CHAPTER 2
In December of 1982—ten years before I was drafted into the Iraqi army—I had been taken as a child to England. My father had a government scholarship to study in England for a Ph.D., and my parents, my brother and sister, and I were to go with him. He attended the University of Manchester, so we lived around the Manchester area—Fallowfield and Moss Side—where my father became deeply involved in the Middle Eastern community centered around the local mosque. My mother, however, pined for Baghdad and the family that she had left behind. Her reluctance to throw herself into the increasingly religion-oriented world my father was making for himself led to terrible tensions between them, and our little family unit, so far from home, became volatile. Eventually my parents’ relationship failed, and my mother, along with my brother and sister, returned to Iraq. My relationship with my father, even as a young boy, was not good; but I loved England, where I spent five of my formative years, so I was pleased to remain.
By 1987, the Iran-Iraq war was coming to an end. It had been devastating for both countries. It cost more than $250 billion in total damages and, thanks to the fact that both armies had launched massive air strikes against each other’s oil infrastructures, the economies of these two once-wealthy nations were damaged almost beyond recognition. But the human cost of the war was more shocking than any economic effects. More than 1.5 million people lost their lives, decimated by forms of warfare that horrified the civilized world. Chemical and biological weapons killed and mutilated soldiers and civilians on both sides. Almost every family had someone involved; practically no one remained untouched by the horrors of that conflict.
Saddam was faced with an unforeseen social and economic quandary: so many men had lost their lives in the war that Iraq suddenly found itself with a surfeit of widowed women. Their lives destroyed, and most having no means of supporting themselves after the deaths of their husbands, they became an intolerable burden on the already damaged economy. The government had to decide what to do with these burdensome widows who had no means of support other than welfare incentives.
Saddam’s answer was novel: he decided to sell them off. Iraqi men were offered 10,000 Iraqi dinars—at the time about $33,000—to marry a war widow and thus shoulder the economic burden that the women presented to the government.
Word of this tempting offer reached my father’s ears in England via his brother. Unbeknownst to me, a widow was found for my father, and he traveled back to Iraq to meet her, with me in tow. Ostensibly the trip was for a holiday; I had no idea at the time that I was returning to Baghdad for good. But my father’s plans with his new wife back in England did not include me, and without warning I was left with my mother and her family in the middle of Baghdad. I was twelve years old, and the culture shock was massive.
My young friends in the West were cajoled into good behavior by threats of an imaginary bogeyman. In Iraq, there was no need for invented horrors.
I was not yet a teenager and had been back in Iraq only a couple of months when, one day in 1988, I saw a cavalcade of black Mercedes with blacked-out windows sweep up the length of Al-Mansour Street. They had no license plates. Iraqis from all walks of life turned to stare, but not too hard: none of the spectators wanted to draw attention to themselves, especially not knowing whom these official cars were carrying. My friend Hakim and I, perhaps emboldened by our youth, stared more intently than the other pedestrians as the sleek, expensive vehicles pulled up, not outside one of the fashionable shops lining this desirable road in Baghdad, but in front of a fast-food restaurant. The restaurant’s sign—a familiar golden M—gave an impression of the West, even if it was not McDonald’s.
After school that day, Hakim and I had met at the beginning of 14th Ramadan Street, by Souk Al-Ghazi. Shopkeepers stood guard as passersby examined their goods: watermelons, baklava, fabric for dishdash—the same wares that could be found at any number of similar places across the Middle East, and items that were of no interest to my thirteen-year-old mind. The few coins in the pocket of my prized black jeans would be spent on something far more precious: Coca-Cola.
Chatting happily, we turned onto 14th Ramadan Street and entered a run-down kebab shop. Its rusting, corrugated-iron roof protected the owner from the fierce rays of the afternoon sun, but the large shop windows—plastered in garish Arabic letters—along with the grills that burned all day long and the chatter of people constantly congregated there meant that it was at least as hot inside as out. I caught the eye of the shopkeeper and he smiled. “Sarmed, my young friend,” he called. “Falafel?”
“And a bottle of Coca-Cola,” I nodded. “Put it on my tab,” I added nonchalantly.
The owner raised his hand dramatically as we continued our little play, which we performed several times every week. “Are you trying to put me out of business?” he shouted in mock indignation. “The falafel I’ll put on your tab. But you pay me next week—otherwise I shall be having words with my friends at Abu Ghraib.” He winked at me. “The Coca-Cola, you pay for now.”
I handed him a coin and watched him fill a piece of flat bread with a generous helping of falafel and the fiery sauce of which I was fond. Then he turned to the fridge behind the counter and removed an icy bottle with the famous logo written in red Arabic letters along its length. He turned to Hakim. “And for you, sir?”
