Escape from Saddam (5 page)

“Indeed?” he replied with an uncharacteristic note of joviality. “Well then,” he stretched his arms out in front of him, “you have my permission!”

I was so astonished I barely knew what to say. I looked hard at my father and could sense that beneath the veil of helpfulness something was not right. Over the past few years he had gone to all sorts of lengths to keep me close to him, ranging from bribery to abduction to physical and mental violence. Why was he now surrendering me without a fight?

“I need your permission in writing,” I told him.

“Certainly,” he said and accompanied me to my school to sign the piece of paper that I hoped would be my ticket out of Iraq: “I, Saadoon Alsamari, give my permission for my son Sarmed to travel out of the country before returning to attend university.”

I couldn’t believe how readily he had granted his permission, but I still required permission from my school. It was not simply a matter of gaining a signature from the right person, however. I approached the registrar with gifts of baklava and bananas—which were scarce at the time because of the sanctions—and literally begged him to take the relevant document to the dean to be signed.

The next step was to take the three documents to military headquarters in Samarra, for that was where my paternal family was originally from, along with the application fee of 15,000 dinars—at that time worth about $300. “Sure,” said my father, “I’ll take you to Samarra.”

“When can we go?”

My father shrugged. “Two weeks, maybe three.”

“But it’s already the middle of July,” I told him. “They would expect me back in the country at the end of August—it won’t give them enough time to process the application.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Sarmed. I’m busy here—I can’t just drop everything to take you to Samarra. You’ll have to be patient.” Suddenly his attitude seemed to be changing, as though he knew I was going to encounter these difficulties but was pleased that I would not be able to pin them precisely on him.

“Okay,” I replied, “I’ll take the coach to Baghdad and get Uncle Saad to take me.”

My father turned stony-faced, as he always did when my uncle was mentioned. “Saad, eh?
Arrooj.
Peg-leg. Very well.”

I had one more favor to ask. “I need the application fee,” I told him. “Fifteen thousand dinars.”

His eyes went flat. “I’m not going to give you that sort of money,” he told me adamantly.

“Please,” I begged him. “If you don’t lend me the money, there’s no way I can get out of the country—no way I can study to become a doctor. The only other way I can raise it is to sell all my stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“My computer, my bike…”

“They’re not yours to sell. They’re mine—you only borrow them. Everything in this house belongs to me.” He turned to leave the room. “If you need money,” he said with a hint of sarcasm, “maybe
arrooj
can give it to you. But somehow, I doubt it.”

My father left me to simmer on that thought for a while. The following day I called Saad. I told him about the conversation as he listened quietly. “Okay,” he said when I had finished. “Get the coach to Baghdad and we’ll sort it all out.”

“What about the money?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about that—I’ll get the money.”

“Where from?”

“I said don’t worry about it. Just get here.”

My father seemed uncharacteristically unconcerned when I informed him boldly that I was going to Baghdad. With any luck, I was to be departing Mosul for the last time before leaving Iraq, but he clearly did not think my chances of success were high. “I’ll see you soon,” he told me before I left. It was almost as though he knew something I did not.

The office in
Samarra was deliciously cool, and the immaculately dressed military official who was to authorize my application made a stark contrast to Saad and me, rumpled and sweating from the torturous heat of the car journey from Baghdad. The room itself was bleak—a table, three chairs, and an old metal filing cabinet in the corner—but the official maintained an imperious bearing nevertheless. We needed this man’s help, so we made every effort to be scrupulously polite. “What is the boy’s name?” he asked as he examined my papers. His voice was thick with the accent of Samarra.

“This is my nephew, Sarmed Alsamari. He wishes to make an application to travel outside the country.”

“I’m sure he does.” He eyed me with suspicion. “What is his status?”

“He has just finished high school, and will start university in Baghdad in September.”

“Who is his father?”

“Saadoon Alsamari.” A flicker of recognition crossed the officer’s face. “You will see from the documents that he has given his permission for the application to be processed. He has asked me to accompany Sarmed today.”

