Escape from Saddam (21 page)

To try to forget my troubles, I threw myself even more robustly into my work. In the small amounts of spare time that I had left, I started trying to mingle with groups of young English people, and even though I gradually started to feel a greater sense of acceptance on their part, I never quite managed to feel comfortable, never quite managed to shake off the feeling that I was an outsider in a strange world that had started to acknowledge me but to which I would always be an alien.

Until, that is, I met Rachel.

We met in a local bar. It was the sort of chance encounter that you wouldn’t expect to lead to anything serious—a glance across the room that led to a relationship that would change both our lives. We fell into an easy, friendly conversation that made us both feel comfortable, and from that night on we spent almost every spare hour we had with each other. I was transfixed by her long, Titian hair and by her modest smile and sparkling eyes that betrayed a vitality and fiery determination that I had never before encountered. She was older than I and had a good job, and I was attracted by her confidence and poise. What she saw in me I can’t say, but gradually, as we became closer, I opened up to her.

Since arriving in England, I learned to push my past into a far corner of my mind. My story was different, I knew that, but I wore it like a comfortable suit of clothes and refrained from revealing it to anyone. If people knew what I had endured, perhaps they would treat me differently, and that was not what I wanted. But now, with the stark honesty of two people who were falling in love, we revealed all there was to tell about each other. The look of wide-eyed amazement mingled with horror and pity that I saw on Rachel’s face as I told her everything I had gone through was a sudden, brutal reminder of my own past, and a signal that I would never really be free of it.

“What about your family,” she asked me. “Don’t you miss them?”

“Of course I do,” I told her quietly. “More than anything. But one day, maybe, I’ll be able to see them again.”

“What can I do to help?”

I smiled gratefully at the offer. “Nothing,” I told her. “Not at the moment.”

Rachel and I moved in together, and after about six months we started talking about marriage. My uncle Faisal was a very religious man, well respected at the local mosque, and he did not like the idea of the two of us living together as man and wife without the sanctity bestowed on our relationship by a wedding ceremony, so he started to pressure us into getting married. Even if his influence on me had not been so great, however, we would have considered it.

Our wedding day was not huge or lavish—neither of us had the money for that. We had a small civil ceremony, witnessed by a somewhat surprised-looking couple whom Rachel had dragged off the street. Yet, for all its simplicity, the words we spoke could not have been more heartfelt and meaningful. We were devoting our lives to each other, along with all that that entailed. Making the whole event even more potent was the fact that Rachel was of Jewish extraction: her marriage to an Arab seemed to me to symbolize something particularly harmonious.

In the Hollywood movies to which I had become addicted, young couples in love promised the world to each other. They would do anything, they said. They would follow their loved one to hell and back. Little did I know that Rachel would end up doing exactly that for me.

Not long after
I moved in with Rachel I received a call from Saad. Instantly I could tell from the sound of his voice that what he had to tell me was of great importance, so I restrained my usual effusiveness and listened to what he had to say.
“Habibi,”
he greeted me cautiously with the traditional Arabic term of affection, which served the double purpose of his not having to say my name. “How are you? How is your health?”

“Fine,” I replied. “And you?”

“We’re
okay.
” He emphasized the word to make it clear that they were very far from being okay but he could say no more.

Soon afterward I received a letter from Saad, sent covertly by way of Jordan because he knew that Iraqi authorities had teams of people reading regular mail. Its contents chilled my blood. The military police had interrogated Saad. The moment I read those words, a sick feeling rose in my stomach. It had been a long time since
Al-Istikhbarat
had questioned Saad, and I had come to believe that they had given up on me.

I could not have been more wrong. Saad was put into a room by himself, where his hands were cuffed behind his back. His eyes were pinned open so that he could not blink, and the light from a large projector was shone onto his face. When he could stand no more, he was taken from the cell and either beaten or interrogated. This was repeated about every four hours for three days, during which time he was given no food or water.

