One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (11 page)

Mustafa
sits in silence, rocking his daughter to comfort her. Then he hands her abruptly to her mother. He goes up the narrow flight of steps and opens the door onto the night. Something’s on fire, just down the street. Black smoke is rising into the air. A rocket has hit his neighbour’s house. One daughter is dead.

*   *   *

Before the next day is over, the neighbour’s twelve-year-old has been buried.

That evening, once they had put the children to bed and mumbled an assurance that tonight they would be safe, Mustafa and Bayan sat up talking. Mustafa had made his mind up. Bayan hesitated. They took the decision before morning came. They wanted to leave Iraq.

If only they could just have left, taken flight. But Iraq was one big prison. Without an exit permit they would get nowhere; the borders
were closely guarded. Iraq was a land that was difficult to go to, hard to live in and almost impossible to leave. Mustafa, who was still a mechanical engineer at the water and sewage works in the city, tried to make contacts who might be able to help them. He offered bribes, he saved up and started currency dealing, looking desperately for a way out. His children should not grow up in fear of
their lives.

A son was born, and Bayan could finally call herself
Umm Ali
, mother of Ali. They celebrated; civil war or not, a child is still a source of joy.

A year passed, then two, and in the third, Bano started school. Mustafa got her a decent pair of shoes; he bought a rucksack and a water bottle. Everything of quality, that was important now she was entering a new phase of her life, he
told himself.

School life suited Bano well; she was mature for her age and had spent a lot of time indoors, where she loved to read. Lara was less well behaved, and more daring, always getting dirty, clambering around the bombsites to discover things, playing at war in the ruins with her cousins Ahmed and Abdullah. Lara was always the boss. She was the best of friends with the two boys and played
them off against each other whenever it suited her. As the middle child, she was left more to her own devices, and was more independent than her sister; Bano had grown accustomed to attention and admiration, and thrived when people noticed her.

To survive the rampant inflation and be able to save up for their escape, Mustafa and Bayan both worked full time. The grandmothers looked after all the
cousins while their parents were at work.

To get passports, Mustafa invented a story involving a pilgrimage to Zeinab’s shrine in Damascus. Zeinab was the granddaughter of the prophet Muhammad. According to the Shia Muslims she was buried in Damascus, while the Sunnis claimed she was laid to rest in Cairo. Three summers after the fatal rocket hit their neighbours’ house and burnt the eldest daughter
to death, the local authorities approved their application to make the pilgrimage.

The parents didn’t tell the girls they would not be coming back. Their daughters could give the game away, as zealous intelligence officers at the border could be expected to question the children. They would only take a small amount of luggage with them, so as not to give away their plan to escape.

*   *   *

On the Thursday before their departure, Bano was chosen as
pupil of the week
at school. She received a little plaque, which she put up on the wall above her bed, and couldn’t make out why her grandmother was in such floods of tears. She was delighted with the award and hung her school uniform neatly in the wardrobe, ready for when they got back from the pilgrimage.

The morning they were due to
leave, there was a total solar eclipse. They had heard you could go blind if you looked at the sun before it disappeared, so the family stayed inside all day.

The following night, Mustafa could not sleep. For decades, the nights had been the worst. Nights were the time when the Ba’ath party militias came for people, consigning them to torture and never-ending darkness in the dungeons of Saddam
Hussein. The soldiers would turn the house upside down in their search for weapons or banned manifestos and writings. They would smash down doors or sneak in over the flat roofs where families dried clothes, stored junk or kept hens. No windows were secure, no doors, reinforcements or locks could keep out the forces of the state. The neighbourhood was sometimes awoken by the sound of men howling.
They knew it was all over when the Ba’ath Party arrived.