“Indeed?” questioned the officer skeptically. “He should be here himself. Why could he not come?”

“He is an important lecturer in Mosul,” Saad replied smoothly. “A very busy man. I’m sure you understand.”

The officer remained expressionless as he placed my documents into a folder and scribbled something on a piece of paper. “Here is a telephone number,” he told Saad. “You can call it to check the status of your application. Good day.”

“But we were under the impression that the application could be approved today.”

“Then I am afraid, my friend, that you were under the incorrect impression. There are a number of checks I have to make.”

“What sort of checks?”

“Just checks,” he replied evasively. “Now, if you don’t mind, I am extremely busy.”

Saad looked pointedly at the empty desk. “So I see,” he said and led me from the room. “Something’s not right,” he told me once the door was closed and we were out of earshot. “There’s no reason why he shouldn’t have processed that application immediately. There’s something he wasn’t telling us.”

We phoned the number every day for the next couple of weeks, but on each occasion the official made himself unavailable.

“We’ll have to go there again and talk to him face to face,” Saad decided. “If you’re to get out before the end of August, time is short. Someone is leaning on this pen-pusher to delay the application, and I think I know who it is.”

The military official was, if anything, even less welcoming this time. “Listen,” he told us impatiently, “I told you that checks need to be made.”

“Well, have you made them?” Saad put him on the spot.

“It’s a very busy time of year.” The official avoided the question. “The schools have all finished. There’s a great deal to do.”

Saad eyeballed him for a few moments before leaning back in his chair and breathing deeply. “Okay,” he said quietly. “
Akhee
[brother], I am very well connected in Baghdad. People high in the military. It is only a matter of one phone call to military headquarters for me to find out what is going on. Now, are you sure you don’t want to move a little more quickly?”

The official gazed back impassively. He had no way of knowing if Saad was bluffing—my uncle was not from Samarra, so no word of this pushy ex-officer with a false leg and a smooth tongue from Baghdad would have reached his ears—but he decided to take the risk. “You do what you have to do,” he replied. “I know my job.”

But Saad was not bluffing. As we drove back to Baghdad he seemed quietly confident that he could get things moving. “I have a favor to call in” was all he would say. Back at his compound in Baghdad, he elaborated. “I have a contact,” he told me. “He sometimes comes to visit us here. He is very high up, a deputy minister, and I have his private number. I’ve never made any requests of him before now, and this will be a small matter for him. I’m sure he will help us.”

That afternoon he made the call. “This is officer Saad from Al-Zaafaraniya compound. My nephew is having trouble with an official in Samarra who is being slow in processing his application to travel before he goes to university, and time is becoming short. Is there anything you can do to help things along?”

Approval from Samarra came through the very next day.

One final hurdle remained between me and the Jordanian border. The approval from Samarra had to be taken to the central military office in Baghdad for the final document to be stamped. Saad and I went there that day; I was buoyant with excitement at the prospect of being able to leave as soon as the final piece of this interminable jigsaw of bureaucracy was in place. Outside the huge, revolving glass doors a crowd of bearded Iraqis wearing
dishdash
sat at small portable tables, umbrellas protecting them from the sun. These were the statement-makers: anybody with a request to be made had to pay one of these statement-makers to draw the request up as an official document before it could be taken to one of the clerks inside the office. Some of them had old-style cameras on tripods with black hoods at the back, because all documents required an accompanying photograph. We paid several hundred dinars to one of these men to produce our written request, and he attached my papers to it using a needle before giving it to us to take inside.

A harassed-looking official took my papers and looked at them. After a few moments he shook his head. “Too late,” he said.

“What do you mean, too late?” Saad asked.

“My friend, we have tens of thousands of applications. It will take at least four weeks to process this—they need to be thoroughly examined by military intelligence. By that time he will have only a week in which to travel—it won’t be worth it.”

“I can spend a week traveling!” I butted in.