He steadfastly refused to admit that he knew my whereabouts.

When the three days were up, he was released, but it was made quite clear that he, along with the rest of my family, could expect worse than that if they did not comply with the intelligence service’s demands.

When I finished reading the letter, I banged the wall in frustration. I knew I was going to have to remain calm if I was going to be any help to them. I knew anger would get me nowhere. But anger was what I was feeling—anger and an intolerable impotence at being so far away when all this was happening because of me. When Rachel returned home, she could tell from the look on my face that something was wrong, and though she begged me to tell her what had happened, somehow I didn’t have the heart. I looked around with distaste at the comfortable apartment we shared: the smart furniture, the carpets, the pictures on the wall, all the trinkets of the affluent West. They seemed ridiculous to me now. How could I surround myself with such comfort while my family was being beaten and threatened on my account? I felt sick to my very soul: despite all my hard work since I had arrived in England, I was no nearer to being able to get them out. I had failed them, and they were paying the price.

From that moment on, my every waking thought was with my family. I would go into fits of panic, unable to sleep and desperate to speak to them. I would spend hours trying to get through on the phone, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully. Poor Rachel, when she learned the stark and brutal truth of what was happening in Baghdad, did her best to comfort me, but it was in vain.

Not long after I first heard the terrible news, I received another call from Saad.

“Those people I was telling you about,
Habibi,
” he said before I had a chance even to inquire after his health. “They want a bit of money.” His voice was abrupt with what I imagined to be a tinge of genuine trauma, and I understood what he was saying—he had to pay another bribe.

“I’ll send as much as I can.”

“You must,
Habibi.
Otherwise they can’t do what they promised. It’s too much for me.”

I quietly understood what he was saying: the amounts I had been sending home were not enough. Not now.

“I hope you’re not enjoying yourself too much,” he continued. I didn’t know what to say. “You should be thinking of us now. Of your family. Remember what I told you.”

Each word he spoke was like a bullet. I knew I had to do something to help, but I didn’t know what.

That night I dreamed about my mother. Curiously I did not picture her at home or suffering in the clutches of
Al-Istikhbarat.
Instead I remembered her in England, when I was a child, huddled over the phone with tears in her eyes, speaking to her family in Baghdad. There had been raised voices behind closed doors between her and my father. I had hidden in my room until they died down; and when I next saw my mother, she looked like a broken woman. In my dream she looked at me, her sad eyes seeming to pierce through me, and I awoke trembling and sweating. For a moment I wondered where I was, then was instantly reoriented by the sound of Rachel breathing deeply next to me. I quietly slipped out of bed and moved to another room, where I sat and looked out the window and into the night sky. It was clear, and the crescent moon looked back down at me—the same moon, I remember thinking, that was looking down at my family in Al-Mansour, on the Bedouin desert by the Jordanian border, on the café in Amman where Abu Firas used to sit. I thought of all the people who had helped over the years, who had got me where I was. Safe. Comfortable. Free. I would be repaying their kindness to me poorly if I did not now direct all my energies into helping my family, into granting them the same security that I now enjoyed. What else could I do?

The next day I started making calls. I spoke to my Iraqi friends, and to friends of friends, to ask whether they knew of smugglers based in the UK who would be able to arrange for my mother and siblings to disappear from Baghdad. There were a few vague leads, rumors of people who could help, but most people said the same thing: it would be difficult and expensive. Everyone wanted to come to England, the routes were full and being watched, and the smugglers had more business than they could handle. Much better, they said, to arrange something from inside Iraq. But how could I do that? The only person I could think of who might be able to help my family was the father of my friend Hakim. He was a Kurd and, unusually, had been appointed to a governmental position because he was loyal to Saddam. Not so loyal, however, that he wasn’t prepared to arrange for people to be smuggled through Kurdistan and into Turkey. But as usual there was a price tag. Even if I suggested to my family that they speak to him, I knew they would need more money than they had. They were saving everything I sent them, but the sums involved would be far more substantial.

