The Weight of a Mustard Seed (25 page)

The chief of the local Amn came over and made inquiries.

“Who is the body?” he asked. He had been told nothing, only that there was a burial that needed to be watched and that no gathering was to be permitted. When he heard the name of Kamel Sachet, the Amn officer inhaled and looked at the ground, coughed at the sudden lump in his throat. As the word spread some of the other Amn officers began crying openly. Ali heard their grief and he let his outrage fly loose at last. He railed, shouting at the sky, at the President, at the men who followed his orders.

The chief of the local Amn took him aside gently, put a sympathetic arm around his shoulders and said, in a kind whisper, “Look, this talk is of no use to you. Be brave as your father was. Go home and take care of your family. This talk will be of no benefit to you.”

I
SPENT THE SUMMER OF 2007 LOOKING FOR GENERALS
and sergeants and anyone who might have known Kamel Sachet. I wanted to hear new stories and overlap and confirm the ones I already knew. Two million or more Iraqis had fled Iraq, mostly to Jordan and Syria, and I spent weeks in Damascus and Amman, sitting in cafés or hotel lobbies or on a thin pallet in a refugee hovel drinking, accordingly, glasses of tea or orange juice, or cans of warm Pepsi.

“And how is your family?” I would ask and then horror stories came out. Everyone, without exception, had a horror story. Kill kidnap kill kidnap kill kidnap. In various permutations: brother, self, wife, five-year-old son; ransomed, shot, missing. They had stopped blaming the Americans; somehow the horror had gone beyond anger or fault. One woman I remember, a modest, educated, English-speaking, handsome woman in a long black abaya. She was Shia married to a Sunni—inter-sect marriage was common in Baghdad—and her husband had been killed in a bombing. During her mourning, her brother-in-law had come to her and threatened to tell the insurgents she was a Shia spy unless she gave her fifteen year old daughter to his son for marriage and took her fourteen year old son out of school to work in his garage. Frightened, she had
fled with her children to Damascus, her son was out of school, there was no one to send more money when the little she had ran out. She told me this all quite matter-of-factly, emotion betrayed only by a deep engraved vertical stress line in the middle of her forehead. One story of many, and many worse. My translator had been kidnapped and kept a picture of her dead son hung around her neck. A Scandinavian psychologist who was married to a UN official at the UNHCR told me she didn't know how to begin to counsel the hundreds of women who had been raped—
“hundreds of women raped
?” I repeated. She nodded. “Sometimes gang raped. One raped more than eight times in front of her husband! I don't know how to treat these women”—rape for Iraqis was indelible shame—“and they can't talk to their families…” Among the women I met there was no theatrical wailing and threshing; the public display of grief that I had known from the early stages of civil war and car bombs in Baghdad had been replaced by a sullen endurance.

In Damascus the displaced Iraqis lived with a little money scraped, dwindling, not much, in small rented apartments in Seyda Zeinab, near the Shia Shrine to the Prophet's hostage granddaughter, where many Iraqis had settled during the Saddam years, or in the Palestinian areas (another, previous wave of refugees) or in farther, outer suburbs. The apartments were concrete, tiled floor, rolled up mats for bedding, a couple of plastic chairs for visitors, a harsh strip light overhead, a television tuned alternately to MTV and Al Jazeera, a small statuette of the Virgin in the Christian households, a picture of the green mantled Hussein in the Shia, a poster of the ranks of faithful kneeling in prayer rings around the Kaaba in Mecca in the Sunni. Almost everyone complained the rent was high and they couldn't find a job and the Syrians kept changing their visa criteria and they couldn't get the new G series Iraqi pass
ports that were only being distributed in Baghdad and money was running out and their children were disrupted from school. They telephoned family members back in Baghdad and Mosul: Was it any better? Was it safe to come home? And heard only news of new bombs and dead relatives.

