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.
THE GENERALS, IN general, recalled Kamel Sachet with hagiographies, affection and reverence:
“He cared very much about the ordinary people, he was always defending the rights of the ordinary people, he was ready to stand against even higher ranks…He did not get angry, his wishes were simple, realistic…he never had the ambition for money…he was quiet, he did not say much…he was faithful, truthful…during battles he slept on a simple folding mattress…he never had a guard outside his house although this was something normal for leaders…he himself served his guests with his own hands…he was frank; this is something natural for you in the West, but for us—I advised him often to calm down, to not speak about such things…may God bless him…amazingly courageous…close to Saddam Hussein…He was so honest in his work, so clean…He had a high standard, he was exact and correct in his job…He never hurried a decision…He concentrated on being correct in his religious duty…He prayed five times a day and if military duty of a meeting prevented a prayer he went as soon as he was able to…He ate with his soldiers, he hated to be in a bunker…. Kamel Sachet was my good friend…a very qualified officer…he was very quiet…very brave…very deliberate…he never paid attention to the Iranian forces, he would say, don’t worry, this is easy…He was a simple man, he was like Rommel—but Hitler was cleverer to make Rommel commit suicide!…
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 16th. 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.
I heard various flowery versions: that Kamel Sachet refused point blank to serve under the murderous Ali Hassan al-Majid and that Qusay called him aside to remonstra
te, Kamel Sachet remained proud and defiant, lost his temper and insisted that he would never take orders from an “aji” (a village word for a runty sheep or a small naughty boy with a recalcitrant and petulant cast) and, furious, Qusay had shot him on the spot. That Kamel Sachet had been taken to the Istikhbarat headquarters where Saddam had personally interrogated him and that Kamel Sachet had shown no fear for his life and insisted on his innocence and that Saddam had slapped him across his face in raw anger. One poignant anecdote came from Saddam’s personal physician, Ala Bashir, who also designed vast non-representational monuments in Baghdad that he afterward claimed were deliberately subversive. Ala Bashir told Jon Lee Anderson of the New Yorker, who met him many times and wrote about him, who told me that after Kamel Sachet was shot, he attended Saddam for some minor ailment and found him distracted and morose and that his skin was a strange purplish color, “as if suffused with blood.”
Kamel Sachet was not the only officer, although he was the most prominent, to be executed around this time. Dates have been confused by the Desert Fox attack, and by the varying number of weeks it took to acknowledge arrest and release the bodies to their families, and it is difficult to superimpose a conspiracy onto these deaths. Janabis heard different stories from other Janabis, the networks inside the security forces crossed accounts. By March 1999, after Ali had buried his father without a funeral, but before Saddam offered his family blood money in some effort to rehabilitate the execution of such a famous General into an unfortunate mistake, his death was being picked up by foreign intelligence monitoring websites and assigned various and vague significance.
People said he was killed because he was a Wahhabi, because he had connection to the Saudis, because he had shouted back at Saddam, because he was too proud, because Ali Hassan al-Majid hated him, because he had picked a fight with Qusay, because he was involved in a conspiracy, because the gang of Tikritis around Saddam felt threatened by his moral authority and good standing in the army and convinced Saddam that his use of Kamel Sachet’s gifts of cash and cars and land to build mosques was a direct rebuttal of his respect and gratitude due to his President.
Ali, his son, once told me that Kamel Sachet’s brothers had tried to encourage him to stand against Saddam, but that he had refused to betray his President. Dr. Hassan told me that Kamel Sachet had visited him in his office, several days before his arrest, ostensibly to recheck the amount of money he had borrowed in several installments from Dr. Hassan for the building of his third mosque. (Dr. Hassan always teased him that he did not like anyone else to contribute to his mosques. Once when Dr. Hassan had brought a prayer carpet, as a gift, Kamel Sachet had barely been able to bring himself to thank his friend and said, “Yes, well, we will put this in the women’s section.”) Dr. Hassan wondered at this odd visit, but Kamel Sachet waved away his concerns. In retrospect, Dr. Hassan thought, perhaps this was an accounting he undertook because he had some premonition of his arrest. Dr. Hassan said he had been very withdrawn in his final months; but others who knew him told me they noticed no outward difference in his behavior. Nejar told me, extraordinarily, that he had arranged for Kamel Sachet and his whole family to be smuggled safely to Kurdistan but that at the last minute, on the morning of the proposed flight, Kamel Sachet changed his mind and said, no, he would remain with his fate in Iraq.
The general consensus however, and one I heard repeated from many sources, although his family always claimed they had no idea why he had been arrested, was that he had received a letter from Nizar Khazraji, his old commander in the Special Forces and the former Chief of Staff of the Army who had defected in the mid nineties and was then living in Denmark. Others had received letters from Khazraji around the same time (Nabil was not the only exile engaged in a letter writing campaign) and the Mukhabarat was aware that Kamel Sachet had also been sent one. It was not the reception of the letter that caught him, it was the fact that he did not report it. This was the final proof, a single sheet, the only serious charge that his enemies could count against him.