And so I inquired about loans. I lost count of the number of banks, building societies, and loan sharks I spoke to, but they all gave me the same reply: no. I had no collateral, no equity. To borrow the sums of money I was talking about—tens of thousands of pounds—simply wasn’t going to be possible.

I grew more and more demoralized as the doors in front of me shut one by one. Then I received another call.

This time it was from my uncle Musaab, Saad’s brother. His voice was breathless, concerned, but he tried to keep it level for the benefit of the third party who we suspected was probably listening in.

“
Habibi,
you know those neighbors of ours, the ones you were trying to write to?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I know the ones you mean.”

“They’re in a bit of trouble.”

“What sort of trouble?” I asked the question with a nonchalance that I did not feel.

“They’ve been taken away. Locked up.”

I caught my breath. “Locked up?” I repeated, stunned by this information. “Where?”

There was a pause before Musaab answered. “Where do you think?” he asked me, his voice dripping with meaning.

CHAPTER
13

THE DEVIL,
IBLIS

I
n Iraq, they tell the story of a merchant who had a servant. One day the servant went to the marketplace in Baghdad, where he bumped into what looked like an old man. The man turned to look at the servant, who saw that it was in fact Death himself. Death gave him a strange look, and the servant fled back to his master. “Master,” he said, “I just saw Death in the marketplace, and he gave me a meaningful look. Please may I borrow your horse so that I may travel to Samarra and avoid what he has in store for me?” The merchant lent the servant his horse, and the servant fled.

Later that day, the merchant went to the marketplace himself, where Death was still waiting. “Why did you scare my servant?” he asked.

“Scare him?” replied Death. “I didn’t mean to scare him. I was just surprised to see him in Baghdad. You see, I have an appointment with him in Samarra this evening.”

Al-Haakimiya.
Al-Mukhabarat. The very words encapsulated everything that was evil about life in Iraq. Al-Mukhabarat was Iraq’s General Directorate of Intelligence and Al-Haakimiya was its prison; I had been running for fear that I might end up there, to learn firsthand all the horrific secrets its walls contained, but instead my good fortune had been monstrously inverted and my family faced imprisonment.

My sister had been spared. Rumors reached my ear that she had caught the eye of somebody with a certain amount of influence, an official of some kind who had been stalking her, following her in his car when she left the house, and taking an unwanted and unnatural interest in her affairs. By a horrible irony, this unasked-for infatuation had protected her, but that protection was not extended to Saad, to my mother, or to my brother.

It is hard to find the words to describe how I felt when I heard the news. My mind was a maelstrom of powerlessness and indecision. There I was, stuck in the UK, unable to return and make amends. I had no wealth or influence, no strings I could pull or arms I could twist. There was nothing I could do. Worst of all, I had no information, no way of knowing what was being done to my family, or whether they were dead or alive. It was left to my imagination to picture what was happening to them, the desperate kind of state they were in, and my imagination ran riot. Not until much later did I discover what had actually occurred.

Everyone in Baghdad knew about Al-Mukhabarat’s prison. Word of its horror was common currency. But few people who had experienced it firsthand ever spoke of it in detail, and even in the time that was to follow, my family was reluctant to describe it. To this day my mother will not speak of her time there, but from conversations with my brother I know this much to be true: The cells in which my family were placed were tiny—two meters by three—with five or six people in each cell. There were other prisoners, like them, who had done nothing that right-thinking people would consider to be wrong; but there were also plenty of genuine criminals—murderers and thieves—who were not segregated from those accused of lesser crimes. The prison walls were filthy, stained in places with stubborn splashes of dried blood that attracted the always-present flies. The concrete floors were similarly unpleasant, covered with bits of old food, human urine, and clumps of hair; this debris attracted not only the flies but other scavengers, especially cockroaches, which made sinister, shuffling noises at night. The air was ridden with mosquitoes and fleas, and you found lice in your own hair within hours of arriving, so unhygienic were the conditions.