Carrying our treats, we started to walk the length of 14th Ramadan Street, holding our bottles like status symbols, smiling at any girls who passed, and talking animatedly. As we walked, the shops became gradually more sophisticated, catering to the expensive tastes of the rich families who lived in the vicinity of nearby Princess Street. Computer shops, clothes shops, antiques shops: it would be another couple of years until the sanctions against Iraq made these small but expensive luxuries a thing of the past and the Coca-Cola that was one of the few remaining links I had with the West disappeared for good, to be replaced by a poor fizzy approximation made from dates.
When that happened, though, the lack of Coca-Cola became the least of our worries. During the first Gulf War, the water tanks were bombed, and water itself became scarce. Families had to make do with what they needed merely to survive. Hair-washing, for example, became a thing of the past. After a few months, however, children began to develop head lice. Gasoline was considerably cheaper than water—you could fill up your car for the equivalent of less than a few American cents—so gasoline was used to kill the head lice. Scrupulous mothers then used rough washing powder to remove the gas from their children’s hair. You could always tell who had received this type of shampoo—the strange cocktail flecked people’s hair with a ruddy orange color when they went out into the sun.
For now, though, I could pretend: pretend that I lived a life that at least bore some small resemblance to the life I had enjoyed in England; pretend that hanging around the stalls where unscrupulous merchants made a living pirating cassettes of Western music to order was a good alternative to being able to turn on the radio at will and listen to Michael Jackson; pretend that I was not living in a country where, at every turn, I was told by a domineering regime what to do, what to say, and what to think.
Hakim and I did not expect that afternoon to be different from any other. Perhaps we would wander down Al-Mansour Street and I would visit the animals in the pet shops I loved so much, only to be chased out by the shopkeepers when they saw me: they knew that I seldom had any money to buy anything. Perhaps we would loiter around one of the pirate cassette shops hoping to hear some Western music. Occasionally I had enough money to buy a cassette, but not today.
If Hakim and I found ourselves in a residential area, we might watch men at the front of their houses cajoling their roosters to fight. Perhaps we would see a young woman being followed by a potential suitor. For a young man to approach a woman in the street would have been most unseemly—such was not the Arab way—but if his intentions were to be encouraged, the girl would nonchalantly drop to the ground a scrap of paper with her phone number scrawled on it. If the relationship thrived across the telephone wires, perhaps they might be permitted to meet in person. And if the sun was setting, we might see young Iraqi women sprinkling water on the front driveways—to cool down the house, certainly, but also to make sure that they were on show, ready to attract the attention of any young men who were passing.
On this particular day we happened to be outside Al Multakaa—The Meeting, Baghdad’s answer to McDonald’s—when three black Mercedes stopped. The traffic slowed as the cars blocked an entire lane. The rear doors opened, and four men wearing the distinctive uniform of the Special Republican Guard and carrying AK-47s swiftly alighted and surrounded the front car. A fifth guard entered the fast-food restaurant and quickly came back carrying a milkshake. As the front passenger door of the first car opened, Hakim tugged on my sleeve. “L…Sarmed,” he said conspiratorially with his characteristic stutter. “It’s U…U…Uday.”
I looked closely. The man in the front seat, perhaps in his late twenties, was tall and wore a close-cropped beard. His short hair shone and appeared expensively groomed. He wore a black suit with an open collar and sat with one foot inside the car and the other on the pavement. In his right hand he held a large cigar, in his left the milkshake that he had just been given. He surveyed the street with an arrogant look, clearly aware that people shuffling by were avoiding his gaze. Hakim was right: it was Uday Hussein, Saddam’s son.
Uday’s reputation was fearsome. He was known throughout Baghdad for his almost psychopathic contempt for ordinary Iraqis, and stories about his terrible deeds abounded. As a fifteen-year-old he had taken part in a massacre of cabinet ministers who opposed his father. It was rumored that he sometimes killed the girls who were brought to the presidential palace to entertain him. On one occasion he shot a civilian in the street, with no provocation and in full view of many witnesses. Nobody intervened or complained—doing so would have given Saddam’s henchmen carte blanche to execute them on the spot—but word of the shootings soon spread and Saddam was forced to take action. It was announced that a punishment would be imposed upon Uday: he was to be exiled from his beloved Iraq for a period of two months. Nobody was fooled, however: this was in the days when the Hussein family could travel freely in the West, and Uday’s “punishment” was little more than a vacation in the casinos of Geneva.
