The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  In August of 1998 Saddam expelled the UN inspection teams as spies. By November he had, under American pressure, allowed them back in again. In the interim he reorganized his national defenses in the face of expected air strikes. Kamel Sachet was appointed to an advisory role with Ali Hassan al-Majid’s command of the south. Kamel Sachet never really took up this position, he either refused point blank to serve under Ali Hassan al-Majid, who he reviled, or he simply remained in Baghdad, attending strategy meetings in the Presidency as required.

  In the early autumn of that year, Nabil Janabi went to Amman, on one of his regular trips. There he met a Janabi relative who brought him a message from Kamel Sachet. He had the “amana,” the thing he had given him to keep, was still with him. By this Nabil understood that he had received the letter.

  After this, Nabil had no further communication or news from Kamel Sachet. He heard only rumors, and it was hard to know which ones were true. He continued his exile efforts, kept his close connection to elements of the Jordanian Royal Family and befriended Khalid, Kamel Sachet’s brother, when he was living in Amman in 2000 after his “defection.” Khalid had his own theories and version of events, but these, Nabil knew, were also second-hand.

  TIME PASSED, TIMES changed. When the American tanks rolled into Baghdad, Nabil was poised, like so many Iraqis, to go home. But he went home, like so many Iraqis, as a foreigner, backed by foreigners, with a foreign agenda. He carried a British passport and had money from a Jordanian prince to set up a monarchist party to push their own pretender candidate (there were several disseminated Hashemite princes floating around since the monarchy had been deposed in Iraq in 1958). He found Khalid in prison (on some kind of conspiracy charge) and had him released to his own custody and appointed him his head of security. They took several gunmen and a convoy of landcruisers and drove across the broken border garrisoned by a few uninterested American soldiers, passed the smashed portraits of Saddam, across that long featureless desert, fast down the highway through Ramadi and Fallujah—because there were always a bunch of bandits ready to rob travelers—to the airport outskirts of the capital, the empty sand-concrete military bases still painted with the Iraqi military flag entwined with the Palestinian flag, the blue and white striped traffic police posts, wreckage, black twisted burned cars, kids yelping, a tank impaled by its own turret.

  For exiles the return was salutary. They knew it would be bad, they had talked to relatives and watched the news, but when they saw, with their own eyes, the extent of the collapse—Iraq reduced to third world; it looked like Africa! Rackety generators, lakes of sewage, ragged kids in the streets, mounds of fly blown garbage, lumpen empty tracts of construction scarred suburb, and so many women covered in black! And where were the old bars and the restaurants they used to go to? Where was the life? The park along the river where they remembered family picnics and fish restaurants was now unkempt and blocked by two American tanks and coils of razor wire. And the people! What had happened to people? Iraqis used to laugh and tease each other and extend their hospitality with largesse at every opportunity and now: what was this sullenness, this resentment, these shifty dark glances, too many lies and their lies were so obvious! (“No, habibe, I was never in the Party!”) And always always they wanted money, and more money as if you were an ATM machine! And then all they did was complain: Why were they not given this? Why had they not received that? And the checkpoints and the curfew and the electricity cuts and no jobs and where were they going to get their car registered now that the ministry annex had been looted by “those Kuwaiti gangs”? One Iraqi, who had lived two decades in Vienna, told me, “I don’t recognize these people any more; it’s as if I had nothing in common with them.”

  Nabil described his homecoming dabbing his leaky eyes with the corner of a white handkerchief.

  “They killed sheep of course, they shot in the air. A nephew came up, ‘Do you remember me?’ and he had gray hair! I wanted to sleep on the roof but they told me it was risky—gunfire. My youngest child was nine months old when I left and I found him a qualified engineer!” He stopped himself in remembrance of the long hard Saddam night, but those days of 2003, when things seemed open and possible had vanished too.

