Escape from Saddam (10 page)

Even if we made the journey to the Bedouin village successfully, how did I know I could trust my guides? I would be putting my fate into the hands of people I had never met, and that made me nervous. And there were dangers even closer to home. I did not really expect that the military would come knocking on my mother’s door just yet, but in the dark quiet of the night even my most unlikely fears were compounded tenfold.

But there was also cause for relief. When Saad had told me that he would be accompanying me to the Bedouin village, it was as if a weight had been lifted off my shoulders and I felt more optimistic than I had for weeks. He would be wearing his decorated military uniform and a suave, confident smile. Surely, if the first of these was not enough to get us past the internal checkpoints, the second would be. I could not wish to be in safer hands.

My leg throbbed. Medicine was hard to come by, and painkillers were especially scarce. All I had been able to lay my hands on had been some acetaminophen, but it certainly wasn’t enough to stop the pain of a bullet wound. I tried to put it from my mind by running over the events of that evening. I had stayed late at my uncle’s house, going over and over the plan for the following day. Around midnight he had driven me back to my grandparents’ house. My mother, brother, and sister were still up when we returned, and the house was shrouded in the nervous quiet of anticipation. I could tell from the look on my mother’s face that she was still angry with me. I hated to see that expression, but I knew there was nothing I could do or say to make her feel better. My uncle took her into the guest room, and they remained there for some time. I heard the gentle murmur of voices through the door, and I knew that Saad was explaining to her what it was that we were intending to do. Gradually my mother’s voice became louder; Saad’s, by contrast, remained perfectly calm. Once she had fallen quiet, he came out of the room and smiled at me. “You’d better go and get your stuff together,” he told me. He glanced at my mother’s anxious face. “Take your brother and sister.”

I took Ahmed and Marwa by the hand and led them across the courtyard to the separate flat they shared with my mother. There I began the business of putting together the things that I would be taking with me out of the country. I would not have room for much—there was no way I could carry huge bags with me across the desert. But my possessions were few in any case, and I limited myself to photographs, cassettes, and other trinkets, items that would sustain me in a foreign land away from my family, as well as the small amount of money that I had.

My brother and sister watched me pack. “What is happening, Sarmed?” Marwa asked me. “Where are you going?”

I knew I had to tell them the truth, so we sat down together. “I’m leaving Iraq,” I explained to them. “Saad has arranged it. We go tomorrow.”

“How long will you be gone for?” they asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“Are you going to go and see Uncle Faisal in Manchester?”

“I’m going to go to Jordan first. From there, I’ll see if I can make my way to England.” I didn’t tell them that what I was doing was illegal.

“Will you write to us?”

“Of course I’ll write to you.”

“Will we see you again?”

I looked into the inquiring eyes of my brother and sister. How could I tell them that I did not even know if I would make it as far as the border? “Of course we will see each other again,” I told them. “I promise.”

I finished packing and walked out into the courtyard. I needed a few moments to myself, time to say good-bye to the place that had been my home when I was a young boy. Standing in the moonlight of that hot night, I remembered happier times that I had spent there. I remembered the hours I had spent caring for my menagerie of animals—the dogs, the parakeets, the tortoises, and the pigeons. I remembered the happy days I had spent climbing our date tree when its branches had become heavy with fruit, gathering its harvest in a small basket. I remembered the times I had spent with my family digging holes for flowers, trying to create our own little patch of color in the huge sprawl of Baghdad. I allowed myself a smile as I remembered my grandmother, bent with age, vigorously hurling a raw egg against the inside of the front door before anybody brought a piece of electrical equipment across the threshold. It was a common custom—where its origins lay, nobody knew—meant to ward off evil spirits and bless the equipment, but it brought great hilarity to the household every time it happened.

Suddenly it seemed very difficult to leave this little house, and perhaps if circumstances had been different, when it came to this moment I would have made the decision to remain. Being surrounded once more by the love and care of my family made the rest of the world seem lonely and dangerous, but now I had no option. I allowed my hands to linger upon the whitewashed walls, trying to absorb something of the place before I left it, most likely never to return.