Back in Iraq, Uday took charge of the Iraqi soccer team, and under his supervision players were routinely beaten and tortured if they played poorly. His diversions became increasingly extreme. He kept lions as pets. Zoological experts later said that it seemed probable these lions were fed human meat and sometimes killed and ate human beings. Saddam’s son was breeding man-eaters for his own amusement.
Several meters away, Hakim and I stood staring for some moments, caught between apprehension and the excitement of seeing a famous—if notorious—face. Suddenly Uday’s eyes met mine and, unsmilingly, he held my gaze. Whether through fear or not I can’t say, but as I stood only a few meters away from one of the most dangerous men in Baghdad, my Coca-Cola bottle slipped from my fingers and smashed on the ground. I looked down to see the black liquid foaming over my shoes; when I looked up again, Uday had raised his hand and was gesturing at me and Hakim to approach him.
Slowly we walked up to the Mercedes. The pungent smell of the cigar was not strong enough to mask the sickly sweet aroma of the strawberry milkshake. A solid-silver Colt handgun with a glass handle rested on Uday’s lap. He had a satisfied air, but who knows what twisted desires he had recently satiated.
“Why did you throw that bottle?” Uday asked, the quiet of his voice barely concealing its menace. He had a lisp, but Hakim and I were in no mood to mock.
“I didn’t,” I replied honestly. “I dropped it.”
Uday dragged on his cigar, shrouding himself in smoke. The hubbub of the busy street seemed to disappear into the background as he eyed me, cobra-like. “Where do you live?”
“At the bottom of Princess Street,” I lied.
“Really?” He looked unconvinced, and with good reason. I did not have the bearing of a well-to-do Iraqi, but even in this situation I was ashamed to admit that we lived in a poor house. Why I felt I could lie to this man, I cannot say—it was probably the recklessness, or stupidity, of youth. “What is your name?” he continued.
“Sarmed.”
“Sarmed what?” he intoned wearily.
“Sarmed Alsamari.”
“Alsamari?” His interest had been caught. The Alsamari tribe had a long-standing feud with the Hussein tribe, which dated back years before Saddam’s coming to power. The dispute was over something fairly insignificant—the ownership of a stretch of the Tigris River, which divided their two villages; but old enmities run deep, and Uday was the sort of person who would use any pretext to spark his particular brand of unpleasantness. “From Samarra?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“But you live in Baghdad?” He continued his interrogation.
“With my grandparents. They are from Baghdad.”
He stretched out in the front seat of the car, making himself more comfortable. He was clearly enjoying himself. “And what is your father’s name?”
“Saadoon Alsamari.”
“Where is he?”
“In London.”
“What is he doing there?”
“Studying for a Ph.D.”
Uday nodded his head slowly. “And is he there thanks to the government?”
“Yes,” I nodded.
“Good.” Suddenly Uday looked over my shoulder. I turned and saw that he was staring at a passerby who had dared to take an interest in our conversation. Knowing what was good for him, the passerby hurried on under the threatening heat of Uday’s glare. Then he turned his attention back to me. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Nearly thirteen.”
“Right.” For the first time he smiled, but there was no warmth in that smile. He exuded the confidence of a cat playing with a mouse. Leaving his cigar in his mouth, he leaned forward, took my chin between his thumb and forefinger, and lifted my head. “So we can have you married soon.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but as Uday surveyed my face through a cloud of smoke, he must have seen the fear in my eyes and it amused him. He chuckled to himself, and as he did so he resembled his father so closely that I was momentarily taken aback. I stood there awkwardly, not knowing what to say. Uday turned his attention to Hakim. “What about you? What is your name?”
Hakim opened his mouth to speak, but the tenseness of the situation accentuated his stutter. He attempted to say his name but found himself unable to spit it out. Uday had no time for this. “Shut up,” he spat waspishly. “Go away.” Hakim looked nervously to me, unsure what to do. Uday raised his voice and touched his Colt with his cigar hand. “I said go away!”
Hakim scurried away, leaving me there. Uday said nothing; he just sat looking at me with his dead eyes, taking deep drags on his cigar. I shifted my weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other. Finally he spoke. “You may go,” he told me. For a few brief moments I stood there, somehow not comprehending that I had been dismissed. Then I became aware of two of the guards moving toward me, their hands firmly gripping their weapons. I turned and hurried away.
As the cars drove away—all other vehicles in the street having been diverted to allow their passage—Hakim and I were left with our sense of fear. As that fear subsided, our encounter with Uday turned into a great adventure, and our exploits were recounted to our contemporaries with increasing elaboration. But as I grew older and became more aware of the reality of life around me, such events took on a more sinister meaning—less a cause for bravado, more a cause for despair. Many Iraqis were unwilling to go into detail about the horrors they experienced, but plenty of rumors reached my ears. That was how the regime worked. There would have been no point to the continuing brutality if ordinary Iraqis did not get to hear of it: how else would Saddam maintain his grip of fear?