It was a very dispiriting time. The former officers I found in Damascus were tired and worried. They carried their lives in plastic carrier bags, photocopies of ID cards, military records, birth certificates for their children, house deeds, license details for a car they had sold two years before, letters from the UNHCR, Red Crescent affidavits, registration forms for emigration from the Canadian Embassy. Some of them had been officers in the new Iraqi Army, allied to the Americans, manning checkpoints and operations against insurgents and militias. They had fled firebombing and assassination attempts and hoped (hopelessly, because the Americans were taking very few refugees and even those who had worked directly for them as translators were stranded) to be resettled in the United States and proffered photographs of themselves in uniform standing next to “American Colonel Bob” or “Major Hudson very good man and my good friend” along with certificates of their service and typed letters of recommendation from American commanders.

They sighed and looked over their shoulders to see if there were any listening agents sitting nearby. Often we would see a lone man reading or pretending to read the newspaper and we would have to pay the check and walk down the street to find a park bench or another, more anonymous café. Iraqis were very afraid. The old Baathies were afraid of the Syrian Mukhabarat, a familiar security blanket, which occasionally deported former high rank officers back to Iraq, like throwing morsels as appeasements at the Americans. But more terribly, Iraqis were
afraid of each other. The internecine violence was a centrifuge that pulled apart colleagues, neighbors, cousins, scattering families and friends among parties, factions, militias, nefarious business arrangements. Whenever I asked someone for help in asking a friend of theirs to talk to me, they always said, politely, that they would call them first to ask their permission to give me their phone number and often people refused to talk to a Western reporter; who knew who might get to hear of the rendezvous or what consequences it might have.

Iraqis were wary of the tensions and threads of war feud that overspilled borders. One former officer in the new Iraqi army told me that three Shia militia thugs had broken his door down at three in the morning and interrogated his pregnant wife as to his whereabouts. Damascus was full of militia bandits and insurgent foot soldiers on R & R for the summer, disgorged with the refugee families from dusty buses into the choking rubbish-ridden lanes around the Shrine of Seyda Zeinab. They adjusted to sleeping without gunfire interruption, went under false names and monikers, calculated the risks and the prices of the people smugglers who promised to get them as far as Greece or Bulgaria and gathered in the hole in the wall cafés, around charcoal braziers grilling kebab, and in airless basement Internet cafés. Sometimes, watching old Iraqi sitcoms from the eighties in the corner of a tea house, catching a refrain of an old Baghdad love song wafting from some open window, they remembered they were all Iraqis again. When the Iraqi national soccer team beat the Saudis (!) in the Asian Cup final, crowds went out into the streets cheering and gunning their motorbikes in lieu of Kalashnikovs until the Syrian police came to quell and beat and remind them where they were.

In Amman the atmosphere was calmer. There were fewer Iraqis in Jordan and they tended to be more middle class Sunnis.
The officers in Amman I met were more senior and had fared better. General Hamdani and his friends had good apartments, with gold chenille sofas and gilt edged ashtrays, money from somewhere. They passed the time writing accounts of the Saddam years under grand delusions of big American publishing advances. They called them memoirs but there was nothing personal in them, they wrote like academics without facts, great tracts of self serving hindsight, epigrammatic assumption, polemical swathes of history downloaded from the top of their heads. Some made apologies for Saddam, some blamed his “evil councilors,” the Tikriti thug-cousins he surrounded himself with, some praised his intelligence and wondered how it could have twisted itself into such catastrophe, others heaped scorn on Saddam and his peasant roots and told me that they had known all along, even from the early days, that his power was built on the foundations of murder.

There were varying shades of hypocrisy and after a while the faces and the excuses and the old war stories blurred into each other, the former general became a type. I joked with my translator that I could pick one out of a crowded café: a man in his fifties or vigorous sixties, straight military back, close cropped gray hair, a mustache (usually trimmed thinner and smaller than its prime), tribal tattoo dots at the base of his thumb (sometimes one, like an old worn freckle on the end of a nose). They were always friendly and affable, often they had a sense of wry humor. A pair of thick black scimitar eyebrows above a pair of orange aviator shades, a rolled up sleeve to show me the skin graft scars to cover the damage from a heavy machine gun bullet caught in Fao in '86, a chunky brushed steel watch ringed with pavé diamonds (whose gift? I wondered), a strand of turquoise prayer beads rubbed between restless fingertips, the framed photograph of Saddam pinning a medal
on his chest proudly explained, “The Sash of Rafidain, 1991. After the Mother of all Battles.” I always told them that I could use pseudonyms if they were more comfortable, that I had no desire to cause them trouble. At first they would look at me skeptically, but then I dropped names of battles and commanders: Mohamara, Sachet, Khazraji, Fish Lake, and they would warm up and unfold their edited memories. One colonel I remember, white hair and white mustache, was initially hesitant to give me his name, but later told me with a flourish, “use my name, use all of it! We have a saying. Why should a drowning man be afraid of a drop of rain?”