The lone voice
of a
muadhin
penetrated my slumber as it floated around the rooftops like a tendril of smoke disturbed by a gentle breeze. Its quiet, monotone drone was punctuated by moments of lilting musicality: “
Allah u Akbar,
” it sang. “Allah is great! I bear witness that there is no divinity but Allah! I bear witness that Muhammad is Allah’s messenger! Hasten to the prayer! Prayer is better than sleep! Allah is great,
Allah u Akbar
!” A similar sound would be emanating from every mosque far and wide across the Middle East, calling the faithful to prayer. There was no time for me to visit the mosque, but my prayers that morning were fervently, if silently, said nevertheless.

My mother had prepared breakfast. As we ate, the tension between us was still strong and we spoke only a few words. When we did speak, we avoided the matter at hand, talking instead of more mundane things. Suddenly I heard a shout from my grandparents’ house. It was one of my little cousins who was staying there. “Sarmed, Sarmed!” he called. “Uncle Saad is here!”

I felt a momentary hesitation, a reluctance to go through with our plan that had so many potential problems, but I put those worries firmly from my mind. I knew how limited my options were. Without saying a word, I stood up from the table and went about gathering my things. Then, my small case in my hand, I made my way over to my grandparents’ house, my mother, brother, and sister following behind me. Saad had given my grandparents a bag of peaches. He always brought them something, some small gift to cheer their day—a watermelon, perhaps, or some dates. My uncle was wearing the trousers and shirt of his military uniform—the jacket, with its medals and honors, he had left in the car—and he had attached his false leg rather than have to move around clumsily with his crutches. He and my grandparents sat in the front room of the house, waiting for me.

It was a quiet farewell. Although my grandparents did not know the full details of my situation, they knew I was making a bid to leave Iraq, and they clearly felt the need to help me in whatever way they could, whether it was by a kind word or with something more material. My grandfather sat nodding in the chair in which he always sat. He gestured to me to approach him.

“Yes, Jidoo?”

“Good luck, Sarmed,” he muttered in his quiet voice. “May God be with you, and
inshallah
—God willing—you will reach your uncle Faisal in England. Do not forget your family.” Few words, but well meant.

My grandmother had been preparing food for Saad and me to eat in the car on the way—kebabs and fruit, traditional Middle Eastern fare—and as she finished packing the meal up, she signaled to me: “Come here, Sarmed. Come with me.” I followed her into her bedroom. In her bedroom was a cupboard that, when I was a child, had always been a place of great mystery to me. In this cupboard my grandmother kept what seemed to my childish eyes to be great treasures: sweets, old letters, gadgets, tools, videos and a VHS player, jewelry, packs of cigarettes. With a twinkle in her eye, she started to rummage through the cupboard. She had clearly hidden something in there, and hidden it well because it took her some time to find it. Eventually, and with a smile, she pulled out a woolly sock containing a thick wad of notes—American dollars.

“This is your auntie’s money. It is what she earned from selling her gold.” Carefully she peeled off a hundred dollars. “This is for you. It is only a loan, but it will help you get started.”

I did not want to take money from my family, but I knew my grandmother would not be refused, so I gratefully placed the notes in my pocket. “Thank you, Bibi,” I said. A hundred dollars to start a new life. It was nothing, really, but at the time it seemed to me like all the riches in the world.

My grandmother placed the remaining money back in her cupboard and then turned to give me a big hug. “The world is a dangerous place, Sarmed,” she whispered. “Be careful.”

“I will, Bibi,” I told her.

Back in the front room, Saad was anxious to begin our journey. It was a long way to the border, and we couldn’t afford too much delay. I hugged my mother and my brother and sister, and then we walked out to my uncle’s automatic car—the only type he could drive given that he was an amputee. Under other circumstances, the sight of uncle and nephew limping together might have been comical. But there was no comedy here. My mother started to cry. I knew nothing I could say would make our farewells any easier, so I just held her tight before climbing into the car. Through the window I could see that my sister was also crying, and I felt the tears well up behind my own eyes. I wound down the window. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I can,” I told them gently.

