Escape from Saddam (2 page)

Not one of us moved a muscle. We didn’t want to make any gesture that could be interpreted as a desire to go back to that godforsaken place.

“Good,” continued the officer. “You are now under my command. Any action that brings shame upon this regiment or upon our beloved leader, may God protect him and bless him, will be dealt with swiftly and severely. If you are called upon to fight for the great and glorious Iraqi army, it will be an honor. You will therefore keep yourselves in a state of utmost readiness. You will continue to train in the art and techniques of warfare, and I advise you to pay close attention at all times. You never know when our leader, may God protect him and bless him, will call upon you to make use of them to serve and protect our glorious country from our cowardly enemies.”

He gave us a look of barely concealed contempt as the
arif
shouted, “Attention!” We saluted; the officer saluted back before turning on his heel and returning to the comforts of his office.

We were taken to our quarters. Again I had been allocated a bunk bed in a large dormitory that housed about sixty people; one white sheet had been supplied, and the rest of the bedding was a dirty army green. I stowed away my few personal belongings—a pen and some paper for writing home and a small portable cassette player with a few Western tapes. Western music, unlike the music of Israel or Iran, was allowed in Iraq, with a few exceptions. “By the Rivers of Babylon” by Boney M was one of those exceptions, though I remember that Saad and I had blasted it in his car when I was young—a small gesture of defiance. But in the army, Western music was banned, so those of us who wanted to bring it in were forced to use subterfuge. On one of my short periods of leave from the training camp, I had taken some tapes of the music I liked to listen to—Michael Jackson, Bon Jovi, Wet Wet Wet, A-Ha—and placed them in cassette boxes on which I had written the names of Middle Eastern singers so that they would not be confiscated.

I took a shower before changing into more-comfortable clothes. A number of people tried to phone home from one of the communal telephones. A stern-faced
arif
sat next to the telephone, listening intently to everyone’s conversations and making a note of how long each person spent on the phone so that everyone could be charged appropriately. The waiting lines for the telephone were long, however, and I was not in the mood to hear the playful laughs of my brother and sister in the background. So I decided to rest before the rigors of the next day.

The following morning we were each assigned a weapon—an Iraqi-made AK-47. Each gun had a piece of what resembled black surgical tape stuck on the side, on which was scrawled a number so that the quartermasters could keep track of who had been issued which weapon. I soon found out that, although our training period was at an end, there was much that we were still expected to learn. At the Baghdad training compound, we had been taught how to handle weapons at the most basic level; now our skills were to be honed and specialized. A special unit came in, for example, to teach us how to plant land mines. We were each given a box containing several heavy, defused land mines. As I slowly took one of the weapons from its packaging, I was very aware that this was the instrument that had almost killed my uncle during the Iran-Iraq war.

While stationed on the front line, on Iranian territory near Basra, Saad had been ordered to lead his men into a minefield. He was one of the lucky few to escape with his life. Debris from a nearby explosion detonated a cluster of mines, and he was knocked unconscious. He awoke to discover that he had been blown one way, his leg the other. His remaining leg had been cut deep enough to expose the bone of his knee, and his whole body was deeply splintered with sharp, angry pieces of hot shrapnel. How he survived is a mystery even to him.

The day I went with my family to visit Saad in the hospital is one of the most vivid memories of my youth. We all packed into his tiny hospital room, and had I not known it was Saad lying in the bed, I wouldn’t have recognized him. His face and body were bandaged up. The outer layer of his skin had been burned and peeled away by the force of the blast; what remained was red and sore. The land mine had severed his leg below the knee, but the remainder of that limb was so riddled with shrapnel that it had been removed several inches above the knee. The other leg was little more than a patchwork of skin grafted from different parts of Saad’s body. You could place a magnet on certain parts of him and it would stick because of all the shrapnel embedded beneath his skin. He was unconscious when we saw him, and my mother and grandmother wailed with tears at the sight of their beloved Saad in such a state. I remember my father standing emotionless in the corner of the room. “I told you this is what would happen if you ran off to war” the look on his face seemed to say. It was a stark introduction for a six-year-old to the realities of battle.

