Escape from Saddam (4 page)

“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.