Hala Jaber interview: I promised something I should never have promised. That the child would live

Little of her hair remained and her eyelashes were burned off completely, while her skin wept with thick, sticky creams. Her arms shook. "Cover me up, Mama, I'm cold," she murmured, crying out for a mother who could no longer hear her, who had died in the bomb that had taken eight of her family. Foreign correspondent Hala Jaber stood listening in despair. For so many years, Jaber had cried for the child she could not conceive, and all that suppressed longing rose up again, creating a connecting arc between them, the childless woman and the motherless child.

"Something in my heart just gave. There was nothing beautiful about her but there was a vulnerability and you just felt you wanted to protect this human being who had lost so much and suffered so much. A kind of compassion and passion and love at the same time." Zahra, the child was called, which in Arabic means "flower". Her parents, five brothers and a sister had all died. Only her grandmother was left now and a three-month-old baby sister, Hawra. But perhaps, Jaber thought, she could create Zahra's new family. "Something inside me told me, you are ready for this. Maybe I wasn't ready for the thought of adoption before and I thought yes, it's going to be for them and for me. It would give them a chance, I would give them a chance, and I would finally… perhaps all the years of looking, all the searching, all the heartache, all the crying, all the sobbing, perhaps, perhaps… this was what was meant to be."

In the spacious basement kitchen of her London home, Jaber smokes furiously as she tells the story of how she came to write her book, The Flying Carpet to Baghdad. She is a tiny woman, almost childlike in her narrow-hipped petiteness, but she exudes enormous emotional energy, talking rapidly in a heavily-accented voice that is deep and dark and stained with nicotine. Originally from Lebanon, her early childhood was spent in Africa but she went to school in Britain, is married to an English press photographer, Steve Bent, and has spent most of her adult life here. The fact that she is female, Arab and Muslim gives her a unique insight that has prompted many awards for her foreign coverage, particularly of the Iraq war. She understands the perspective of both the Muslim world and the western world, being part of both but belonging fully to neither. She loves the neatly regimented order of life in Britain but misses the warmth of life in Beirut, the friendliness of the people and the pervading scent of parsley and coriander.

Her career is a success but it wasn't always so. The Arab world emphasises motherhood and family and when Jaber discovered she couldn't have children, the pain and longing shaped her life for many years. "There were times… Oh God, I never want to go back to them. Days when I woke up and sat in this house and thought, I am nothing. I am seriously nothing. Steve would come and I would say to him, I am just a piece of furniture. I don't feel anything. I am not anything. I am not a woman. I am not a mother. I am not a journalist any more. What am I? I am guardian of this house that has no soul anyway because it has no kids. I sank to a bottom where I don't ever want to go back to. I realised finally that I could not do this any more, something had to give. It wasn't going to happen."

A devout Muslim, she found herself in conflict with God. Don't question Him, her mother told her, but Jaber has always asked why. It is part of who she is. She used to pray five times a day but one day she stepped on the mat and realised she had no peace in her heart. She has not prayed since. "I was at war with God. Blasphemous, yes, but I was blaspheming right, left and centre. Then I thought I can't do it. I can't fight Him. I have to accept. However, I had lost so many other things because of this and I wasn't working. I was penniless. I was without a job and my name had gone. I wrote letters to everyone I knew asking for a job and they said no. I was getting hit from every angle."

She managed to get some assignments working with Bent and threw herself into work. Foreign reporting was a world predominantly inhabited by men, but having no children meant Jaber did not have the reluctance women sometimes feel about placing themselves in danger. "I was going for the hard stuff, the macho stuff. I was going into this man's world, if you like, and was avoiding children altogether. I felt I couldn't be near children." Until, that is, research for a story led her to that hospital room where she heard an orphan plead with her dead mother. Only Zahra's grandmother kept vigil by her bed. Please help, the grandmother begged Jaber. Jaber sought financial assistance through her newspaper the Sunday Times' appeal. But she also made the biggest personal pledge of her life. "Zahra will live," she told the child's grateful grandmother. "I promise."

PERHAPS it was Jaber's father who shaped her independent spirit, her pick and mix approach to culture. Her mother had been taken out of school early by her own grandfather and Jaber's father was told if he wanted to marry her, he must agree that she should not be allowed to wear trousers, or dance, or go to the beach. He agreed but in fact set about ensuring his wife's education, teaching her to read properly, to converse widely, to understand politics and the world around her. A tender-hearted man, he wanted his wife to be what she could be. "My mother developed into something amazing," says Jaber.