During the worst spells of political terror – the bomb attacks and street fighting – Mustafa would toss and turn, waiting for dawn. The days were safer than the nights. He lay there listening in the darkness. You didn’t need to open your eyes to know daylight was on its way. Daylight, even before the sun had risen, meant the sound of Primus
stoves being lit, the smell of fresh bread, the first shuffle of footsteps down below, the click of the door handle as someone went out to get some flatbread before it ran out. Daylight meant the first call to prayer, while it was still dark. Only when the muezzin’s holy words had died away, when the real morning arrived with farmers offering freshly strained yogurt, white cheese with salt, tea
and bread, only then could he relax and sleep.

If you didn’t hear the lighting of the stoves or smell the fresh bread it was a signal that the city was under attack, or that there had been warning of an attack, and there was a state of
Maneh al-Tajawel
– a curfew.

*   *   *

That August morning they got up before daylight, before the heat arrived. They all squashed into a car, so tightly packed
that none of them could turn and look back at the house with the flat roof where the line of clothes would soon dry in the sun.

They drove out into the desert. Out here on the sandy plains, Abbasid, Moguls, Turkmens, Mongols, Persians and Ottomans had built their civilisations. They had all fought fiercely for Erbil –
the four gods
– as the city’s name means. Here Alexander did battle with the
Persian king Darius, here the first soldiers of Islam fought for their faith, and this land was the original home of the Kurdish warrior hero Saladin, who captured Jerusalem from the Crusaders.

Over the centuries, the city had become increasingly difficult to seize, situated as it was behind high walls on a flat-topped mountain reaching ever closer to the sky. It was a man-made mountain, created
by people rebuilding on the ruins of those they had conquered. Now only the old town still lay behind the walls; the settlement had overflowed onto the plain, where it lay unprotected from desert storms and militia feuds alike.

Bayan was already regretting it all. There was no way it could end well. This was where they belonged. This was where they ought to live and die.

Mustafa gave her hand
a squeeze. ‘Everything will be all right in the end,’ he said.

Though they had an exit permit from Iraq, they took a smuggling route as they approached the border because they had no Syrian entry permit. Half the money had already been handed over and a relation would pay the rest once Mustafa rang to say they were there. They had no idea where ‘there’ was. Nor did the smugglers, yet.

The family
of five was crammed into a little boat with many other refugees. The boat set off to cross the Khabur River, a tributary of the Tigris. The banks were patrolled by Iraqi and Syrian troops on their respective sides.

Bayan cried throughout the crossing. ‘Imagine, I’m leaving my country! How can I leave my country?’

Lara, now five, regarded her parents in bafflement. It was strange to see them
unhappy. They were the ones who looked after her, Bano and Ali. Now she had her turn to comfort
them
. Why did they have to go on this journey if it made everyone so sad?

Bano was uneasy too. Mustafa tried to hold her attention with a story about a girl who fell out of a boat into the water. That little girl fell over the side because she couldn’t sit still, and was eaten up by a big fish, a huge
fish. Mustafa was groping for words, an enormous fish, and then she lived there, in the belly of the fish, with all the other children the fish gradually gobbled up. Mustafa was just talking away because he was afraid the soldiers on the bank would notice the boat and start firing. ‘And then the fish spat out all the children onto the shore,’ he improvised.

Bano suddenly interrupted his story.
‘Daddy, we’re going to die now,’ she said.

Her mother flinched.

‘I feel so close to God,’ Bano said to no one in particular. ‘It’s as if I’m in the clouds, looking down on you. The clouds are under me. I can see you in the boat, down below. I can see you all together.’

Mustafa started to pray.

God, There is no god but He, Living and Everlasting. Neither slumber overtakes Him nor sleep. To Him belongs what is in the heavens and what is on earth.

The others sat motionless in the boat while Mustafa quoted from the prayer
Ayat al-Kursi
. This was the prayer he always turned to when he was lying awake at nights feeling frightened.

He knows their present affairs and their past. And they do not grasp of His knowledge except what He wills. His throne encompasses the heavens and the earth; Preserving them is no burden to him. He is the Exalted, the Majestic.

After this prayer he asked God to protect Bayan and the children, and, as is the Muslim way, he put his hands in front of his face, then held them out and blew, as if to blow the prayer up to God. Finally he turned his face out to the waves and blew for as long as his breath would allow him.

