Escape from Saddam (6 page)

It was acknowledged without words that Saad was more of a father to me than my father had ever been. He was beginning to look pressured, however, and although he would not admit it, it was clear to me that he was having trouble finding one of these mysterious Kurdish smugglers. Most of the Kurdish population was centered around Mosul, and Saad had no contacts in that part of Iraq.

One morning, the local Ba’ath party official knocked on our door, and my mother answered. “Sarmed Alsamari must report to the military headquarters in Samarra.” There was no point asking questions: it was couched as a request but was very much an order, and if I failed to show up, then the Red Berets would soon come asking for me. Once more, Saad and I found ourselves on the route to Samarra. “It’s okay,” Saad told me. “They will offer you another course—you had better attend this one!”

The same military official was dealing with my case. “It appears your attendance at university has been poor,” he told me with more than a hint of satisfaction.

I could not deny it. “I didn’t find that I was suited to it,” I lied. “I would like to find a different course to study.”

“It’s too late for that,” the official told me. He handed me a sheaf of documents. “These are your call-up papers. You are to report immediately to Baghdad military training center. You will undergo three months’ training before being assigned to your unit.” His words fell upon me like body blows as he turned to Saad. “And there is no point asking your friends to rap my knuckles this time,” he told him. “If he fails to attend university, he joins the army. Republican law, and there is nothing you can do about it.”

CHAPTER
3

THE ROAD TO AL-MANSOUR

E
very month we were granted leave from the army. Papers would be issued by an
arif,
stating how long the leave period was and the date on which it ended. Leave periods were dictated by the army. You could request time off under exceptional circumstances such as the death of a close family member—after inquiries had been made and only if the death was not politically connected—but otherwise you could go home only when you were told.

In the absence of genuinely exceptional circumstances, some soldiers went to the most extreme lengths to engineer them. I saw desperate young men deliberately open fire on their feet—often causing the loss of toes and legs—in order to be awarded temporary or permanent leave from service. I saw them breaking their own arms or cajoling others to do it for them. I saw them firing their AK-47s close to their eardrums so that they could sustain deafness and be sent home to recuperate.

Whenever any soldiers were granted leave—for whatever reason—I envied them with all my being. The wake-up call would be blown about half an hour after the early-morning call to prayer, which itself was about half an hour before sunrise so that the faithful could complete their prayers before daylight. But everyone who was going home for a few days would be up well before that, preparing their bags and getting ready to leave. I would pretend to sleep through the noise, not wanting to listen to their good-natured gloats about what they would get up to at home.

When it was my turn for a break, however, it was a different matter. I too would be up before the sun, hastily collecting my things and checking more than once that I had my leave papers all in order. They were thin, easily crumpled pieces of parchment, and the stamps were often blurred and unreadable. Checkpoint guards relied more on the fact that a color-rotation system was used than on their ability to read the stamps, but it was common for soldiers to be escorted back to their unit simply because their perfectly valid leave papers were illegible.

Once outside the gates, the soldiers who had been granted leave bought watermelon or bottles of water for the journey. The richer ones flagged down a taxi to take them to the bus station. The rest of us had to walk, but the hour-long trip to the station was always completed with a lighter heart than the trip back. The journey to Baghdad took a good six hours, and I counted every kilometer impatiently, desperate to get back to the comforts of home, such as they were. Once there, I spent a glorious five or six days in the little house my mother shared with my siblings and grandparents, simply relaxing, away from the regimented horrors and brutality of the army.

My mother would ask me what I had been up to, but I would answer her only vaguely, keen to protect her from the realities of what was going on. Uncle Saad, on the other hand, had no need to ask. He had been through army life and he knew of its bitter realities. I did my best to speak to him regularly from the unit, but all our calls were monitored so there was no way I could ask him about the one thing that was constantly on my mind: his attempts to smuggle me out. Back home, it became clear that things were not going well. Smugglers did not advertise their services on street corners, and they had every reason to be suspicious of this ex–army officer making inquiries about their illegal activities.

The night before I had to return was always a time of bitter despair and anguish, but there was nothing I could do to avoid the inevitable fact that I had to go back. My farewells to my mother and my brother and sister were emotional; my grandmother cried, while my grandfather, who seemed older every time I saw him, sat quietly in the corner of the room, his head nodding. I knew I could not allow myself to prolong the moment, however: if I was late getting back to the unit by even an hour, it would mean the loss of a whole day when my next leave came around.