Jaber was sent to school in Oswestry on the Welsh border, but hated it. It was so regimented. She was a city girl at heart, could not get used to the silence of the countryside. "I missed the honking cars and the noise and then I was waking up to cows and green grass and milk… I would phone my dad. 'Oh God, Dad, I don't want to be a girly. Take me back.'"

In the early 1980s the family moved back to Beirut, just before the country was devastated by civil war. The violence was terrifying, but it was a good training ground for Jaber's future career as a journalist. She had first studied accountancy and was sent by her firm, Price Waterhouse, to audit the books of the Press Association. Because of her fluent English, the head of PA asked her to do some evening shifts and eventually she realised she found journalism far more exciting than her day job.

The civil war did not inure her to fear because fear keeps you alive. "I respect the sound of gunfire. I respect the man with the gun and the possibility of a car bomb, because as long as I do, I will be aware of them. However much I want to do a story, I keep in my head that no story is worth me getting killed for."

When she went to work in Iraq, she knew how to protect herself physically. It was the emotional assault of working with war orphans that ambushed her. By the time her newspaper campaign had got Zahra moved to an American military hospital at Camp Dogwood, she was physically and mentally exhausted. Now that the child was safe, she and Bent took a break, returning to Beirut to visit Jaber's family and discuss the possibility of adoption – which she had already raised with the children's grandmother. Coming out of a war zone, Jaber found it difficult to adjust to normality. She went to Cairo to visit her sister and her family took her shopping. She felt guilty spending money when she had just witnessed the deprivation of Baghdad, but her mother persuaded her to treat herself to a set of two pretty diamond rings. The rings would take on enormous significance when, shortly after buying them, Jaber received a phone call that broke her world. Zahra was dead.

For Jaber, the rings became a symbol of her own betrayal. She had promised Grandmother that Zahra would live. When Zahra died, she was buying trinkets when she should have been at the child's bedside. She wanted the rings off her fingers but resolved to wear them as a reminder of her own shame. One day she would give them to Zahra's grandmother. Right now, she could not face the older woman with whom she had formed such a special bond. Others may recognise her promise as simply an act of kindness, an emotional encouragement at a time of crisis. Jaber saw it as a literal guarantee and felt destroyed by guilt.

"Grandmother never felt that I had killed her girl or caused her death but I had stepped over a line I shouldn't have. I promised something I should never have promised. I promised her the child would live. For me, that was the thing I couldn't handle. The child didn't live and I should have known better. The chances were 50-50 so I should never have made the promise."

At first Jaber stayed away from the family through choice, but by the time she was ready to be reunited, sectarian fighting in Baghdad made it impossible to move freely in certain areas of the city. The suburbs were out of bounds and she lost contact with Zahra's grandmother. "When Zahra died, I lost the plot again. Having been broken before, I was back in a situation I didn't want to be in. I found myself sinking… with guilt, with anger, with depression. I was thinking more blasphemy. Having made my peace, I was back questioning. 'Why me again, why me again? Have you nothing better to do than sit there making sure nothing in my life goes the way I want it?'"

But did that longing not make her want to fight harder for Hawra? "I knew if I went back and fought for Hawra I was not going to get her. It was impossible and would have taken me back to a place where I didn't want to be. Every month when you think you may have a child, you may conceive, you may be pregnant. So you go through two weeks where you pretend in your head that you may be a mother. I couldn't do that. I couldn't go there. Somehow I had to be selfish for my sanity so that I didn't totally break."

When finally the conditions were right to meet again, Hawra was six years old. "She had a haunted look. I felt this child carried the pain of the world on her shoulders." To Jaber's relief, Grandmother did not blame her for Zahra's death. But she did blame her for abandoning them, for not ensuring Hawra's needs were being met. Jaber had been right about one thing, though. Grandmother admitted she would never have handed Hawra over. She couldn't. The child was all she had left of her son. But she wanted Jaber to promise that she would always be part of Hawra's life, that she would look after her when she was gone. When the two women had made their peace, Jaber slipped two white gold rings off her finger, and placed them in Grandmother's palm, the diamonds sparkling in the light. Reparation. The rings were Hawra's now, in memory of Zahra, the older sister she never knew.