Then I turned to Saad, who was sitting behind the wheel waiting for me to give him the word. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER
6

A JOURNEY AT NIGHT

I
did not look back as we drove away, and Saad was discreet enough not to speak to me until long after my home had disappeared into the distance.

The road out of Baghdad was long and busy. It was early, but the sun was already hot, and I was glad Saad’s green Toyota had air conditioning. He didn’t use it all the time, as it would be expensive to replace; but this was a special occasion, and the fact that he had it would give him more authority if we were stopped by any checkpoint guards. As we struggled down the congested streets, flustered pedestrians looked hopefully at Saad. In Baghdad there were lots of official taxis, but never enough to satisfy demand at the busy times of day. Today I saw only the occasional familiar sight of the white and orange taxis, the battered
TEX’E
signs on their roofs—as if the gaudy coloring were not enough to make it clear that they were for hire. Some of them were decorated with garlands and religious symbols in the same fashion as the taxi that had brought me up from the south. Others had a photograph of Saddam fastened to the dashboard—either an expression of the drivers’ Ba’athist sympathies or the result of a threatening word from a passenger who had happened to be part of the security services. “I see you have a picture of Muhammad. What about our leader, may God protect him and bless him? Why do you not have a picture of him?” More often than not the terrified taxi driver would waive that particular fare.

When cabs were scarce, anyone with a car would suddenly switch professions and become a taxi driver for an hour. Saad’s air-conditioned Toyota was popular, and he could always be sure of a good fare if times were lean. He would pull up to a crowd of people waiting for transport and see who was going in the direction he was headed. A moment of intense negotiation would follow. Money would be discussed, certainly, but the potential customer would also want to be sure that this opportunist chauffeur had the right intentions and was not some bandit with a false smile, fully prepared to murder him in the backseat for the price of the few dinars in his pocket. This was an alarmingly common occurrence. While the penalty for deserting from the army could be horrifically severe, the punishment for murder—if you could show that it was done in self-defense (easily enough achieved with a few bogus witnesses)—was six months’ imprisonment.

But there would be no fares today, nobody to hinder us in our objective. Our journey would take us first around the outskirts of Fallujah, and the road that would lead us there was good and full of traffic. It was unlikely that we would encounter any difficulties on that early stretch. Once past Fallujah, however, things would become more problematic. It was about four hundred kilometers from there to the village where we were heading. Although the highway that continued west to the Jordanian border crossing was relatively new, in places where heavy military vehicles had made their mark on the road, it was in poor repair and the going would be slow. We did not expect to get to our destination until the following day.

The state of the highway, however, was the farthest thing from my mind. I could think of nothing but how we were going to talk our way through the internal checkpoints. I asked Saad how many there would be. “Three, perhaps four,” he shrugged.

I kept quiet. I did not want Saad to know how scared I was about approaching them, but I think he sensed my fear in any case. “Don’t worry about it,” he told me calmly. “If they stop us, leave everything to me.”

I was dressed neatly in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and together we looked perfectly respectable. “We want to give them the impression that you are my son.” He gestured at the jacket of his military uniform, which was neatly folded in the backseat. “When they see that, it will instill some kind of respect into them,” he told me. “If they assume that you are my son, that respect will rub off on you. Let me do the talking.”

We passed the busy town of Ar-Ramaadi and a few miles later approached a fork in the road. The right-hand fork would take us up to Al-Haglanya and then on to the Euphrates River, but our path did not lie that way. Instead we continued straight on, into the desert region of Al-Anbar. From time to time, to our left and right, the roads branched off toward poor desert towns—replicas of any number of the faceless communities I had seen near Mosul or Basra. Houses were built using huge lumps of concrete covered over with mud; cows roamed the streets. Kids played in the dirt tracks with sticks, and colorful market stalls belied the poverty of these places. Inhabitants eked out a living selling homemade drinks on the streets, but only those with the strongest immune systems would be wise to risk them.

It did not take long for us to approach a checkpoint. My uncle slowed down, and a look of intense concentration passed his face. “Give me my jacket, Sarmed,” he said. I reached into the back and handed him the jacket, and he wriggled his way into it, keeping one hand on the steering wheel. “Good,” he said. “Now, open the glove compartment.”

