Angel of Mercy

"One of her most legendary ideas was to open a bar to raise money for her project," Joe recalls, "and I did my part by being the guest bartender. Opening night at 'Club Kabul' was a smash hit, with more than 125 people ranging from aid workers to journalists to the ambassador of Italy turning out for some much needed drinks and conversation. Marla dressed in a dark lavender dress, played hostess, single-handedly allowing us to forget that we were in a conflict zone thousands of miles from home." As if she were some Washington hostess with the mostest, she was always networking and lobbying, albeit on a shoestring and in the middle of enormous danger.

Marla asked herself wisely, and perhaps too brutally, if there was not something about war that she loved. She knew the sorrow and the fear, certainly, but she also knew there were adrenaline highs to be had, and she understood there could be something ennobling about the most horrible events. Such conflicting emotions are not uncommon in combat zones, but they are never easy to reconcile inside yourself. "When you find the balance between the war and a normal life is when one can do it all."

It's not surprising that soldiers, always suspicious of Marla at first, often grew to revere her energy, determination and bravery. It's also not surprising that some fellow aid workers remained hostile. Marla didn't play by their rules, in fact. "Marla was alienated from much of the human rights community because she chose to work with the military instead of always against it," says Scott Johnson, NEWSWEEK's new Baghdad bureau chief, who got to know Marla in both Afghanistan and Iraq. When reporters discovered, soon after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003, that the Baghdad neighborhood of Dhoura was littered with little grenade-like munitions from American cluster bombs--some of them hanging from trees, others on the hoods and roofs of cars--the journalists wrote their stories but despaired of actually getting anything done to help the people, even after three in the neighborhood were killed. One reporter told Marla. Two days later the military was in Dhoura cleaning up the bomblets and giving assistance to the families.

"In Afghanistan, she staged protests outside the U.S. embassy and a few weeks later she had won a multi-million-dollar compensation package for Afghan civilian victims," Scott remembers. Since then, she has won more than $10 million in appropriations for Iraqi victims. Yet the last time Scott saw Marla, in Brooklyn earlier this year, he was still surprised, as one always was, by the way her wide-eyed naivete would become cold-eyed focus whenever she talked about civilian casualties and what had to be done for them. "She went through the litany of protagonists, talking about [Sen. Bill] Frist and [Sen. Patrick] Leahy and God knows how many other senators, and what bill was coming up in what Senate appropriations committee and when, and who was going to vote for it, and who not, and if not, why not. And so on." And then, Marla would stop herself, and laugh ebulliently, and reminisce about the bar in Afghanistan or some other adventure. And you would see how sad she was.

Marla was never naive about the risks she ran in Iraq, and an entry on her Web site last summer was horribly prescient:

"A good friend of mine advised me to keep my movements minimal in the coming days, saying 'Just think of all the work you will be able to do in three months when the situation is better because you were not killed by a bomb.'" But there was a job to be done, and nobody else to do it. "We have been working on submitting more compensation cases and encouraging the military to pay them out. In order to submit a case we have to drive out to the airport. The ride is not pleasant, military convoys passing every moment. Faiz and I hold our breath--such convoys in that area are the target of rockets and fire from the resistance...." It was while she and Faiz were passing a convoy last Saturday that the bomber struck.