JABER HAD been against the Iraq war from the start. There was a particular pain for her that was about both her worlds – the Arabs and the West – being involved in conflict. But morally and politically she felt it the wrong thing to do. "People say to me, Would it have been better to keep the monstrosity of Saddam?' It's not about that. First of all, who are we to decide? If you want to go down that road, let's clear the rest of the Arab world because they are all dictators."

Zahra was not killed by Saddam Hussein. She did not die at the hands of al-Qaeda. She was killed by an American war plane, slaughtered as her entire family tried to flee the bombing. "Even if it's fixed now, did we have to kill 300,000 or 100,000 or 50,000? Did this little girl have to be damaged like this? To do what? To make what point? To get rid of Saddam Hussein? I am not for him, I don't like him, but we don't have the right to do that. Hawra lost every member of her family and guess what? Nobody has come forward and said 'what happened to her, let's compensate her'. Do they even remember her?"

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," the American poet Robert Frost wrote, "That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun, And makes gaps even two can pass abreast."

The Iraq war set up so many divisions between peoples but Jaber is like the "something" that doesn't love a wall. The strength of her foreign coverage is the way she breaks down the barriers of conflict by reaching for the underlying humanity that binds everyone involved in it. When she interviewed suicide bombers, she did not condone what they did but she told the stories of how they came to be where they were. When she interviewed Saddam Hussein's daughter Rana, she painted a picture not simply of a dictator's child but of a daughter who grieved for a lost father.

"There are two sisters and I tell you the younger one is amazing. The older one is typical Saddam but Rana is a sweetheart. Should I hate her because her father is Saddam? No I can't. What has she done to me? She happens to be his daughter, and by the way, she will pay a price for the rest of her life for that."

Jaber's work became compensation for her infertility. She has finally reached a stage where she does not want to give up her career, does not need to define herself in terms of a child. She will not be Hawra's mother, but she will be her protector. Hawra laughs with her now, plays with her. Jaber wishes she was not in Iraq where she does not have access to even simple things like dental and medical care, but she recognises the importance of blood ties. "Her grandmother is her life. However much I would love her there is no way – and I have to be honest about it – I cannot love her more than her own grandmother. She is her blood. She is her granddaughter, her everything. I would be dragging her away from that. If I love her enough, I have to let her be."

Things may change when Hawra is older. "Perhaps when Hawra is 10, when she is older and has more understanding of what is going on in life, when she has started school and her emotions have settled and developed, maybe then we would bring her here. That is something I am talking about with her grandmother. We talk about Hawra's future. She wouldn't be adopted but perhaps there could be schooling here or in Beirut. We are linked. We have a long way to go, she and I."

Jaber has subsequently helped another child victim of Iraq, Shams Kareem, who was blinded in a car bomb that killed her mother. Shams is currently receiving medical treatment in Britain thanks to Jaber, who seems to have transferred her need for a single child into the desire to help many. "Shams is a beautiful human being. I love her and am emotionally involved – how can you not be? – but I am not breaking about her which for me is incredible. There was a time when I nearly destroyed myself emotionally because I made everything such a personal thing."

Jaber is 48 now and says she is past the stage where she could adopt a child. Zahra was her last chance. "There has to be a cutoff point. You have to rationalise it. I have gone through years of pain on this issue and have decided that I have to be selfish about me. I don't allow myself to wander down that road so the answer is always no. It's OK. It has to be OK or you would go mad. I really don't want to open the wound again. It's been stitched. It's time to let it be."

Which is not to say that the wistfulness is gone. That feeling, she says, of being the entire world to another human being, the centre of their existence, she will never experience it. "For me, the one miracle of my life would have been a child. I always felt it. It was the one miracle and that's the one that never happened and never will happen."

But her life has been changed by Hawra and by the memory of Zahra. She wrote her book for them and for the others like them. The forgotten children of Iraq. "Nobody remembers them, nobody cares, and people should know. I felt I owed it to Zahra for her name not to be erased. I may not have given her life like I promised but I will make sure her name is alive. People will read it and say OK, there was a little girl and her name was Zahra…"

• The Flying Carpet To Baghdad, by Hala Jaber, published 15 May (MacMillan, 16.99)