The first evening back at the base was always the worst. I felt lonely and far from home, somehow divorced in every way from the bustle of activity around me. Sometimes I walked to one of the farthest corners of the camp, where nothing but a thick wall of barbed wire separated us from the expanse of the desert, and I watched the sun set; other times I lay on my bed and played one of my cassettes of Western music, closing my eyes and thinking of happier times. It was on one of these occasions that an
arif
walked through the dormitory. I can’t remember what music I was listening to, but instead of reprimanding me he took a sudden interest to it.

“Do you understand what they are singing about?” he asked curiously.

I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“You speak English?”

“I spent some time living there when I was younger.” He nodded attentively, then left me alone to spend the rest of the evening as I saw fit.

The next day I was summoned to see the commanding officer of the camp: to his face we called him “sir,” of course, but behind his back we always referred to him by his real name, Taha. I walked into his office and saluted; he continued to scribble on a piece of paper before looking up. “At ease,” he told me.

I let my arm fall to my side, but my body remained rigid. Summons to this office normally led to a punishment of some kind. I didn’t know what I had done wrong, but I needed to make sure I was on my best behavior. “How’s your English?” the officer asked out of the blue.

I was caught momentarily off guard—it wasn’t the question I had expected. “Good, sir,” I replied hesitantly.

He turned to a radio on his desk and switched it on. An English news program crackled into life. “What are they saying?”

I listened briefly, then translated what I heard into Arabic. The officer nodded slowly to himself. “Good,” he muttered. “Good. Where in England have you lived?”

“Manchester,” I told him.

“Ah,” he said with a nod of the head, “Manchester United! You like it in England?” His face was expressionless as he asked me, and I hesitated, unsure as to whether this was a trick question or not. “It’s okay,” he encouraged me. “You can answer me honestly.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied quietly. “I like it in England.”

“I would like to visit there myself. If I were to do that, could you arrange people for me to stay with?”

It was such an unusual request. Although Taha maintained his superior demeanor, this was a conversation that I might have had with a casual acquaintance on the streets of Baghdad. “Of course,” I replied. “I have family there. I would have to ask them first, but…” My voice trailed off.

“Naturally,” he replied. Then, suddenly: “You are dismissed.”

I saluted and left.

Over the next few weeks I received more of these curious summonses. Each time, Taha would ask me more about England, sometimes sounding as if he was merely wanting to satisfy his own curiosity, at other times firing questions at me in quick succession as if trying to test the truth of what I was saying. “Who did you live with in England?” he asked.

“My parents and my brother and sister, to start with,” I replied. “Then just with my father, when my mother went home.”

“Why did she not stay?”

I stared ahead, impassively. “Their marriage ran into problems, sir.”

“What sort of problems?”

I had no desire to tell this man the full truth. As I stood there considering his question, I could not help but remember the sorry image of my mother weeping in the corner of a room, distraught by whatever furious words had been exchanged between her and my father. It happened so many times that even I did not know the full truth of what had gone on behind closed doors, but these images had remained locked in my head for too long for me to start discussing them now, especially here. “Just the usual problems couples have.” I shrugged it off. “It often happens in the West.”

On other occasions, Taha would ask me in more detail about whom I knew in England, and about the lifestyle, and he would listen to my answers with what seemed to me to be great interest. I would be asked to translate songs and news programs, and I gradually became aware of the fact that I was turning into teacher’s pet. My interviews did not go unnoticed. My colleagues started to tease me—“Hey, don’t mess with him. He’s got special contacts now!”—and even the
arifs
started to treat me with less disdain, clearly unaware of the content of our conversations.

Some time after our first meeting, I was summoned to see Taha once more. He had in front of him a file that he casually flicked through. “I see you live in Al-Mansour,” he commented.

“Yes, sir.”

“How would you like the opportunity to be based back there?”

I felt a shudder of excitement. “I would like that very much, sir.”

“Excellent,” replied the officer. “Then you will be pleased to hear that I have arranged for you to transfer to the military intelligence compound. I’m sure they will find your skills to be of great use.”