I did so. Stashed inside was a 9mm Beretta handgun. This was not an ordinary Beretta. For a start it was an Iraqi-made
tarek,
and it had been given to the officers of the Iran-Iraq war who had been awarded bravery medals as a “gift” from Saddam. It bore a small insignia on the handle that identified it as being a special-issue weapon; the owners of such items were afforded special respect by other members of the military. Saad took the gun from me and placed it prominently on the dashboard where it could be easily seen.

As we approached the checkpoint, I saw the usual hubbub of activity. Buses were parked by the roadside, as were white and orange taxis—more modern than the one in which I had journeyed the previous day. Their occupants were hanging around outside, talking, drinking, cooling down, and generally just taking a break from their journeys. The checkpoint itself was little more than a bunker on the side of the road, there to protect the guards from the sun. The Red Berets gripped their AK-47s firmly, and their light-armored vehicles stood nearby as they looked through the papers of those drivers they had decided to stop.

I saw all this from a distance. My uncle continued to slow down and as he did so I felt my heart in my chest. I did my best to look straight ahead and appear calm. But as I strained my face into a look of somber innocence, I could not help but feel that to the trained eyes of the Red Berets I showed all the signs of a guilty man. For a split second I thought I caught the eye of one of them. He had noticed me. Surely the look of fear on my face would arouse his suspicions. I breathed deeply.

“
Let-khaaf,
Sarmed,” said my uncle. “Don’t be afraid.” He kept looking straight ahead as if he didn’t have a care in the world, but I could not take my eye off the guard. As we passed him, I foolishly turned my head, and our eyes locked; I saw him begin to raise his arm before I quickly jerked my head away. My uncle kept the car moving slowly forward, ignoring the guard’s attention and, suddenly, the checkpoint was behind us. I looked in the rearview mirror, fully expecting to see one of the light-armored vehicles pull away. I wanted to tell Saad to drive more quickly, but I knew that would just arouse suspicion; and gradually the checkpoint faded behind us, without any guards appearing to follow. We had passed our first obstacle, it seemed, without incident.

As we drove farther from Baghdad, the traffic became less and less heavy. From my point of view, this was not good. The fewer vehicles there were along the road, the more chance we had of being stopped at the next checkpoint. Although the Red Berets would be more likely to stop buses or taxis, they would still pull over a substantial number of ordinary vehicles, and that could mean us. Perhaps I should have felt more relaxed having made it through the first checkpoint safely; in fact I just grew more terrified.

Later that afternoon we approached a second checkpoint. It was less busy than the first, but our luck held and we were waved past with no questions asked.

We stopped for the night in one of the small, run-down complexes that lined the road at irregular intervals. Part restaurant, part garage, part mosque, these places catered to the most basic needs of the travelers along the road. We ate a meal in the restaurant, which was the least filthy part of the whole complex, and then made our way to the car to spend the night. I tried to sleep, but without much success.

We left early the next morning. Gradually the traffic, which had been sparse, became more heavy. It did not take long to see why this was happening: there was a checkpoint up ahead, and to my horror they were stopping every car that passed. Terrible scenarios flitted through my brain. Did they know Saad and I were on the road headed west? Had the military police been to my mother’s house and extracted some sort of confession from my family? Why would they be stopping every car that passed if not to look for us? Whether such thoughts were going through Saad’s mind, I cannot say. He simply put his military jacket on once more and made sure his Beretta was in full view. We were silent as we sat in the line of cars awaiting our turn, but the time we spent in that queue gave my mind the opportunity to imagine increasingly awful explanations for this delay.

Eventually, two Red Berets walked up to the car in front of us. They stood there for some minutes asking questions of the driver, before asking him to pull his car over to the side of the road. As he did so, one of the guards followed him; the other unsmilingly waved us forward. He appeared at the driver’s door and gestured at Saad to wind down the window. He took one look at his military uniform and saluted him, but there were no pleasantries. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“We are going to see family in Rutbah.” My uncle smiled at him.

“Is this your son?”

Saad nodded.

“Your papers,” the Red Beret said to me.