The officers told me war stories from the eighties and tended to defend the use of chemical weapons and ignore the terror of the Anfal, conceding only that “mistakes were made” and that in war and counter insurgency bad things happen. Their dates were a year or two off kilter, their accounts were full of ellipses, their versions palimpsests, subject to the vagaries of oral history. They were dumbfounded and aghast at the current situation and blamed both the crass American heavy handedness and the delicate machinations of the Iranian
Pasdaran
and, according to the tropes of Iraqi hospitality, never let me pay for coffee no matter how reduced their circumstances. Together we shook our heads at the mistakes and the violence and even at the indignity of Saddam's execution, the last awful noosed moment when the Shia balaclavas taunted him with Moqtada's name, and made an effort at grim black humor, “Who knew then, four years ago, that we would be missing him so soon!” I liked them, I joked with them, I sympathized with them. But not one ever looked at me straight in the eye and admitted responsibility for the crimes of the government which they had served.

At times my long running narrative quest for
how-why
seemed moot against the twisted fragments of news that came out of Baghdad those summer months: triangular battles between Al-Qaeda factions, Sunni tribal insurgents and Americans, Shia-on-Shia fighting in Amara, militia gang turf war in Basra. “Civil war” was almost a polite euphemism. Twenty four years of Saddam had been followed by an even nastier era, the bottom pulled out of purgatory, fallen into some deeper hole. Where did this vile carnage come from?
How-why
? I recalled my Baghdad interviews during the summer after the invasion (four years ago, four years already!) and all the different kinds of brain damage I had seen that Dr. Hassan had gamely tried to diagnose as paranoia, depression and anxiety. I had absorbed all their stories and now, as Sheikh Adnan sometimes jokingly admonished me, “I knew too much.” In Damascus that summer I dreamed of Saddam. In my dream I was at a huge fancy reception in one of his palaces, all his henchmen and both his sons were there, gilt trays of crystal glasses of whiskey were passed by thin, obsequious, nervous waiters. The atmosphere was an uncomfortable forced jollity and I was trapped—I was a “guest” and dared not refuse such pointed hospitality—but when Saddam himself nodded a greeting in my direction from his dais, I felt strangely smug and gratified. In the morning I laughed at my empathetic Saddam anxiety dream but I noticed, toward the end of a month of dense, difficult, dolorous interviews, that every time I went to the toilet, I closed the door behind me and found that my first thought was not, clean? toilet paper? but: could I survive in this space if this was my cell for six months? Is there enough room to lie down to sleep, for example, is there a window? Would I get used to the smell? Probably…there was no sink, but never mind, I thought, I could wash in the cistern.

 

T
HE GENERALS, IN
general, recalled Kamel Sachet with hagiographies, affection and reverence:

About the reasons for his execution there were various theories, second hand rumors, one of the most prevalent, put about by Khalid, his unreliable defected brother, was that Qusay himself had shot him out of pique.

Kamel Sachet was arrested on December 16 1998, against the gathering imminence of an American and British air attack. In preparation for this and to counter the ongoing no-fly zone Allied provocations, Saddam had reorganized his general staff, notably putting Ali Hassan al-Majid in command of the southern theater. He asked Kamel Sachet to assist him, according to some, to be effectively his deputy. Kamel Sachet may or may not have been formally ordered to serve under Ali Hassan al-Majid, whom he despised; but in either case he never went south to actively take up such a command position. In some versions he refused in a meeting with Saddam and Qusay and several top commanders in the Presidential office on the morning of December 16
^th
. In others his reluctance had already been noted for several weeks. But there does seem to be a general consensus that Kamel Sachet attended a high level meeting chaired by Saddam that morning, that there was a disagreement, that Kamel Sachet excused himself in order to pray, and that he was arrested very shortly after returning to his office by special security agents who were under the command of Qusay.