  “Saddam was bad,” he said, as everyone did, exile or not, “but this regime is worse. Worse!” And he wiped his eyes again. “Khalid?” No, he could not find Khalid. Khalid had been killed sometime in the latter months of 2004. Shot on the street. Nabil wasn’t more forthcoming, he said he didn’t know who killed him, stories were vague, gunmen…Mehdi Army…Nabil had left Baghdad by then—no one was interested in a monarchy. Bombs, Shia groups everywhere, too many revenge assassinations, “Well, you know how it went”—and returned to London.

  Chapter 16

  THE CARCASS OF AN ABANDONED REFRIGERATOR

  AT 7 A.M., ON 16 DECEMBER 1998, LIEUTENANT Colonel Khalid Obeid bin Walid, head of a section of Abu Ghraib prison, woke in the narrow single bed in his office. Stretched his barrel pugilistic frame, rubbed his stubble chin. Lt. Colonel Walid had the meticulous habits of an army officer, proud and polished, but as a Director in the Amn, he dressed in civilian clothes. He always wore a tie (“Always, always!” he told me, chopping his hand vertically, definite, nostalgic for his more sartorial days), he polished his brown loafers every morning, his Chevrolet was kept clean and shining. On this morning he washed his face in the basin in the adjoining bathroom and put on one of the brown suits that he favored. On his bedside table was a book by an Arab author called The School of Spying, about the practices and methods of the KGB. Next to it was the gold watch that had been a gift from the Governor of Mosul; he picked it up and checked the time.

  He had a wedding ring on his finger and three children and a pleasant home in the Western suburbs of Baghdad, but had slept at the office that night because the Amn had been placed on maximum alert. The Americans had threatened bombing and their bombs were expected. For three days he had been accommodating Amn prisoners evacuated from different Amn offices in Baghdad. Four hundred prisoners had to be found room for in his section, which usually housed 3,500 prisoners in conditions of such extreme overcrowding that fifty or sixty men were routinely crammed into cells built for eight. Prisoners slept on the floor because there were not enough bunks, on the steps of the staircases that connected two tiers of barracks-halls if they were lucky. Lt. Colonel Walid had cleared one hall, redistributed its inhabitants and told the Baghdad Amn officers their prisoners could be put there. He did not concern himself with food or other amenities; these were a matter for his Baghdad colleagues.

  IN THE RETELLING of this day, Walid displayed the usual flourishes and gestures of the Baathie: a florid, jovial expansiveness, finger splay and jabbing or slapping the table. His hand would sweep into an upturned palm and then flick like he was waving, for emphasis. Gesticulations that dismissed as they explained.

  “What could I do?” “It was like this!” “This was usual then!”

  He was forty-five when I met him in May 2006, fleshy, but still trim. A striped gray suit and a shirt, well dressed enough, but poor now; his shoes were scuffed. He was seeking political asylum in Britain and living in the grim northern town of Middlesbrough. After the war he had worked for the Interior Ministry and found himself on Shia and Sunni death lists. His garage was blown up and he had fled, smuggled across Turkey and through Europe in the back of lorries, thousands of dollars paid to the traffickers, landed in Liverpool and presented himself to the authorities. He had come to London to meet me and attend some other business and we talked over a whole afternoon up and down the Araby Edgware Road, in the basement of the Costa Coffee opposite the British Islamic Bank, in a restaurant over plates of stewed okra and gravy and rice, in a teahouse with brass tray tables and shisha pipes.

  In his reduced circumstances, as a refugee, he had changed his name to Walid and shaved off his Iraqi Baathie mustache, into a strip of bristle. It was as if he could not quite bear to shave it off completely and needed a comf
ort reminder of the past, a tactile touchpoint. As he talked, I checked his face, jowls and dewlaps, the aging lines and expression for a sign of casual barbarity. He had a faint pox scar on one cheek, a deep trench in his nasal labial fold, a crease in one earlobe. His lips were wet and mobile, easy to laugh, quick to joke, genial, but there was a darker occluded cast behind his brown eyes and when he stopped talking he would hold my gaze for a moment before looking down. As he folded his arms against his chest, flat and defensive, I thought I could discern guilt—no, not guilt, that would have been impossible, too devastating to admit, to articulate, to allow, to even suspect. I looked carefully: hoped I could see that there were things that were difficult to think about because there might be chinks of unease in them, things which he hid from himself, an emotion folded between the images of a lost memory—but I suspected that this was my own imposition, wishful thinking. In general we had a nice friendly chat, and who among those Arabs, single men, mostly, along the Edgware Road, that day or any day, did not have scarred souls, long journeys, complicated motives and the shadows that accompany lives that have been lived between tribe-dictator father, bride fight-flight and the internal-external dichotomy, the face shown to the world and the unacknowledged private ego. In every brown face I could see an existential dislocation; these were men who had left behind a country that was dreadful enough to abandon but which made them homesick, and found themselves in a city that was freezing cold, unbelievably expensive and faintly hostile.