The smell of the cells was matched by the smell of the prisoners: they too reeked of sweat and urine. Their clothes bore visible reminders of the squalor in which they were living: they would sweat in the heat of the day, and the sweat would dry as they continued to perspire. The result was thick, visible marks of salt on their clothes where the sweat had dried. There were prison baths, but they were seldom used, and even when they were used, prisoners came out scarcely any cleaner than when they went in. The paint on the sides of the baths was peeling to reveal rusty old metal, and the sides were covered in a distinct kind of grimy mucus.

Everyone was constantly hungry. The food consisted only of rice or a thin bean stew. In either case it was clear from the taste that the raw ingredients had been putrefying somewhere, because there was always the taste of rot. The only time that taste was ever masked was when salt was added to the food; but when that happened, the salt was added in such gargantuan quantities as to make the food almost inedible. No matter how unpalatable it was, however, the food was always eaten because it was so scarce.

The air was constantly thick with the fumes of cigarette smoke—almost all the prisoners smoked as a way of taking their minds off their desperate conditions—and it was never possible to have any fresh, natural air because most cells were windowless. The windows in the cells that had them were small and high up. As a result, the majority of the prisoners were ill with respiratory diseases—pneumonia and the like. All day and all night there was the sound of sneezing, vomiting, and the bringing up of phlegm. The guards, of course, ignored all cases of ill health other than the most extreme: you had to be unconscious before you were taken off for the rudimentary health care the prison offered.

The guards themselves treated the prisoners worse than animals, never speaking to them other than in terms of insult, always referring to them as “dogs” and “imbeciles.” Slaps to the face were commonplace and were among the more lenient treatment that could be expected on a daily basis. Often, and without warning or reason, prisoners were told to sit in a line on the floor, where the guards proceeded to kick them in the face and in the stomach until they were little more than bruised and bloodied messes. On other occasions, they were whipped all over their bodies with short pieces of blue rubber hose about the length of a ruler.

Retaliation, of course, was unthinkable.

It took a number of weeks for them to be released. All the while, I feared the worst. When I finally received a phone call to say they were out, I almost collapsed with relief. I was overwhelmed with the need to find out how they were, and never did the need to speak in our roundabout, coded way seem so difficult.

Gradually, though, I was made aware of the realities of the situation. It had been made clear to them that unless I returned, they would be recalled and could look forward to living in the cramped cells of that stinking prison for the rest of their days—however long that should be—enduring on a daily basis the violent whims of whichever prison guard felt like beating them up. This mistreatment was not going to stop now that my family had been singled out, so somehow, however we could, we had to raise the money to pay smugglers to get them out of Iraq. They weren’t an attractive proposition for a smuggler: three of them traveling together, one of them a middle-aged woman who bore the weight of her difficult years heavily. It would cost tens of thousands of pounds.

Once again I tried to borrow the money but was rejected. Rachel offered to help, but her credit was insufficient, and Faisal was not in a position to help either. I started to go out of my mind thinking of ways to raise the cash, and all the while my mother and brother could be dragged back to prison.

While all this
was happening, I was temping in the financial departments of various big companies. All day long I was in charge of transferring huge sums of money from one account to another. The transactions were entirely straightforward, and after a while the amounts involved, which often ran into the millions, became meaningless. Just figures. I finally found myself working in the accounts department of the bookmaker William Hill. Thousands of transactions a day passed through this department, and I fulfilled my duties unenthusiastically, always mindful of what was happening two and a half thousand miles away and constantly distracted by Saad’s increasingly frequent phone calls during which he said so little but meant so much. Occasionally the irony struck me that the people around me were spending all their time handling sums of money that would have smuggled a thousand families from under the nose of
Al-Istikhbarat,
but never did it occur to me that I might be able to use any of this money to help my mother, brother, and sister.

Until one day, that is, when I felt the Devil,
Iblis,
tap me on my shoulder.