Rumors were spread by word of mouth. Some of them were exaggerated in the telling, no doubt, but even the most grisly were not, I am sure, so very far from the truth. AIDS, we were told, was a Western disease, an epidemic confined to the relative promiscuity of the non-Arab world. I was walking down 14th Ramadan Street with Hakim one day, however, when we noticed a poster in a shop window. The names of four women were printed in large letters, and text below the names urged anyone who knew these women to report them to the authorities. They were HIV-positive, the poster informed us, and were part of a wicked Zionist plot to deliberately spread AIDS around our great nation.
Hakim and I did not know the women, of course, so we thought little more about them, although the posters continued to appear in shop windows across Baghdad. A few weeks later, however, word spread that the women had been apprehended. The authorities had made no effort to arrest them formally, and they certainly had not been given any opportunity to defend themselves through any legal process. Instead, they had been taken to Abu Ghraib prison, twenty miles west of Baghdad.
The notoriety of Abu Ghraib was enough to chill the fervor of even the most revolutionary citizens. It was said that thousands of men and women were crammed into tiny cells and that abuse, torture, and executions were daily occurrences. The regime tested chemical and biological weapons on the inmates, and some prisoners were given nothing but scraps of shredded plastic to eat. Chunks of flesh were torn from the bodies of some prisoners and then force-fed to others. Gruesome tortures involving power tools and hungry dogs were routine, and thousands of people who entered the doors of that fearsome place were never heard of again. It was known that mass graves existed around the country, and it was known in general terms where they were situated; but of course nobody dared to hunt out the final resting places of those poor men and women who had become victims of the enthusiastic guards at Abu Ghraib, for fear of becoming one of their number.
The four AIDS-stricken women were dealt with in a fashion brutal even by the standards of the prison. Stripped of their clothes, they were placed, alive and screaming, into an incinerator so that they and their “vile disease” could be utterly destroyed. In this way Saddam “delivered” our country from the horrific infections of the West and from the iniquities of the “evil Zionist state.” I kept quiet about my maternal grandmother’s Jewish heritage. She was one of only a handful of Jews who remained in Iraq during the great exodus of 1950. Before that time there were about 150,000 Jews living in Iraq; now there were fewer than a hundred, and it would have done me no favors if anybody suspected that I might embrace Zionism.
Other atrocities took place more openly. As living conditions became increasingly intolerable, many women were forced into prostitution in order to make enough money to feed themselves and their families. It was an occupation deemed unacceptable by the state, punishable by death. The swift hand of justice was left to officials of the Ba’ath party, who were given orders to seek and behead all those suspected of prostitution. The standard of proof required was low, but the enthusiasm with which these officials carried out their work was high. Accompanied by two “witnesses” from the local community, they forced their way into the house of a suspect, then dragged her out into the street, where a specialist executioner was waiting with a sword. He sliced off the head of the screaming woman with one deft, well-practiced stroke. The head hung outside the woman’s house for two days, and her front door was branded with the warning “Hathihee Al-Qahba’a.” “This Is the Whore.”
I remember a parade down one of the main thoroughfares of Baghdad when I was a child. The road was closed to traffic, and thousands of people joined the march, which was intended to celebrate the glory of Saddam. As the day wore on, however, a small group of insurgents became vocal in their criticism of the regime and started to shout anti-Saddam slogans. There weren’t very many—certainly only a small proportion of the crowd—but the Republican Guard was quick to react. A helicopter immediately flew overhead, and white paint was poured over the entire crowd—insurgents and noninsurgents alike. Heavily armed soldiers were then dispatched with orders to shoot anybody stained with white paint. The whole operation took less than an hour. A few lucky souls with paint only on their clothes managed to escape the crowd and change, but people with paint in their hair or on their bodies, where it was more difficult to remove, fared less well. The military scoured the area and shot dead anybody suspected of being part of the “uprising.”
The town of Balad north of Baghdad had long been a place of neglect and oppression. Compared to Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, it suffered unbearable poverty and degradation. The people of Balad extended an official invitation to Saddam to come to the town to discuss matters. As a cultural mark of respect, the wife of one of the leading tribesmen arranged for Saddam’s car to be marked with henna. Secretly, the tribesmen arranged for militia armed with RPG-launchers to be stationed on rooftops on the street where Saddam’s fleet would pass; their instructions were to destroy the henna-marked car on sight.
