The Weight of a Mustard Seed

The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny

We shall set up scales of justice for the Day of Judgment
, so that not a soul will be dealt with unjustly in the least, and if there be (no more than) the weight of a mustard seed, We will bring it (to account): and enough are We to take account.

—T
HE
K
ORAN.
Chapter 21, The Prophets, verse 47
(Translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali)

Epigraph

Map

Author's Note

Prologue

1
His Wife

2
His First Victory

3
His Eldest and Favorite Daughter

4
Inside

5
Yes, But

6
His Third and Most Religious Son

7
“Are You Sure It's Not Kut?”

8
Euphemisms

9
Uprising

10
The Good Caliph

11
Mosque

12
His Sheikh

13
Shame

14
Pride

15
Waiting

16
The Carcass of an Abandoned Refrigerator

17
Collection

18
Generals in General

Epilogue

Cast of Characters

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by Wendell Steavenson

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

I
WENT TO BAGHDAD IN THE SUMMER OF 2003 AS A
freelance journalist with a commission from London's
Observer
newspaper. I had spent the war in Kurdistan in the north and I wanted to see its aftermath and learn more about the locked-in years of Saddam's regime. I was in Baghdad all through that August and returned the following November for a further seven months. I lived first at the Hamra Hotel with the journalist pack, then moved to the cheaper Dulaimi next door, then into the UK
Guardian
house with a couple of armed guards in the garden. I wrote dispatches for Slate.com and articles for the
Financial Times Magazine
and
Granta
and worked on the story for this book by interviewing, with a translator, the Sachet family and friends of colleagues of General Kamel Sachet. I was interested in the story of an Iraqi general as a way of telling the story of what had happened in Iraq, not just from the point of view of the victims of the regime, but those who had participated in it. I wrote down my interviews in a notebook, and, usually the same day, transposed these notes into cleaned-up transcripts, observations and paragraphs on my laptop.

I left Baghdad in June 2004, exhausted by the stress of the violence which had ratcheted unrelenting, intending to return after a good break. Over the summer two of my friends were
kidnapped—both were released after a few days—but from conversations with colleagues in Iraq it was clear that my way of working, driving about Baghdad in a regular car with a headscarf obscuring my blonde hair, but without guards or guns, was increasingly foolhardy. I did return for five weeks in January and February 2005, to cover the first elections and see what other stories I could find and to check in with the Sachets, but by that time there had been more kidnaps and it was clear foreigners were targets for bandits as well as insurgents. Seventy percent of Baghdad was controlled by gunmen and pretty much no-go, gun battles and hold-ups were happenstance every day and, although I covered myself in a big black enveloping abaya in the back of an anonymous car, was careful to visit people unannounced and stayed not more than an hour or two, it was clear than any pretense at risk-management, for an independent like me, was a sham. Later, in the spring of that year, Marla Ruzicka, who had founded an NGO working to compensate Iraqis for American collateral damage, was killed with her Iraqi colleague by a car bomb aimed at a Humvee. The following year Jill Carroll, who was freelancing for the
Christian Science Monitor
, was kidnapped for three months and her translator, Alan Enwia, who I had first met in 2003 and who was a wonderful, warm, intelligent guy, was killed during the ambush. In earlier times, Marla and Jill and I had walked over to the Babylon Hotel together to go swimming in their indoor pool.

From the summer of 2004 to the time of writing, the relative relief of the surge in 2007 notwithstanding, I don't think any Western journalists walked down any Iraqi street (except in Kurdistan) for a coffee, to go to a restaurant or to go shopping in any casual way. When I talked to newspaper colleagues in between their rotations, it was clear they were confined to
their guarded compounds and embeds and that any eyes-and-ears reporting was being done by Iraqis. By 2006, even Iraqi reporter friends of mine (the ones still alive) said they could barely go out, let alone carry a camera or a notebook, in public spaces.

So after 2005 I conducted my research among the increasingly large Iraqi refugee and exile populations in London, Beirut, Damascus, Amman and Dubai. It wasn't a perfect solution, but once a story is under your skin, time and distance become just more hurdles, along with sense and sensibility, that have to be reckoned with.

