BAGHDAD, Iraq _ When her fiance left Iraq for Germany, Nayzak al Jassm gave him a Quran for good luck. Rafael Velez asked her to remember him with a tiny cross that dangles on a gold chain around her neck.
Faith, they said, is the only force strong enough to protect them from the disapproving whispers of people who don’t believe in love between a Muslim Iraqi woman and a Roman Catholic U.S. Army sergeant.
Their relationship is forbidden by both local custom and
military orders. It unfolds amid daily attacks on American troops, car bombings of civilian targets and massive demonstrations by residents demanding that foreign troops leave their country. But the
letters Jassm and Velez have written each other since May describe a vastly different relationship between the occupier and the occupied.
“We won’t have to worry about what people say and we sure won’t have to worry about getting shot at,” Velez wrote in a letter describing the Sunday drives and barbecues he planned for them in America. “Just think what our love would be like without all these restraints.

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