As arranged, the militia destroyed the marked car, along with nineteen other cars. They then came down to street level and destroyed all except three of the remaining vehicles, which retreated with great haste. A checkpoint guard who was collaborating with the tribe reported that Saddam was in one of those three cars. His head of security had been suspicious and arranged for him to be moved to an unmarked vehicle.
The entire town immediately fled to Mosul or Samarra: everyone knew retribution would be swift and uncompromising. Within hours, armed helicopters arrived and laid waste to Balad. Then bulldozers arrived to destroy whatever was left of the place. In twenty-four hours, a whole town was turned to rubble; any civilians unlucky enough to have remained in what was left of their homes were bulldozed or burned to death.
During my teenage years, I made no secret to my family of the fact that I wanted to leave all this. As I grew up, I witnessed more and more of my friends in Baghdad—many of whom were older than I—somehow managing to make it across the border. Some made the dangerous trip into Iran, others made it to Kurdistan. I even heard that some claimed asylum in Israel. I longed to do the same. “At least finish your schooling,” my mother would beg me. “Then at least you will have some sort of grounding.” So I persevered at school, but with a certain reluctance: I simply saw it as an obstacle to be got out of the way before I could make attempts to leave the country.
But there were other obstacles too. In 1990, when I was fourteen, my father—who was by now back from England—took me against my mother’s will and my own to live with him at the College of Forestry and Agriculture near Mosul, where he was based. I didn’t want to be there, but my father had a hold on me, and there was little I could do.
From an early age it had been drummed into me that the best career path I could possibly follow would be medicine. Doctors would always be in demand, it was said, and medicine would be a noble calling. To gain a place at medical school, however, was not easy. Applications to university were accepted on the basis of your average mark for your final exams in high school. Unfortunately for me, academic merit was not the only factor to be taken into account when this final mark was calculated. If the father of a student was an active member of the Ba’ath party, for example, the student would receive an extra five points; if the father was an officer in the military, the student would be awarded another five. It was reasonably common for students to finish high school with an average mark of 110 out of 100.
My father had no military or political connections. I was not a bad student, but my final mark of 86 was always going to be insufficient for me to achieve what I wanted to. I applied for medical school, but I knew that I was unlikely to make the grade against people whose marks had been doctored as a result of their parents’ connections. Sure enough, I was rejected.
I made other applications too. My father persuaded me to apply to the College of Forestry and Agriculture—he would be able to keep an eye on me, he said, and make sure my grades were good—and I was offered a place. But I had no desire to live with him any longer than I had to, so I also did some research into which colleges in Baghdad were likely to accept me, and I was offered two other places: one to study veterinary medicine, the other to study accounting and finance. I made the applications without much enthusiasm and chose to enroll in the latter course almost at random. I never expected to attend; I already had made other plans.
There was a period of two months between the end of high school and starting at university. During that time, if the proper applications were made, the government allowed students to spend a brief time traveling outside Iraq. My dream had always been to return to England, but that would not be allowed. However, I reasoned, if I could at least make it to Jordan, where border control was less strict, I could apply for a student visa and make my way to the UK. My plans were hazy but bolstered by an inexorable desire to leave. Secretly I made contact with a college in England, and I was accepted for a basic medical course. My mother’s brother, Faisal, was a doctor in England, and I was sure that my uncle would help me study to become a doctor myself. But first I had to get there.
In order to make my application for a visitor’s visa, certain papers needed to be compiled. During my final few weeks at school, I applied for a certificate of nationality. When that came through, I had the most difficult hurdle to cross. I approached my father with a certain amount of trepidation. As part of the application, I needed his written permission, and I had no reason to believe that he would give it willingly. I fully expected to have to beg, cajole, and finally argue furiously with him.
My relationship with my father was an unhappy one. When I was a child, he had taken me from my mother in Baghdad and forced me to live in a place I hated, in the north: the compound of the College of Forestry and Agriculture, which was next to a village called Hamam Al-Aleel, near Mosul. Hamam Al-Aleel was something of a Sunni stronghold, a bastion of Saddam’s supporters. The village was populated by people who were loyal to the regime, and a significant proportion of the Special Republican Guard was recruited from that area. The college itself was part of a massive compound that included not only living quarters for the lecturers and the students but also a vast expanse of forest. Surrounding it all was a high, concrete wall that made it resemble a prison. But the fortifications were not to keep students in; they were to keep the vicious inhabitants of Hamam Al-Aleel out.