  “I do not like England, to be honest,” Walid told me. “I do not like Middlesbrough.”

  IN DECEMBER 1998 he had enjoyed his status, his privilege and his position. A cushion, a smugness; he held himself in confidence. A servant brought his breakfast of tea, yogurt and eggs and afterward he drove to his office. It was his routine to listen to the report of the night duty officer and then take the report in hand and investigate, walking the corridors checking.

  There might have been a prisoner escape overnight, for example. A group of prisoners would distract the guards by chatting to them, telling them jokes or cadging cigarettes and then the escaping prisoner would sneak past them and wait until the dead of night to creep between guard posts. Once outside the blocks he would watch the guards up in the watch towers around the perimeter and when one came down to take a piss, get some more matches or some food, he would climb up and jump over the wall. One morning, Lt. Colonel Walid had to disentangle the problem of a prisoner who had assumed the identity of a friend of his he knew was going to be set free by drugging him and presenting himself for release. After the deception had been discovered, Lt. Colonel Walid had to release the real prisoner and face the embarrassment of having let the wrong man go.

  Sometimes there had been fights between the prisoners who made knives from pipes and dismantled iron bed struts and sharpened them to points by scraping them on concrete and wrapped shoe leather into handles. These fights could be fatal; one night six prisoners were killed, another time prisoners took over their section so that the guards could not enter for three days. This violence, the sodomy and murder, was mostly contained in the section for criminals sentenced to long prison terms. In general however, although political prisoners not sentenced to execution generally received long sentences, at least 20 years and sometimes forty, even seventy, they were educated people: doctors, professors, army officers, and the violence in his section was far less. Once, in his Special Section, a guard had been taken hostage with a knife to his throat. For this reason Lt. Colonel Walid was always escorted by a bodyguard of prison guards armed with batons. No one, not even himself, carried a gun inside the prison, in case a prisoner snatched it. The main problems that Lt. Colonel Walid had to deal with were drugs, which were endemic, brought in by family members who visited, anything, but often Valium, and scabies, spread by the overcrowding.

  Walid laughed. In the corner of the basement of Costa Coffee a young Arab man leaned closer to a young Arab woman wearing a headscarf. Walid looked behind him.

  “It was too busy!” he said and lowered his voice more seriously, “Abu Ghraib was one of the most ugly unfair prisons in the world, there was no freedom for prisoners, no real food, the food was simply inedible, they were dependent on their families bringing food. The most difficult situation, for me, as a human, was then scabies, there was no water, no sun—”

  They were never allowed outside?

  Walid put up his hands, “What can you do? What can you do?” He made mock offering to God above in his might. “Where could I put them? It was impossible to manage such a thing.”

  The prisoners were locked in without any provision for fresh air or exercise. Toilets in the corner of the cells were filthy. Pipes broke and water taps dripped scant water, once sewage leaked into the water pipes and a load of prisoners went down with dysentery and three men died. The food was “air soup” made of water and tomato paste added for a brownish color and rice; meat once a year, maybe.

  Walid told me he was always concerned about the prisoners and he would try to separate the worst cases where the skin rash covered the whole body. He had heard stories of a prisoner who had killed himself with the suffering of suppuration and itching.

  “Wallah!” Walid brought his arms around in a great circle and clapped his hands together, “What can you do?”

  After his morning rounds Lt. Colonel Walid went, as he often did, to play billiards.