Al-Mansour military intelligence compound was a stone’s throw from my grandparents’ house. The officer was offering me a ticket out of the unit I hated so much, straight into the arms of my family. It was very rare for a soldier to be transferred to intelligence—the privilege was almost unheard of for a lowly recruit like me. As a member of
Al-Istikhbarat,
the intelligence services, I would occasionally be allowed to wear civilian clothes and would start to earn a decent wage. If I worked hard, I could even become rich, driving expensive cars and brandishing exotic weapons just as I had seen important people in Baghdad do. I don’t deny that I had sometimes considered that path—in a society where power was everything, everybody dreamed of having a little. The only way you could ensure a high standard of living for yourself and your family was to become part of the system, a cog in the massive machine of terror that Saddam had constructed to keep himself in a position of omnipotence.

But I knew my success would come at a high price. No doubt they wanted me for my interpreting skills, so that I could listen in to Western messages intercepted via radar and satellite and translate them for my superiors. But inexorably I would be dragged into a den so deep I might never come out of it. Al-Mansour was a fearsome place, and those who worked there more fearsome still. As a member of military intelligence, it would not even be called into question that I would betray my friends, even my family if need be, for the greater good of the country and its glorious leader. The transfer was a prison sentence in itself, one that would last for the rest of my life as I was turned into the very symbol of everything I wanted to escape.

Indeed, escape would be farther from my reach than it had ever been. As it stood, the dangers involved were too terrible to think about; but if a member of the intelligence services was caught betraying his country, the consequences were unimaginable. If I was caught absconding from Al-Mansour, I would be tortured and killed, certainly, but the retribution would not stop there. Whether the authorities apprehended me or not, they would without question go after my family. My parents and grandparents would undergo horrific cruelty—they would perhaps even be murdered—and I could not be sure that my little brother and sister would not be brutalized in some way.

These were not idle fears: they were part and parcel of life in Iraq—accepted facts that touched every family across the land. I remembered talking to my friend Kamall one day. The heat of the summer was beginning to subside, and heavy clouds in the distance threatened one of the tumultuous deluges that sometimes fell upon Baghdad, turning its wide streets into rivers. Out of the blue, I decided to ask Kamall the question that had been nagging at me ever since we had met: “Where’s your father?”

Kamall was silent for a moment. “I don’t know,” he told me, looking intently down the street at nothing in particular. For a moment he didn’t elaborate, and I sensed that it would not be tactful to press him; but gradually he opened up. “He was a pilot.”

“In the air force?” I asked quietly, thinking that perhaps he had been one of the many casualties of the war.

Kamall shook his head. “No,” he replied. “For the state airline.”
Al-Khutoot Aljawiyaa Al-Irakia
—Iraqi Airways.

It transpired that he and another pilot had spoken out against part of the airline’s safety policy and were arrested. The other pilot agreed to retract his objection, but Kamall’s father wouldn’t. Only a few days later, the authorities came for him. Kamall remembered two white security vehicles pulling up outside the house. There was a knock on the door; Kamall’s father opened it to see three or four men in civilian clothing brandishing handguns. They did not need to say anything. They just looked at Kamall’s father and then at Kamall himself, who was no older than ten, and gestured that they should follow them to one of the security vans. Kamall’s father held up his hands. “Okay,” he said. “Take me. I’ll come with you now without any struggle. But please, leave my family alone.”

“Our instructions are to take you and your son,” one of the intelligence officers replied.

A horrible silence ensued. “Please,” Kamall’s father begged quietly, “he’s only a little boy.”

Suddenly, Kamall’s mother started to scream. “Don’t take my little one!” she shouted. “Please, don’t take my little one!” She held her son tight to her body.

The intelligence officers looked around nervously. They had no wish to be recognized by other members of the general public for what they were, and the screams of Kamall’s mother were bound to attract attention. “All right then,” one of them said to his father, “just you. But move quickly.”

Kamall’s father nodded. He held his wife for a few brief moments, then bent down to hug his son, but no words were spoken. And then he walked out of the door with the guards. He was never seen again.

At home that evening, I told Uncle Saad the story as we sat playing chess. “Yes,” he said. “I knew Kamall’s father. He was at school with me.”

I wanted to know more about what I had heard. “Would they really have taken Kamall?”

“Who knows, Sarmed. I suspect not. More likely, I think, that they were saying that to make his father come quietly. The officers would not have wanted a fuss. They wouldn’t have wanted neighbors to see their faces—much better for them to keep their identities under wraps as much as possible.”