In places, the wall had crumbled and toppled, so the compound itself was never completely secure. Sometimes, groups of young men entered the college and attacked anyone they saw wearing good clothes—not because they needed or wanted clothing but simply because they could. Nobody was going to argue with these fearsome animals brandishing Kalashnikovs. On other occasions these marauding groups wandered around looking for girls—there were a good number of female students at the college—and broke into the female residence halls. Sometimes at night I lay in bed and heard the yelling. The police and other authorities, many related to the villagers, typically turned a blind eye. These people were loyal to Saddam, and an unspoken law gave them carte blanche to act more or less as they wished.
I occasionally spoke on the telephone to my family in Baghdad, but fear of my father kept me rooted in Mosul. Nevertheless, all the years I spent in that place were filled with a desire to leave. So it was that I carefully waited until he was in what passed for a good mood before I brought the matter up with him. “If I am to make an application for students’ leave, I will need your permission,” I told him.
“Indeed?” he replied with an uncharacteristic note of joviality. “Well then,” he stretched his arms out in front of him, “you have my permission!”
I was so astonished I barely knew what to say. I looked hard at my father and could sense that beneath the veil of helpfulness something was not right. Over the past few years he had gone to all sorts of lengths to keep me close to him, ranging from bribery to abduction to physical and mental violence. Why was he now surrendering me without a fight?
“I need your permission in writing,” I told him.
“Certainly,” he said and accompanied me to my school to sign the piece of paper that I hoped would be my ticket out of Iraq: “I, Saadoon Alsamari, give my permission for my son Sarmed to travel out of the country before returning to attend university.”
I couldn’t believe how readily he had granted his permission, but I still required permission from my school. It was not simply a matter of gaining a signature from the right person, however. I approached the registrar with gifts of baklava and bananas—which were scarce at the time because of the sanctions—and literally begged him to take the relevant document to the dean to be signed.
The next step was to take the three documents to military headquarters in Samarra, for that was where my paternal family was originally from, along with the application fee of 15,000 dinars—at that time worth about $300. “Sure,” said my father, “I’ll take you to Samarra.”
“When can we go?”
My father shrugged. “Two weeks, maybe three.”
“But it’s already the middle of July,” I told him. “They would expect me back in the country at the end of August—it won’t give them enough time to process the application.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Sarmed. I’m busy here—I can’t just drop everything to take you to Samarra. You’ll have to be patient.” Suddenly his attitude seemed to be changing, as though he knew I was going to encounter these difficulties but was pleased that I would not be able to pin them precisely on him.
“Okay,” I replied, “I’ll take the coach to Baghdad and get Uncle Saad to take me.”
My father turned stony-faced, as he always did when my uncle was mentioned. “Saad, eh? Arrooj. Peg-leg. Very well.”
I had one more favor to ask. “I need the application fee,” I told him. “Fifteen thousand dinars.”
His eyes went flat. “I’m not going to give you that sort of money,” he told me adamantly.
“Please,” I begged him. “If you don’t lend me the money, there’s no way I can get out of the country—no way I can study to become a doctor. The only other way I can raise it is to sell all my stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“My computer, my bike…”
“They’re not yours to sell. They’re mine—you only borrow them. Everything in this house belongs to me.” He turned to leave the room. “If you need money,” he said with a hint of sarcasm, “maybe arrooj can give it to you. But somehow, I doubt it.”
My father left me to simmer on that thought for a while. The following day I called Saad. I told him about the conversation as he listened quietly. “Okay,” he said when I had finished. “Get the coach to Baghdad and we’ll sort it all out.”
“What about the money?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about that—I’ll get the money.”
“Where from?”
“I said don’t worry about it. Just get here.”
My father seemed uncharacteristically unconcerned when I informed him boldly that I was going to Baghdad. With any luck, I was to be departing Mosul for the last time before leaving Iraq, but he clearly did not think my chances of success were high. “I’ll see you soon,” he told me before I left. It was almost as though he knew something I did not.
The office in Samarra was deliciously cool, and the immaculately dressed military official who was to authorize my application made a stark contrast to Saad and me, rumpled and sweating from the torturous heat of the car journey from Baghdad. The room itself was bleak—a table, three chairs, and an old metal filing cabinet in the corner—but the official maintained an imperious bearing nevertheless. We needed this man’s help, so we made every effort to be scrupulously polite. “What is the boy’s name?” he asked as he examined my papers. His voice was thick with the accent of Samarra.
“This is my nephew, Sarmed Alsamari. He wishes to make an application to travel outside the country.”
“I’m sure he does.” He eyed me with suspicion. “What is his status?”
“He has just finished high school, and will start university in Baghdad in September.”
“Who is his father?”