  He had set up a shed and decked it out as a leisure room, a few chairs and tables and a billiard baize, for guards and trusty prisoners. He was particularly fond of playing with Abu Seif, a prisoner who had been sentenced to twenty years for smuggling currency to Jordan. Prison befell so many Iraqis that better conditions could be always be arranged if the prisoner had protectors. Special handling for those prisoners who could pay or display wasta, letters from the Presidential Office or from Ministers who asked for preferential treatment for relatives or the children of friends. Prisoners with pull had access to money, food, television, luxurious double cells all to themselves, drugs; sometimes even wives were allowed to stay overnight.

  At noon Lt. Colonel Walid decided to release a few prisoners from crushing punishment cells into the regular halls. At lunch he and the Amn officers, who had been evacuated from Baghdad, discussed whether the Americans would bomb or not. One of them was sure they would bomb Baghdad. Lt. Colonel Walid said he thought the Americans were threatening more than they were serious, they wanted to shake Saddam and keep him in line.

  After lunch he changed into a tracksuit and played more billiards with Abu Seif and several other prisoners. Lt. Colonel Walid liked playing billiards. He always won. In the late afternoon he took a shower and changed and called his wife.

  In the evening around 8 p.m. he was walking down the main road of the prison with several of the Baghdad officers. They were smoking and talking. The road ran though an open tract toward the main gate and the guard towers were quite far off. The lights were still on in the prison (lights out at 10 p.m.) and there was no black out because Abu Ghraib was not expected to be a target.

  Their stride was measured, the conversation strained. The Americans would most likely bomb when it got dark and now it was dark. They felt a heightened sensitivity, tension; there was a surreal quietude waiting among the prison blocks and the officers found themselves talking softly to each other as gravel crunched under their heels. The night carried an unknown potential.

  Then the bombs began. The horizon burst yellow flashes and the earth shook low tone vibrations. The center of Baghdad with its targeted ministries and security offices was thirty kilometers away, but the Radwaniya Presidential palace complex next to the airport was close to Abu Ghraib and the Americans were bombing Radwaniya. Close and thudding. Anti aircraft guns erupted from all over the city, white flecking streaks and red tracer arcs.

  “From everywhere they were firing. Ha! Everyone wanted to show their bravery!” The flak made a crisscrossing matrix in the sky, but the bombers flew high unseen and
could not be hit.

  The small group of Amn officers stood on the road, stopped their paltry conversation and listened. Presently, unexpectedly, two new landcruisers drove up to the main gate. From where he was standing, Lt. Colonel Walid could see an officer get out of the lead car and begin an argument with the guard to open the gate. The guard was uncertain and looked over for him to come and give him authority to let the landcruisers in. It was a time of maximum alert, the Americans had just commenced bombing the capital and it was extremely unusual for cars to drive up unannounced at eight o’clock at night.

  As he walked toward the confrontation Lt. Colonel Walid saw that the officer who was remonstrating was of the same rank, a Lt. Colonel in the army. Without introducing himself the Lt. Colonel asked for Colonel Hassan, the commander of Abu Ghraib.

  Lt. Colonel Walid told him that Colonel Hassan had been summoned to Baghdad earlier and was on his way back.

  “What do you want?” he asked the officer. The officer seemed troubled, weighted with a heavy duty, as if he had been ordered to do something he did not want to do. His speech was simultaneously rapid and hesitant. Lt. Colonel Walid noticed his hand was shaking.

  Another officer got out of the second landcruiser. As he opened the door, the light inside the car went on automatically and Lt. Colonel Walid could see, sitting on the back seat, a man, blindfolded and handcuffed, leaning forward slightly with his head bowed. He thought he glimpsed a military uniform, but could not be sure. The second officer walked briskly toward him and Lt. Colonel Walid could tell, by the well-cut quality cloth of his smooth olive green uniform, the elaborate and non-regulation woven leather belt, the expensive Browning pistol in a hand tooled leather holster and the deliberate absence of rank insignia on his shoulders, that he was an officer in the Presidential Bodyguard.