police officers, but they released few other details about the attack. The question of whether the three had been targeted because of their actions on behalf of Iraqis or whether they were unlucky victims of the violence that permeates the country a year after the U. Possessing a laser focus on serving Iraqi women, Holland and Ourmaishi had been driving around the country without armed escorts since about late January, according to friends in the United States and Iraqi women with whom they worked.
They ignored the requirement that they travel with an armed convoy because they felt gunmen would intimidate the people they were trying to help. Holland hated the feeling of walking into a women's center or a mosque with soldiers in tow, said Sawsan al-Barak, director of the Fatima al-Zahra Center for Women's Rights in Hillah. Al-Barak, who took at least a half-dozen trips with Holland and Ourmaishi, said they preferred an inconspicuous blue Daewoo sedan rather than the armor-plated GMC SUVs typically used by coalition employees.