“Saadoon Alsamari.” A flicker of recognition crossed the officer’s face. “You will see from the documents that he has given his permission for the application to be processed. He has asked me to accompany Sarmed today.”
“Indeed?” questioned the officer skeptically. “He should be here himself. Why could he not come?”
“He is an important lecturer in Mosul,” Saad replied smoothly. “A very busy man. I’m sure you understand.”
The officer remained expressionless as he placed my documents into a folder and scribbled something on a piece of paper. “Here is a telephone number,” he told Saad. “You can call it to check the status of your application. Good day.”
“But we were under the impression that the application could be approved today.”
“Then I am afraid, my friend, that you were under the incorrect impression. There are a number of checks I have to make.”
“What sort of checks?”
“Just checks,” he replied evasively. “Now, if you don’t mind, I am extremely busy.”
Saad looked pointedly at the empty desk. “So I see,” he said and led me from the room. “Something’s not right,” he told me once the door was closed and we were out of earshot. “There’s no reason why he shouldn’t have processed that application immediately. There’s something he wasn’t telling us.”
We phoned the number every day for the next couple of weeks, but on each occasion the official made himself unavailable.
“We’ll have to go there again and talk to him face to face,” Saad decided. “If you’re to get out before the end of August, time is short. Someone is leaning on this pen-pusher to delay the application, and I think I know who it is.”
The military official was, if anything, even less welcoming this time. “Listen,” he told us impatiently, “I told you that checks need to be made.”
“Well, have you made them?” Saad put him on the spot.
“It’s a very busy time of year.” The official avoided the question. “The schools have all finished. There’s a great deal to do.”
Saad eyeballed him for a few moments before leaning back in his chair and breathing deeply. “Okay,” he said quietly. “Akhee [brother], I am very well connected in Baghdad. People high in the military. It is only a matter of one phone call to military headquarters for me to find out what is going on. Now, are you sure you don’t want to move a little more quickly?”
The official gazed back impassively. He had no way of knowing if Saad was bluffing—my uncle was not from Samarra, so no word of this pushy ex-officer with a false leg and a smooth tongue from Baghdad would have reached his ears—but he decided to take the risk. “You do what you have to do,” he replied. “I know my job.”
But Saad was not bluffing. As we drove back to Baghdad he seemed quietly confident that he could get things moving. “I have a favor to call in” was all he would say. Back at his compound in Baghdad, he elaborated. “I have a contact,” he told me. “He sometimes comes to visit us here. He is very high up, a deputy minister, and I have his private number. I’ve never made any requests of him before now, and this will be a small matter for him. I’m sure he will help us.”
That afternoon he made the call. “This is officer Saad from Al-Zaafaraniya compound. My nephew is having trouble with an official in Samarra who is being slow in processing his application to travel before he goes to university, and time is becoming short. Is there anything you can do to help things along?”
Approval from Samarra came through the very next day.
One final hurdle remained between me and the Jordanian border. The approval from Samarra had to be taken to the central military office in Baghdad for the final document to be stamped. Saad and I went there that day; I was buoyant with excitement at the prospect of being able to leave as soon as the final piece of this interminable jigsaw of bureaucracy was in place. Outside the huge, revolving glass doors a crowd of bearded Iraqis wearing dishdash sat at small portable tables, umbrellas protecting them from the sun. These were the statement-makers: anybody with a request to be made had to pay one of these statement-makers to draw the request up as an official document before it could be taken to one of the clerks inside the office. Some of them had old-style cameras on tripods with black hoods at the back, because all documents required an accompanying photograph. We paid several hundred dinars to one of these men to produce our written request, and he attached my papers to it using a needle before giving it to us to take inside.
A harassed-looking official took my papers and looked at them. After a few moments he shook his head. “Too late,” he said.
“What do you mean, too late?” Saad asked.
“My friend, we have tens of thousands of applications. It will take at least four weeks to process this—they need to be thoroughly examined by military intelligence. By that time he will have only a week in which to travel—it won’t be worth it.”
“I can spend a week traveling!” I butted in.
“It’s not up to you, young man,” the official told me. “If we say it’s not worth it, it’s not worth it.” He handed the papers back to me.
“But it’s only late because we were delayed by the official in Samarra…” I started to argue, but he had already moved away to join his colleague.
Crestfallen, I turned to Saad. “Come on, Sarmed,” he said quietly. “We’re wasting our time here. Let’s go home.”
Saad tried to approach his high-ranking contact once more, but that door seemed shut to us. “This is the second favor,” my uncle was told. “I have a job to do—I can’t keep sorting out your problems.”
Saad looked demoralized as he put the phone down. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I feel as though I’ve let you down.”
