Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs (4 page)

The history of Kuwait and Iraq was a complicated one, but not in the ways that Saddam and his regime implied. According to most sources, Kuwait City was only settled in the eighteenth century; the area was mostly empty before then. By the nineteenth century it was an important trading metropolis. That importance grew as oil became a critical export in the region.

Like most of the Middle East and all of Iraq, Kuwait was part of the Ottoman Empire. But in the mid-eighteenth century, Sabah I bin Jaber established himself as the emir of Kuwait. (Sabah I bin Jaber was the leader of a tribe that originated in Iraq; among the reasons they are said to have gone to Kuwait was persecution by the ruling Turks.) Though still owing allegiance to the Ottomans, Sabah I bin Jaber was granted a certain amount of autonomy and independence over the region. Some of that independence continued after the arrival of the British, who also ended up formalizing Kuwait’s borders with Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

In 1961, Kuwait became independent. At no time in the modern era had Kuwait been part of Iraq.

Nor had it been hostile. Kuwait was a close ally of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988. The country gave or loaned Iraq a great deal of money as well as strategic support. Leftover debts from the war were one of the reasons for friction with Saddam’s government at the end of the 1980s. But these were never more than a pretext for Saddam. He saw an opportunity to do many things by annexing Kuwait besides skipping out on money owed.

Kuwait had oil revenues that he coveted. Kuwait City was a modern trading port, which would give Iraq much more access to world trade and, not coincidentally, bring the regime additional money. Conquering Kuwait would make Saddam appear grand and accomplished to his people. It would also take their minds off the long and senseless war that had dwindled down to an inconclusive close a few years before. And what would the world care about Kuwait?

While I knew there would be trouble as soon as I heard the news, a lot of my neighbors saw things differently. Kuwait was an opportunity. To them, the invasion was a chance to rip off Kuwait. I remember seeing cars loaded down with loot: televisions, household items. There were suddenly a lot of new cars in the neighborhood—even a Chevy Caprice. The classic American automobile became a status symbol for a short while in some parts of Iraq.

Let me not say that everything was stolen. I don’t know. Maybe some were purchased. But certainly the prices must have been very low compared to what they would have been before the invasion.

Meanwhile, Saddam filled our airwaves with proclamations that Kuwait belonged to Iraq, and that it was only just that we reclaim our territory. The actual history didn’t matter to Saddam.

“We took our rightful lands back,” he claimed again and again. “It was always ours, and now it is again.”

I felt about Kuwait the same way I felt when I heard about break-ins or robberies—it wasn’t right.

I wasn’t surprised when I heard that America’s President Bush was getting together a coalition to free the annexed country. It wasn’t hard to figure out what would happen—Iraq would lose. I remember having many conversations with friends in the army. A surprising number thought that Iraq would defeat the United States and other coalition members because our religion was better and that God would inevitably be on our side.

“It’s not about religion,” I told them. “It’s about technology. And we have no right to be in that country.”

Of course, I could only have such conversations with people I truly trusted. Talking about the war—or saying anything that could be interpreted as criticism of Saddam—would have been suicidal. At best I would have ended up in jail.

I came back from Mosul and rejoined my anti-aircraft unit, waiting for the inevitable. It took several months for the Western nations to organize and group for an attack. The fall passed into winter. The conflict didn’t seem real. There were negotiations, deadlines—nothing that remotely affected me and my tiny anti-aircraft installation deep in northern Iraq.

Finally, on January 17, 1991, the air war began. The Americans and their allies took out key Iraqi air force installations in the first few hours of the campaign—we weren’t touched, which gives you some idea of how important we were. In fact, the war remained distant until U.S. bombers blew out a bridge in Mosul and I heard about the attack from friends and family. Shortly afterward, I saw a division of Iraqi army soldiers walking up from Baghdad. It was a strange sight, thousands of men walking along the road.