Nizar Khazraji had been Chief of Staff of the army during the time of Anfal. Throughout his time in Denmark, where he lived with his family, quietly plotting, for several years, human rights groups and Kurdish groups tried to have him arrested for crimes against humanity. At the end of 2002, as the Americans gathered their “Coalition of the Willing,” and began to cast around for exiles to make phone calls to old colleagues inside Iraq convincing them not to fight, human rights groups scored a coup and an arrest warrant was issued for Khazraji. Between Washington and Copenhagen and the vagaries of international law and the realpolitik of diplomacy, Khazraji was charged but remained at home at large. Nabil Janabi says he remembers that Khazraji called him in London to ask him to help negotiate asylum in Jordan. But before Nabil could finalize such an arrangement, just days before the invasion in March 2003, Khazraji simply disappeared. There was a suspicion that he had been spirited away by the CIA; he was in fact reported to have been spotted in the south of Iraq during the invasion, perhaps negotiating with commanders behind the lines. There was even a report that he had been killed in Najaf, until the Danish police tapped a phone call he made to his son. After that he vanished completely. When I asked different generals what had happened to Nizar Khazraji they rolled their eyes and said the word was that he had been given Saudi protection and was keeping his head down in Saudi Arabia somewhere.
I often asked people who knew him whether they thought Kamel Sachet had been seriously involved in a conspiracy against Saddam or if he had remained, despite all his anger, agonies and misgivings, loyal.
In the plush surroundings of the Hyatt in Amman, a senior Janabi, a former colonel in the Mukhabarat, considered this question.
“This is the thing. Did he have a real plan against Saddam or was it just in his mind or was it a maneuver he had not thought about? Nobody knew this except him.”
The Colonel, when pressed for an opinion, thought on balance yes, Kamel Sachet was actively plotting against Saddam. Plenty of others I talked to said no, it was not in his nature to play politics, and that he would never have set himself up as a figurehead for the nefarious ambitions of others. But the Mukhabarat Colonel in Amman took another sip of tea and stretched his thoughts back to that time of stuck-stagnation and imposed a little of his own frustration on Kamel Sachet’s state of mind.
“He must have had something up his sleeve,” he guessed, “with all his activities in the military, social and religious fields…he had a strong belief in himself; he was a strong person who made decisions. We all knew the status quo couldn’t last, perhaps he was contemplating something for the future. Many of us would talk about it. What comes after Saddam? Uday or Qusay?”
The tragedy of Kamel Sachet was tripartite:
It was an ordinary everyday tragedy, the same as any other of the unnumbered millions, a man killed.
It was the tragedy of self-sacrifice: Kamel Sachet would not compromise his religion or his own values and he was killed because he was brave and would not run away but would rather accept his own death in order to spare his family further wrath.
It was a tragedy of hubris: of pride, overconfidence, self-certainty.
Kamel Sachet’s end was a very Iraqi tragedy, but Iraq was not a Shakespeare play, plotted as one man, his destiny and a final curtain. It was only an episode in a long running serial. His sons inherited his death as a scar, but they inherited his pride and his reputation also. A year after his father was killed, Ali was arrested at the border, trying to get into Jordan on a fake passport, looking for work, for a way out. He was beaten, shoved into crammed prisons, sentenced to twenty years in Abu Ghraib (released in the general amnesty of November 2002, just missing his elder brother’s wedding the day before), but he always managed to find one among his guards who had known his father and in remembrance smuggled him antibiotics when he was sick, or transferred him to a better cell.
Beget begat. Generation to generation. Pain and injustice, tyranny and su
fferance was as much the Sachet sons’ fate as every other Iraqi son. War and impoverishment and repression had led to moral disintegration and religious fanaticism, two sides of the same coin.
IT WAS EASY enough, even facile, to just shake your head at the whole blasted mess. Whenever anyone asked me where I thought Iraq was headed I always said, “God only knows!” The plot had already lurched in several different stupefying directions and prediction is a fool-pundit.
I did however, glimpse a small chink in the pessimism. For years Iraq had been getting worse, but that didn’t mean it would continue to. For years Islamicism had screamed at an ever higher radical pitch, but that didn’t mean it would continue to. If Iraq had taught me anything it was the complexity of reactions to events and ideals and isms contained within each human mind. Iraqis carried the scars and memories of good and bad and mad and sad and bits of Baathism, globs of pride and an inferiority complex; they carried Koranic surahs in their heads along with the precepts of grandfathers, memories of war slogans and the chorus of a Britney Spears song. Fractious, miasmic and changeable: Communist to Baathist. Jingo to war weary. Religious to skeptic. Fanatic to cynic. History doesn’t necessarily progress, and people don’t follow straight-line lives either.
IN JORDAN THAT summer I re-discovered Dr. Laith, the psychiatrist friend of Dr. Hassan’s who had reported on army morale during Kuwait and who had got out of Iraq in the mid nineties after being arrested. Dr. Laith had gone back to Iraq in 2003 and become adviser to the Minister of Defense. I had heard reports that he had been severely wounded during an assassination attempt in 2005, and so I was very happy to find him safe in Amman, healthy and smiling.
“No! Not wounded!” He laughed at my concern. He had not been wounded in the attack, although two of his bodyguards had. Afterward he was sent to Paris as Defense Attaché in the Iraqi embassy for a few months before returning to Iraq for a year, “it was unbearable, violence, chaos” and leaving again. Now he and his wife, Bushra, had apartments in Amman and Damascus and split their time between the two. Bushra, Dr. Laith explained tenderly, felt more comfortable in Damascus, but for him it was too familiar: “all those posters of the dictator!” It was in Damascus in exile that Bushra had first worn hijab, it had felt somehow more comfortable for her, socially, morally, when she was living alone there. But now, as she came out of the kitchen with a tray of tea glasses, I saw that she was out of hijab again. He hair was highlighted and glossily blow-dried, she wore a pair of trousers and a sleeveless camisole and lipstick penciled carefully outside her natural lip line.
The Weight of a Mustard Seed Page 23