The engine stopped. They slid in
towards a sandbank and the boat made gentle contact with the Syrian shore. A waiting car took them to the Kurdish town of Qamishli, where they spent the night before travelling on to Damascus. In the Syrian capital, with its carved façades, beautiful palaces and spies on every corner, they stayed in a small room.

Nobody bothered them, and they bothered nobody. Bayan felt as if the heat and dust
were settling on her in a layer. She missed her kitchen, her cool living room, her sisters.

After a month in Damascus, they were issued with Iraqi passports and plane tickets to Moscow.

In the Russian capital, they were accommodated in an Aeroflot hotel at Sheremetyevo airport. A man came up to their hotel room and gave them an envelope with some new tickets in it.

The destination was written
in Cyrillic script – it had four letters.

Asking for Protection

‘They’ve all got fair hair,’ exclaimed Bano. Dressed in a bright green top and orange skirt, she was running across the pale wooden floor of the airport. Bayan had bought colourful clothes for the children at a market in Damascus. Lara was in a sunshine-yellow dress and Ali was in red. That way it would be easier to keep track of the children on the journey, Bayan had
decided.

They walked along a corridor in the brand-new arrivals hall and Mustafa spelled his way through the notice
Welcome to Oslo Airport
. The soaring ceiling was clad in light wood and the dividing walls were of clear glass and concrete, while the floor was laminated wood or slate flagstones. Going along the corridor, they could see out on one side to the spruce forest over which they had
just flown, and on the other they were looking down on the people who were about to board flights. They came to a kind of conveyor belt and the little girls stood wide-eyed as the floor carried them forward.

But most of their attention was focused on the people.

‘Princess hair, real princess hair,’ Lara whispered to Bano.

*   *   *

Their passports and visas were in order, so they slid through
passport control. The luggage arrived and they walked out of the terminal building.

Outside, people were lightly dressed for the unusually warm September day. To the Iraqi arrivals it felt cool.

They had never seen so much greenery all in one go. Even the roadsides were a mass of green. Areas of green heath and fields sped by on the other side of the car window. The forest seemed to go on for
ever.

Then they saw a few scattered tower blocks, then more, and soon they were down in the hollow where Oslo lies and they could see out over the fjord and all the little islands. Now they were driving along streets with pavements, there was a tunnel, and they were in the city. They went straight to the police station.

‘My name is Mustafa Abobakar Rashid. I am a Kurd from Iraq and I want to
seek asylum for myself and all my family.’

They had their details taken and were sent to the Tanum transit and reception centre, where they were registered again and had interviews and health checks.

‘What an awful place,’ complained Bayan. The room they had been given was cramped and there were people everywhere, people crying and shouting and quarrelling in every language under the sun, all
of them gesticulating wildly.

‘It’s going to be fine,’ said Mustafa. ‘Here we won’t have to worry about how to get fuel and food. Look, there’s water in the taps, clean drinking water, and heat in the stoves. And the most important thing is that there’s no war, and nobody who wishes us ill. We can sleep soundly here.’

A few days later they were moved to a centre for asylum seekers. Mustafa was
optimistic. ‘You see, we’ll soon have a house of our own,’ he told Bayan. His wife was sceptical, and asked him to see if he could press their case and get things moving.

Bano started at the centre’s school and learnt to sing Norwegian children’s songs. She was given books and coloured pencils, while Lara was sent to the centre’s kindergarten with Ali. Mustafa dipped deep into their travel budget
to buy a big dictionary at a cost of five hundred kroner. He pored over it every evening. ‘We’ve got to know the language if we’re going to get jobs,’ he said, learning lists of words by rote.

The months passed. They were getting nowhere. Perhaps they wouldn’t even be allowed to stay. They could be sent back. The atmosphere at Nesbyen asylum centre was one of gloom and despondency. Some of the
people suffered mental health problems. Young men fired up with adrenalin and hope felt their lives were falling apart. Inevitably there was trouble.