To this day, I have no idea what they were doing. Retreating from a nonexistent (at that point) enemy? Heading north to reinforce the border with Turkey? Mobilizing to the Kurdish area to prevent a rebellion? Whatever it was, they were in no hurry to get where they were going.

Power went out in much of the country, including Baiji. The city was home to an oil refinery, and eventually the plant was targeted by the allies as they attempted to cut supplies of fuel to the Iraqi military. Our anti-aircraft battery was attacked by one or more allied planes. I’m not sure whether they were British or American, though from what I remember I think the aircraft was a Tornado, which was flown by Britain’s Royal Air Force as well as the Italians and Saudis. In any event, the plane was too far for me to get a positive identification myself, and frankly I had good reason to stay in our bunker: the aircraft dropped cluster bombs on us.

I am happy to report that we didn’t fire at them, and there were no casualties on the ground. None as the result of the bombing, that is. There was one loss due to stupidity. Which, in war, is more dangerous than explosives.

After the attack, we found an unexploded cluster bomb lying on the ground near one of the batteries. One of our officers approached the bomb and for some unknown reason drew his pistol and fired. He was a good enough shot to hit the bomb—which then exploded, killing him.

What is the American saying? You can’t fix stupid?

The officer’s idiocy was typical not just of our leadership, but of the army in general. The last thing Saddam wanted was an army that was so highly trained and capable that it might challenge him. Dumb officers who were loyal were preferable to smart officers who might want to be dictator themselves someday. We’d been at war for years with Iran, yet our leaders didn’t know that much about advanced Western weapons. They had no idea of the firepower Americans possessed.

Nor did they understand America. The coalition allies used strategies that they hoped would limit civilian casualties and collateral damage. From the Iraqi point of view, these limited attacks seemed like the sum total of American capabilities. It was hard for our leaders to understand that the allies were pulling their punches. That made no sense to them.

Our guns, useless as they were, remained intact. But the raid on the refinery was successful enough to put the plant out of operation for the duration of the war. It was a scene repeated over and over again in Iraq, as the Americans and their allies overwhelmed pitifully antiquated defenses and poorly trained men. The coalition made quick work of the Iraqi army in Kuwait. The route used to retreat became known as the Highway of Death, as our escaping troops were easy targets for allied planes. Frontline Iraqi units that didn’t surrender were destroyed as the coalition executed what became known following the war as the “left hook,” sweeping into Iraq and cutting off the south with an attack from the western desert along the Saudi border.

Sometimes I think it would have been better if the Americans had kept up their attack, gone on to Baghdad and chased Saddam from power. But if they’d made the attack without much of a plan for what to do afterward—as they did in 2003—the end result would have been chaos and eventual bloodshed among Iraqis. The misery would have been the same, just sooner.

As soon as the coalition ended its attack, the cities in southern Iraq began rebelling against the dictator. Iran helped both encourage the rebellion and then support the people who were trying to take over. But as soon as he knew that the Americans wouldn’t attack him in Baghdad, Saddam pushed what was left of his forces south to end the rebellions. The rebellions were quickly crushed.

My unit stayed put. There wasn’t too much call for anti-aircraft guns to fight poorly armed civilians.

I don’t know what I would have done had I been ordered to join an attack. I hope I would have been brave and done the right thing: not harmed innocent civilians. But at that time, it’s very likely I would have followed orders.

Thank God I was never faced with that situation.

The people couldn’t do anything about the dictator. I’m sure a lot of Iraqis farther north wanted to be rid of Saddam, too. He had brought terrible times to the country. But he still had much power. Though defeated, the army remained loyal to him. The Fedayeen Saddam—a special paramilitary group aligned with the Ba’ath Party and loyal to Saddam personally—enforced discipline. (
Fedayeen
means, roughly, “man who sacrifices”; in theory these thugs were supposed to sacrifice their lives for Saddam. In reality, they generally sacrificed others for their own benefit.) The Ba’ath Party was the only viable political organization in the country. Saddam had everyone’s arm, everyone’s leg, tied to his.