Nervously I handed him the fake military pass. He studied it carefully. The seconds ticked by. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the driver of the other car being frisked and then taken into the guards’ hut. There was an anxious silence; even Saad could not think of anything to say. The Red Beret looked at me, looked back at my papers, and then handed them back.

“Do you always keep your Beretta on the dashboard, sir?” he asked my uncle.

Saad flashed him a grin. “Why?” he said. “Are you looking to buy one?”

That was all that was needed. The Red Beret smiled for the first time at my uncle’s joke. “You can go, sir,” he told us. Saad inclined his head politely, they saluted each other; and we were waved on. As we passed the checkpoint, I let out an explosion of breath, and Saad and I laughed with relief. We were through.

We arrived at
a small Bedouin village at around seven o’clock that evening. There were perhaps twenty houses made of mud and brick. We knew that the tribesman we were looking for lived in this area, but we had no means of finding him. There was nothing for it but to go knocking on doors.

“Do you know Abu Mustapha?”

At first we were met with blank faces—either they did not know this man, or they did not want to let on to somebody in military uniform that they did. But eventually we found somebody who was willing to help. He pointed to a small road leading away from the settlement. “Take that road,” he told us. “It will lead you to another village. He is well known there. Ask anybody and they will point you to his house.”

We returned to the car and followed the road he had indicated. As we drove, the silence of the desert gradually impressed itself upon us, and we grew quiet ourselves. Sure enough, after about half an hour, we came to another village. A group of children were playing in the street, so we stopped and asked them the same question: “Do you know Abu Mustapha?” With typical childish exuberance they shouted that they did and pointed us in the direction of what seemed to me to be a more modern house than the others. As we made our way toward it, a few children who, barefoot and filthy, had been playing their games in the driveway at the front of the house came out toward us.

“What do you want?” they shouted. “Who are you?”

Saad limped up to them. “Is your father at home?” he asked.

The children scurried indoors, calling for their mother, who soon appeared at the door. “Who are you?” she repeated, suspiciously.

“My name is Saad Al-Khatab,” my uncle replied politely, “and this is my nephew Sarmed.”

“What do you want?”

“We are here to see Abu Mustapha.”

“Are you sure it is him you want? What makes you think he lives here?”

“I am a friend of relatives of his in Baghdad. They described to me the place that he lives. I have a business proposition for him.”

Reluctantly, the wife nodded and went inside. “Wait here,” she said as she disappeared.

We stood outside the house and waited for several minutes before a huge figure appeared at the door. He had a thick white mustache and white hair and was wearing a black robe; he was an impressive sight in the failing light of the desert evening. He stood in the doorway and said nothing, so my uncle repeated the introduction he had already given to his wife: “My name is Saad Al-Khatab, and this is my nephew Sarmed.”

Suddenly a smile lit up the tribesman’s face; it was clear that he understood in that instant why we were there. He clapped his hands and shouted at his children to stop playing and make themselves scarce. Then he called to his wife. “
Ya marr’a!
Prepare supper!” he shouted. He extended his arms to Saad and me, and he ushered us inside. Our presence did not seem to surprise him. Maybe he had been forewarned of our arrival; maybe people like us arrived on his doorstep out of the blue on a regular basis.

We were led into Abu Mustapha’s guest room. It was a peaceful place: there was no television, and the walls were covered with embroidered religious texts. The seating, of course, was all Bedouin style, with cushions scattered across the floor. We sat down, and tea was brought in to us, along with sherbet—concentrated fruit juice diluted with water. We were thirsty after our long journey, and the drinks refreshed us. The tribesman sat opposite Saad and me, a huge imposing figure shrouded in his flowing robe. I glanced at my uncle and saw on his face a look that I recognized, a calm, almost humble aura he emanated before he was to start engaging in any kind of negotiation. As we sat there, there were frequent moments of silence as my uncle and the tribesman smiled and nodded toward each other. Each knew what the other wanted, but there was a ritual to such meetings, and nothing was spoken of the real reason for our presence just yet. Tradition dictated that we should wait until after we had eaten together—or at the very least finished our first round of drinks—before we even began to discuss business.