I shook my head. “I’ve been let down,” I told him, “but not by you.” We sat in silence for a while. “It was my father, wasn’t it? He tipped off the official in Samarra about my application and asked him to delay it.”
Saad nodded. “It can’t have been anybody else.”
“No wonder he was so relaxed about me leaving. Why does he have to be like this? I thought he wanted me to study medicine.”
“He had his reasons.” Saad muttered the platitude, unwilling to speak badly of my father in front of me; but the steel in his eyes told of less forgiving thoughts.
“There must be something I can do,” I almost whispered. “I can’t stay here—this place is making me mad.”
Saad looked at me closely. “I’d hoped that you would be able to get out legally,” he said after a while. “There is another option, but it is very dangerous.”
“What is it?”
“You would be taking a great risk.”
“I’m not a child anymore,” I said impatiently. “What do you have in mind?”
He still seemed reluctant to tell me. “I have heard that there are Kurds who are willing to smuggle people north into Kurdistan. They would forge a document saying that you are their son. From there they would get professionals to create false papers and take you over the border into Turkey.”
We were silent for some time. Both of us knew the implications of what he was suggesting. If I was caught trying to leave the country without the proper permissions, the chances were that I would be escorted to Abu Ghraib. Once there, I would hope that the guards did not decide to become creative in their dealings with me. I did my best to dispel those thoughts. “Do you know anyone who does this?” I asked Saad.
He shook his head. “Not directly. And it will take a while to find someone—I can’t just approach people in the street and ask them if they are willing to smuggle my nephew to Turkey. It could take some weeks. You’ll have to start at university in the meantime.”
I shrugged. “If it’s only for a few weeks…”
“You can’t make this decision lightly, Sarmed,” my uncle told me almost with impatience. “It’s not a game, and you know what will happen if you get caught. Maybe you should think about staying—get your degree and see how you feel then.” His piercing eyes looked straight at me. “I understand why you want to leave, but everybody wants you to stay.”
“I know,” I replied, humbled by the affection my uncle was showing me. “But please, Uncle Saad, find out what you can.”
“Okay, Sarmed. I’m not promising anything, but I’ll do my best.”
With a heavy heart, I enrolled at university to study accounting and finance, hanging on to the hope that Saad would find someone who could help us, and soon. I did not consider what would happen if I was caught—such thoughts were too unpleasant to dwell upon—and in any case I was single-minded in my determination not to stay in Iraq for a day longer than was necessary.
My attendance at university was poor. As I look back now I realize I should have made the most of it, but thoughts of escape were foremost in my young mind. I was not to know that my actions would precipitate everything that followed, but my enthusiasm for the course was nonexistent, and in any case I did not expect to be around long enough to make it worth my while to even show up. Once my nonattendance hit a certain level, I knew that republican law dictated that a letter be sent to Samarra—probably to the same official with whom I had had dealings before—and I would be tracked down and called in. I would then be given a choice: find another course and attend it properly, or enlist in the army. But by the time that happened, I was convinced, I would be well on my way to Turkey.
I saw Saad every day. Sometimes we played chess; other times we just sat and chatted. Every day I asked him how his inquiries were going; every day he skirted around the issue. “I need a few more days,” he would say. “Be patient, Sarmed. I’m working on it.” And I knew he was.
It was acknowledged without words that Saad was more of a father to me than my father had ever been. He was beginning to look pressured, however, and although he would not admit it, it was clear to me that he was having trouble finding one of these mysterious Kurdish smugglers. Most of the Kurdish population was centered around Mosul, and Saad had no contacts in that part of Iraq.
One morning, the local Ba’ath party official knocked on our door, and my mother answered. “Sarmed Alsamari must report to the military headquarters in Samarra.” There was no point asking questions: it was couched as a request but was very much an order, and if I failed to show up, then the Red Berets would soon come asking for me. Once more, Saad and I found ourselves on the route to Samarra. “It’s okay,” Saad told me. “They will offer you another course—you had better attend this one!”
The same military official was dealing with my case. “It appears your attendance at university has been poor,” he told me with more than a hint of satisfaction.
I could not deny it. “I didn’t find that I was suited to it,” I lied. “I would like to find a different course to study.”
“It’s too late for that,” the official told me. He handed me a sheaf of documents. “These are your call-up papers. You are to report immediately to Baghdad military training center. You will undergo three months’ training before being assigned to your unit.” His words fell upon me like body blows as he turned to Saad. “And there is no point asking your friends to rap my knuckles this time,” he told him. “If he fails to attend university, he joins the army. Republican law, and there is nothing you can do about it.”