It was not simply a matter of threats or violence. Saddam’s dictatorship was the only thing the people had ever known. For many, imagining an Iraq free from him was unimaginable.

Except in the south, where there had been a lot of destruction, things quickly returned to normal. Within a few weeks, life was about the same as it had been before the invasion.

Don’t take that to mean things were perfect, or even good. Prices had been climbing slowly before the war. They continued to do that after the conflict. It was a classic situation of supply and demand. With less and less available, things became more precious. The price of beef escalated from roughly fifteen hundred dinar (between two and three dollars at the time) a kilo to twelve thousand dinar. Anything that had to be imported became very expensive. Gasoline, regulated by the state and refined in Iraq, was an exception, but even things like electricity increased greatly in price.

This didn’t happen overnight. Things got worse gradually, then accelerated as the United Nations clamped down because Saddam didn’t comply with its stipulations following the war. UN sanctions squeezed imports and made it difficult to export anything. Little by little, jobs began to disappear. Each day, things got a little worse. You didn’t notice it until you thought back to the previous month.

The electrical shortages became worse and worse. Power was cut for two hours each day in Mosul. Then, after some time passed, three hours, then four. Finally, power might be cut for ten or twelve hours, turned on for two, then cut off for another long stretch.

Why didn’t Saddam comply with the UN? Why did he let the sanctions get worse and the economy shrivel?

In retrospect, it seems ridiculous. He had to know that the Americans were not fooling around. And he had no serious nuclear program; even if he had, it would have been a foolish waste of money and resources.

I can’t read the mind of a crazed dictator. I can only make guesses.

I think perhaps he didn’t want the rest of the world to know that he’d been bluffing about weapons of mass destruction. I think he thought if other nations—Iran in particular—found that out, we would be attacked. Or that people in Iraq would rise up against him.

Or maybe it had nothing to do with protecting either himself or the country. Maybe it was more his pride. Pretending to have weapons meant he could pretend to be strong. If others thought he was strong, then in his mind maybe he was strong.

But the reality was that he and Iraq were really very weak. Defying the UN was foolish. It hurt only Iraqis—and ultimately led to Saddam’s downfall.

But it took a few years for things to get desperately bad. We were sliding down the hill but didn’t really know it.

THE GULF WAR
ended in February 1991. My military service finished a few months later. I was released from the army and returned to Mosul, where my sister’s husband gave me a job in his construction business operating heavy machinery—bulldozers, earthmovers, and my favorite of all, graders.

Construction may not be a glamorous job, but to me there’s something important in building things, whether they’re roads or skyscrapers. Creating is a critical human activity. It’s being positive; it’s doing something. It’s the opposite of war, where the goal is to tear things down.

I wasn’t particularly philosophical as I worked. I wanted to make a living. I wanted to earn money and have a good life, one where I fulfilled my dreams.

Those dreams had been modified by reality. Lessened. I wouldn’t be king. But I was going to be successful. Maybe not rich, but well off, with enough money to have a nice house, nice cars, and a nice family.

And I definitely had someone in mind to start that family with.

SOHEILA AND I HAD
kept in touch while I was in the army. Now I saw my chance to spend more time with her—and to make her my wife. I told her I would do anything and everything to convince her mother to let her marry me.

But now there was competition, serious competition. A cousin of hers had a very important job in the government and had been nominated to be a high-ranking minister in Saddam’s government. He was single, and needed a pretty wife in order to hold that position with respect.

Even though he was the same age as Soheila’s mother, he told the family that he wanted to marry Soheila.

“I’m very important now,” he told Soheila’s mom. “I will let Soheila live an amazing life with my money . . .”

Blah-blah-blah.
You can imagine the things he said. Not that they were lies: I am sure that he was sincere, and would have given Soheila many things.

Except true love.

Soheila’s mother agreed to let him marry her. When I heard, I went wild. Angry? I was beyond angry. Fury doesn’t begin to describe how I felt.