As a child in the 1950s, Hazim Hanna loved going to American movies in his northern Iraq hometown of Mosul. He wrote fan letters to his favourite Hollywood stars in schoolboy English and eagerly collected autographs from such actors as John Wayne, Robert Ford and the young Ronald Reagan.

In Baghdad nearly half a century later, Hanna and his wife Emel Meskoni welcomed the 2003 U.S. invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime. Hanna and Meskoni became two of the first Iraqis to work as translators at the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in 2004. Within a decade or so, Hanna predicted, Iraq would be “like Dubai” — a showcase of prosperity and progress.

Instead, Iraq fell apart. Although Hanna and his wife never stopped expressing hope for their country, they were waiting for final approval to immigrate to the United States when kidnappers grabbed him, then her, this past May. A message appeared on an Islamist website in the name of the Islamic State of Iraq, a front organization for al Qaeda in Iraq, trumpeting the killing of “two of the most prominent agents and spies of the worshippers of the Cross ... a man and woman who occupy an important position at the U.S. Embassy.” On July 8, the U.S. Embassy publicly announced that their bodies had been found and identified.

Hanna and Meskoni were the kind of people you would look for to build a nation — smart and stubborn and proud. The couple could not stand the thought of abandoning their Baghdad home. “Terrorists will take my house,” Hanna told relatives who urged him to leave. He was especially proud of his huge library. “He built his house, as we say in Iraq, brick by brick,” says Hanna’s former office mate at the embassy, Serwan. Yet just before she died Meskoni told a friend that her “mission in life” had been completed by getting her three children out of Iraq.

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