Now I was learning how to plant the same weapon so that it could mutilate some other foreign soldier or maybe an unsuspecting civilian unlucky enough to stumble across it. A thick circle of gray metal, perhaps two inches thick, the mine had a second, smaller circle protruding from the top. The mine was to be placed in the dirt, or underwater in the mud, so that it was not visible, and then a small pin was removed to arm it. The slightest movement above the mine would detonate it, and the results would be devastating. We were not taught how to defuse land mines. For that knowledge, we were told, we had to wait until our second year.

We were taught how to arm and fire heavy BKC machine guns that could hit targets over two kilometers in the distance. Two soldiers were needed to operate them—one to fire the weapon, the other to feed the long chain of ammunition into it. On the grounds of the unit was the shell of a Russian-style tank. We were not taught to drive tanks—that was a specialized job not suited to such low-ranking soldiers as ourselves. Instead we were taught how to fire the machine gun perched at the top. In a battle situation the gunners would be on full display—cannon fodder for enemy troops, who could pick them off with the greatest of ease.

I remembered the maxim I was taught at school, a favorite saying of Saddam’s that we were forced to commit to memory: “He who does not sweat to build his country will not bleed defending it.” We had been trained since childhood to see weaponry as part of everyday life. Guns were commonplace, of course, but even when I was young I had come into contact with weapons of far greater destructive power. As a young boy I spent time living with my father in the northern city of Mosul, in the semirural surroundings of the College of Forestry and Agriculture. One day my friends and I decided to go hunting for the foxes that had been terrorizing my beloved chickens, which I kept in the yard, so we set off along the road that led into the forest.

After walking for an hour or so, we came across an area enclosed by barbed wire. We had all been into the forest before, but none of us had stumbled across this enclosure. Not far inside, we saw a huge mound covered with army camouflage material. Peeping out from under the camouflage were large, metal, pointed tips; they were clearly either Scud missiles or some other form of rocket-propelled weapon. A family of foxes were scurrying over the missiles or nestling peacefully under their tips. We stood in silence for a few moments, staring at our discovery, when suddenly we heard the sound of a car approaching. A red Chevrolet drove up slowly; not wanting to be caught here by a member of the security forces, we ran away as quickly as we could, vowing to return the next day.

Every time we went back to spy on our discovery, the red Chevrolet was always nearby. We never got close enough to find out who was in it, nor did we want to, for fear of being seen. Gradually, though, we began to work out the times that it disappeared—presumably so that the driver could get something to eat or go off duty and swap with somebody else—and we started to formulate a plan. We took an old wheelbarrow to a section of the surrounding wall that either had crumbled naturally or had been destroyed by villagers trying to get in. We filled the wheelbarrow with small pieces of rubble and then took it to the weapons dump, waited for the Chevrolet to disappear, and rolled it close to the barbed wire. If we could throw the rubble at the missiles, we naively thought, and explode one of them, we could launch our first strike in the battle against the foxes. They would be painlessly dispatched, and we would be far enough away to avoid getting hurt.

Of course, the missiles were too deep inside the barbed-wired area for us to score many direct hits, and our aim was not that true in any case. Occasionally a small stone rebounded off the metal with a satisfying clunk, but when we saw the red Chevrolet approaching after about forty-five minutes, we scampered away, and the foxes lived to scavenge for chickens another day.

The next time I spoke to Uncle Saad on the phone, I casually told him about our exploits. He listened attentively before speaking very quietly but with the full weight of his authority: “Listen to me very carefully, Sarmed. You must
never
do that again. The chances of exploding one of those missiles with a piece of rubble are minuscule, but if you did manage it, you wouldn’t just be wiping out your foxes—you’d be wiping out your home and probably the surrounding villages too.”