I was working quietly at my desk, shuffling papers rather unenthusiastically and without fully taking in what I was reading. Suddenly I became aware of a conversation happening at the desk in front of me between two of my colleagues. They were working at the computer, transferring money from customers’ betting accounts into the relevant bank accounts. Clearly one of them had his own betting account, and it came up on the screen. “Look,” he told his friend, “I’ve won a tenner.”

I watched as his friend glanced at the screen. “Nice one,” he said. “Shall we transfer it now?”

The winning employee nodded, tapped his password into the computer, and made the transfer. As he did so, his friend spoke: “Hang on, you’ve transferred a hundred, not ten.”

The employee nodded, and with another tap of the keyboard transferred the money back. “Nice try,” his friend noted, and they both laughed.

“What do you think would happen if I’d just left it there?”

“They’d track you down, mate, and fuck you over.”

It was as simple as that. Not only had the Devil given me a way to save my family, he had also told me what would happen if I followed the path he showed me.

I hesitated while I weighed the pros and cons of the idea that was forming in my mind. I told nobody what I was planning to do, not even Rachel, who saw that I was increasingly distracted but just put it down to the stress of the news that was coming from Iraq. The choice was a simple one: do nothing and risk my family spending the rest of their lives rotting in Al-Haakimiya, where they would be tortured and maltreated, or illicitly transfer some of William Hill’s money to my account to pay for their release. Without question, my employers and the police would catch up with me—I wasn’t so naive as to believe that my actions would go undetected—but that probably wouldn’t happen until there was an audit of the company, which would give me several months’ grace in which to get my family out. What I was about to do would be entirely premeditated, and I felt sure that the authorities would be severe with me no matter how extenuating my circumstances. But if I was sent to prison, so be it. At least in British prisons you didn’t get tortured, brutalized, or killed.

It took me several days to come to my decision, but in reality the decision had already been made for me.

The first thing I needed to do was to open a betting account. That was simple enough: ten minutes in a bright, buzzing Internet café, surrounded by young people happily typing e-mails to loved ones, oblivious of what I was doing. Next, I had to open a number of bank accounts. The amount of money I was planning to steal was considerable, and I imagined that it would be less easy to trace a number of small transactions to different accounts than one big tranfer. The authorities would catch up with me eventually, of course, but I needed to ensure I had enough time to do what I had to do.

The next hurdle was more difficult to overcome. The transfer of money at William Hill was not part of my job, so I did not have access to the passwords that were necessary to affect it. The passwords themselves were guarded quite jealously: all the employees who needed them had their own separate passwords and were unlikely to reveal them to anybody else because they knew that the system would be open to abuse. Moreover, the passwords changed regularly. Once I discovered a password, I would have to move quickly.

I started to fall into casual conversation with the colleague whom I had overheard transferring money in the first place. Over a period of a few days we became as friendly as the stifling office atmosphere would allow. I loitered by his desk, drinking coffee and chatting while he carried on with his work. He was a talkative guy, and we had no difficulty keeping the conversation going. He showed no signs of realizing the ulterior motive behind my sudden camaraderie, and as we spoke, I was able to glance at his fingers while he was typing. It took a few tries, but eventually I managed to work out his password. I didn’t worry that my using it would land him in trouble: why would he use his password to transfer money to my account? In any case, I had no intention of doing anything other than tell the whole truth about my actions when the authorities did finally catch up with me.

I had everything I needed. The following day, I waited for everyone to leave the office at lunchtime, while I stayed behind. I approached a computer terminal and, my heart in my mouth, typed in what I hoped was the correct password.

It worked.

To start, I transferred only a small amount of money—a hundred pounds, I think—just to check that it would work. As soon as I finished, I logged out and walked quickly away from the terminal. No one had been watching, but I couldn’t dispel the hot flush of unease that swept across my body at the thought of what I had done. I felt sick and continued to do so for the rest of the day.