In the writing of this book I have keenly felt an outsider's temerity in attempting to depict Iraqis. I have tried to get things right, of course, but I have also worried at exposing the private lives and thoughts of Iraqis in such dangerous and uncertain times. Accordingly, some names have been changed. The Iraqis who appear within these pages talked to me because they hoped that, through their stories and the story of Kamel Sachet, somehow a broader truth of Iraqi sufferance would be told and that American and British readers would understand a little better the nation they had invaded.

There are very few books written from the interior of the Baath Party state and those that have appeared in English tend to be ghost-written memoirs, fallible and full of holes. In the Great Loot of 2003, swaths of state files and dossiers were collected by various vested-interest parties—Shia, American, historian, blackmailer—but they are often handwritten in Arabic and almost all still in the piles of disorder with which they were swept from the shelves of government offices. Without written sources, I have been dependent on people's memories and these can be self-serving and elusive. Every story (except one or two smaller incidents) about the life of Kamel Sachet has been told
to me by more than one person and the general trajectory of his life has been confirmed by many. The stories that people have told me about themselves, however, are uncheckable. I know that omission can be as great a lie as selective recall and I tried to push people into as much honesty as they could bear. It is the nature of the subject that this sometimes did not amount to very much. Ultimately the veracity of these stories relies on my own judgment, and nobody's judgment, just like nobody's memory, is right 100 percent of the time.

I worried too about sensitivity, how much or how little of it I should allow to the officers of tyranny I was interviewing. I explain my panderings to the sympathies of Baathies by reminding myself that these are people after all, and what person does not deserve to be listened to? None, I maintain. If we strive to understand ourselves in the other, which is the only and original reason to tell stories in the first place: None.

Paris, March 2008

A
UGUST 2003. EARLY DAYS. I HAD A NAME, DR. HASSAN
al-Qadhani, and an address on a piece of paper; the telephone number written beside them, like most of the lines in Baghdad, did not work.

There was a pink rose bush overhanging the garden wall. I pushed the buzzer by the metal gate, but the electricity was off and it did not sound. My translator called up the path, several minutes went by, we called again, a woman nervously poked her head out and said the doctor would be back shortly. I did not want to intrude or frighten her so I said we would wait in the car.

When Dr. Hassan arrived, I introduced myself and he brought us in and sat with me in the formal reception room of the house. He was in his early fifties, handsome in a square way, brushed dark hair, mustache, trim physique, polite, pleasant, weary; there were dark circles under his eyes. Dr. Hassan was a psychiatrist; he told me that he had studied in Munich and London and that he had been in the army medical corps. He spoke clearly in perfect English, steadily, with a certain grimness that a couple of times flashed into a warm smile. There was a lot of ground to cover.

“Yes, post traumatic stress, soldiers who have committed suicide, self mutilation,” he listed. “I have seen these effect through
four,” and he stopped himself to count, “yes, the war in the North against the Kurds in '74, the war with Iran, the First Gulf War and this one, yes, four wars.”

His wife, blonde and well dressed, came in with two cups of coffee. Dr. Hassan started to apologize because I had waited outside in the street. I waved him down, no, no, of course.

“But my wife was afraid, you understand. Five days ago we were robbed.”

Three men had broken in at dawn. Dr. Hassan had woken up with a gun pointed at his head. The robbers had pushed him and his wife and eight-year-old son into the kitchen and tied them up while they ransacked the house. They found $15,000 in cash, a gold bar and the keys to the Mercedes parked outside. This haul did not quite satisfy them. They said they knew the doctor had $100,000: Where was it? They wanted to take his eight-year-old son as hostage against this amount, but Dr. Hassan swore he did not have this money, that they had the wrong information, he asked them to leave the boy, to take the car, and go, now that it was light and morning. He pulled up his shirt to show me a large red oval bruise on his stomach where he had been punched with the butt of a Kalashnikov.