“It’s not up to you, young man,” the official told me. “If we say it’s not worth it, it’s not worth it.” He handed the papers back to me.

“But it’s only late because we were delayed by the official in Samarra…” I started to argue, but he had already moved away to join his colleague.

Crestfallen, I turned to Saad. “Come on, Sarmed,” he said quietly. “We’re wasting our time here. Let’s go home.”

Saad tried to
approach his high-ranking contact once more, but that door seemed shut to us. “This is the second favor,” my uncle was told. “I have a job to do—I can’t keep sorting out your problems.”

Saad looked demoralized as he put the phone down. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I feel as though I’ve let you down.”

I shook my head. “I’ve been let down,” I told him, “but not by you.” We sat in silence for a while. “It was my father, wasn’t it? He tipped off the official in Samarra about my application and asked him to delay it.”

Saad nodded. “It can’t have been anybody else.”

“No wonder he was so relaxed about me leaving. Why does he have to be like this? I thought he
wanted
me to study medicine.”

“He had his reasons.” Saad muttered the platitude, unwilling to speak badly of my father in front of me; but the steel in his eyes told of less forgiving thoughts.

“There must be something I can do,” I almost whispered. “I can’t stay here—this place is making me mad.”

Saad looked at me closely. “I’d hoped that you would be able to get out legally,” he said after a while. “There is another option, but it is very dangerous.”

“What is it?”

“You would be taking a great risk.”

“I’m not a child anymore,” I said impatiently. “What do you have in mind?”

He still seemed reluctant to tell me. “I have heard that there are Kurds who are willing to smuggle people north into Kurdistan. They would forge a document saying that you are their son. From there they would get professionals to create false papers and take you over the border into Turkey.”

We were silent for some time. Both of us knew the implications of what he was suggesting. If I was caught trying to leave the country without the proper permissions, the chances were that I would be escorted to Abu Ghraib. Once there, I would hope that the guards did not decide to become creative in their dealings with me. I did my best to dispel those thoughts. “Do you know anyone who does this?” I asked Saad.

He shook his head. “Not directly. And it will take a while to find someone—I can’t just approach people in the street and ask them if they are willing to smuggle my nephew to Turkey. It could take some weeks. You’ll have to start at university in the meantime.”

I shrugged. “If it’s only for a few weeks…”

“You can’t make this decision lightly, Sarmed,” my uncle told me almost with impatience. “It’s not a game, and you know what will happen if you get caught. Maybe you should think about staying—get your degree and see how you feel then.” His piercing eyes looked straight at me. “I understand why you want to leave, but everybody wants you to stay.”

“I know,” I replied, humbled by the affection my uncle was showing me. “But please, Uncle Saad, find out what you can.”

“Okay, Sarmed. I’m not promising anything, but I’ll do my best.”

With a heavy heart, I enrolled at university to study accounting and finance, hanging on to the hope that Saad would find someone who could help us, and soon. I did not consider what would happen if I was caught—such thoughts were too unpleasant to dwell upon—and in any case I was single-minded in my determination not to stay in Iraq for a day longer than was necessary.

My attendance at university was poor. As I look back now I realize I should have made the most of it, but thoughts of escape were foremost in my young mind. I was not to know that my actions would precipitate everything that followed, but my enthusiasm for the course was nonexistent, and in any case I did not expect to be around long enough to make it worth my while to even show up. Once my nonattendance hit a certain level, I knew that republican law dictated that a letter be sent to Samarra—probably to the same official with whom I had had dealings before—and I would be tracked down and called in. I would then be given a choice: find another course and attend it properly, or enlist in the army. But by the time that happened, I was convinced, I would be well on my way to Turkey.

I saw Saad every day. Sometimes we played chess; other times we just sat and chatted. Every day I asked him how his inquiries were going; every day he skirted around the issue. “I need a few more days,” he would say. “Be patient, Sarmed. I’m working on it.” And I knew he was.