I fell silent as the implications of our stupidity were spelled out to me.

“Promise me you’ll never go back there, Sarmed,” Saad continued, “even just to look. It’s not the sort of place you want to be caught snooping around.”

“I promise,” I replied quietly.

Back at my unit, we learned how to use different types of grenades. Special honor was reserved for those soldiers who threw grenades the farthest, and the day after a training session our arms were bruised from the effort of several hours of hurling these heavy weapons into the desert surrounding the camp. We also practiced disassembling and assembling AK-47s. As a child I had practiced using these weapons on the wasteland outskirts of Baghdad with my uncle, so I required no instruction in this part of my training. None of my superiors questioned me about my almost natural ability with the guns, and my sharpshooting skills went from good to excellent.

We were taught basic martial arts movements so that we could become proficient in hand-to-hand combat, and we learned how to fight with the bayonet attached to the end of a Kalashnikov. After only a few weeks of training I learned how to break a man’s kneecap with one solid kick, and I mastered several methods of rendering an opponent helpless so that I could plunge my Kalashnikov bayonet deep into his throat. I learned how to approach a person from behind and kill him in one swift, simple move. Gradually, despite my reluctance, I was being carefully and proficiently instructed in the mechanics of killing. There was an unspoken acknowledgment that, as simple soldiers, we were the pawns in Saddam’s bombastic shows of military bravado. Iraq was never far away from war, and everybody knew somebody who had been killed or horribly injured in one of the leader’s campaigns. Should we find ourselves on the front line, our ability to kill other men would be the only thing with any chance of saving us from a similar fate.

A couple of
months into my time at the unit, I looked at the notice board that listed everybody’s duties and training sessions for a particular day.
“Al’Tadreeb ala Al-Istijwab”
announced one of the sheets, “Interrogation Training.” My name was one of four on the list.

At the appointed time, I made my way to the prison cells. At the training center, misdemeanors had been punished by the pit; here the
arifs
simply hurled you into prison if you refused to toe the line, or into solitary confinement if you had been particularly wayward. Next to the cells were small, bare interrogation rooms. The room in which my resistance-to-torture training was to take place had nothing but a dull lamp, a metal table, and three metal chairs. Two
arifs
with clipboards and pencils sat at the table; the third chair had been placed in the middle of the room, directly under a fan that did not so much provide ventilation as simply move the stale air. I stood at attention against one of the walls while I waited for my colleagues to arrive.

Once we were all assembled, one of the
arifs
addressed us. “You,” the
arif
pointed at one of our number, “sit down.”

The man singled out was the burliest of the four of us and was from the south. Until now I had avoided him, as did most of the camp. Occasionally in the dining room I had noticed him spitting into the communal food to put people off from eating it. He fraternized only with the members of his own community who also found themselves at this unit—all of them also large and thickset and displaying arrogance bordering on contempt for anybody not in their clique. Despite his overpowering self-confidence, however, he could not hide his nervousness as he took a seat. His hands were bound tightly with rope behind the back of the chair.

“You have been captured,” the
arif
continued. “Your regiment is moving north, and this is the information that your captors are trying to force you to reveal. They will use any means to get it, but you must reveal nothing.” He turned to the three of us still standing against the wall. “Do what you must to find this information out,” he told us, “with one exception: you are not to cut his face, and you are not to break his bones. He needs to be presentable for lineup. Anything else is acceptable.”

The three of us remained silent; the only noises in the room were the regular whirr of the ceiling fan and the heavy breathing of the soldier tied to the chair. We looked at each other apprehensively, unwilling to attack our colleague but uncertain how to avoid it.

“You!” the
arif
pointed at me. “You start.”

I stared into the eyes of the prisoner; he looked back defiantly. Slowly I approached him and then, with a brief look at the
arif,
struck him in the stomach. The blow was as gentle as I dared make it, although it was enough to make the prisoner cough sharply and catch his breath. As he did so, the
arif
raised his voice. “Harder!” he shouted.