“My son,” he told me, “has bad dreams and cries. He sleeps with us now. We have to walk him even to the bathroom. I told him everything was alright, that none of us were hurt and that everything would be OK. He doesn't believe me. He is always searching for my gun, to keep beside him.”

But in Iraq, there was never one story, there were always many stories, layers of episodes, each one a wound. We began to talk about his recent cases, but our conversation halted with an explosion; the glass in the windows banged, a car alarm went off.

Dr. Hassan then looked down at his hands and told me that
he understood his patients, he understood the phobia, anxiety, panic, depression, restlessness, insomnia:

“I myself was once arrested under the old regime.” He paused and looked out of the gap in the iron bars on the windows, which the robbers had pulled out to get inside. “These things are very sensitive,” he said without looking at me. “Solitary confinement for three months…I have often seen torture victims, they are apathetic, withdrawn, severely depressed, often emaciated. It is difficult enough for a doctor to treat another doctor, a psychiatrist treating another psychiatrist…”

 

T
HE NEXT TIME
I went to see Dr. Hassan, it took him several minutes to unlock the new heavy padlock he had bought and let us in through the gate. He looked better since the robbery, he smiled a little more, the dark circles under his eyes were gone and his bruise was healing.

We met several times that summer. Dr. Hassan seemed to regain a genial sense of humor, but too often his eyes shadowed, clouded with memories, and he maintained a certain strain of diffident frankness. He had kept everything shut in a box for a long time. As we talked, he cautiously unburdened. He told me he had a brother in England, that he had once fallen in love in Munich and had to give her up, that he was a Shia from the South and “they” had never trusted him. In the course of his duties he had been responsible for certifying soldiers mentally fit for duty, he had witnessed men shot for desertion and treated their traumatized executioners, healed psychosomatic paralysis and investigated spies. We talked about the Americans: what did they want in Iraq? How was a former Baath Party member to comport himself with the occupation? Cold shoulder or collaborate? He was worried for his family's
safety; he talked about leaving the country. Throughout the former elite there were rumors of revenge assassinations, extortion, detentions. One of his friends had been an adviser to Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister, and was sitting at home, unable to sleep much or eat, losing weight, too frightened to travel on his diplomatic passport, waiting for the Americans to come and arrest him. “It is only a different kind of fear; before we had paranoia about Saddam. Now I am seeing it transferred to Bremer and the Americans!”

Invariably, though, we returned to the era before, the time of Saddam Hussein. Saddam, abusive father, super-sheikh, paranoiac—Dr. Hassan tried to explain the totality of it, even from the inside, even from his position, even with his connections and military rank.

“You had to lie against your principles. You had to say things that you did not believe. It was mental conflict. This kind of tension and suppression destroys the superego—I mean that you cannot decide anything, you are directed by the regime, your education, your military service, your job. You could see cases where people were socially withdrawn, they were afraid to go to work, they were often absent. It was somewhere between social phobia and agoraphobia. And you would see normal people too displaying signs of paranoia, not wanting to talk on the telephone, for example, afraid of the door-bell ringing at an odd time. The more extreme cases lost their jobs, suspected their families and friends. They said they were sure the police were following them, that they were being watched from satellites.”

The fear was incubated, inculcated.

“To live thirty-five years like this. It becomes conditioned as a personality trait.”

It had been a long sufferance. Dr. Hassan had opened the
door, not into the black and white world of oppressor and victim that I had expected, but into a grayer corridor. He had been a member of the Baath Party. He had, I discovered, attained the rank of general in the medical corps. He had participated in the regime. And yet…

And yet, an intelligent rational man, a man with pain and morality, regret and hubris, a wife and a son, pride and fear of humiliation.

It was just an inkling of a story then, a question hanging in my head in the blue shadow hour of a leavening dawn: Why hadn't men like Dr. Hassan just left? Why had they served such a regime? How had they accommodated their own morality? How had they lived? How had they lived with themselves?

One day, musing on some of these ideas, Dr. Hassan had told me, “You should go and see the Sachets. I don't know how much they will tell you. But they are an interesting family. Kamel Sachet was a general. A very famous general.”