The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  I thought back to the Sachet family I had known in the months after the invasion, now torn by events, out of contact, lost, dead, imprisoned. I remembered Omar’s tall gravity; his father’s height, his father’s taciturn quietness. He had always avoided sitting down and talking to me one-on-one; he was busy, he was out, he sent his greetings. Now I understood why. I thought of Ali who I teased because he got fatter and fatter every time I saw him. I remembered how funny and abashed he had been, showing me the room he had decorated for his new bride and pointing out, blushing, the pink tulle draped over the lamps and the satin pink bed spread and the vases of cloth roses, shyly, asking my opinion, “Will she like it, do you think?” I thought of their father, whose picture I kept as I wrote—as I write—to watch over my efforts and of Shadwan of whom there was no news at all. And I thought of Ali’s baby son, named Kamel after his grandfather, and the legacy of war and anger and revenge and pride that he would inherit.

  I mused these final paragraphs into an unfinished conclusion. So many unintended consequences. How/why had the sons of Saddam’s Iraq come to break their country, deracinate family and murder neighbors? Who knew when it might be possible to go back to Baghdad and drive through the scarred and scabbed and re-wounded neighborhoods, look up the Sachets, and other friends, those that had managed to survive and ask, again: What happened here?

  Cast of Characters

  THE SACHET FAMILY

  Of the sub tribe of the Albu Hassoun of the greater Janabi Tribe.

  General Kamel Sachet Aziz al Janabi Abu Omar

  Um Omar Shamh, his wife

  Shadwan Kamel Sachet’s eldest daughter, and his favorite

  Omar his son

  Ali his son

  Sheima his daughter

  Amani his daughter

  Ahmed his son

  Zeinab his daughter

  Mustafa his son

  Zaid his son

  Abdullah Kamel Sachet’s elder brother

  Khalid Kamel Sachet’s younger brother

  Abu Shakr Kamel Sachet’s brother-in-law

  Abdul Qadir Kamel Sachet’s nephew and driver

  Ali Misjil sometime servant and driver of Kamel Sachet

  OFFICERS IN THE IRAQI ARMY

  General Raad Hamdani Commander of the 2nd Republican Guard Corps until 2003. Cooperated with the Americans after the invasion. Now lives in Jordan.

  General Latif Commander of the battle of Seif Said 1981. Died of natural causes sometime in the nineties.

  Adnan Khairallah Saddam’s cousin and brother-in-law. Khairallah was the popular Defense Minister throughout the Iran-Iraq war. He died in a helicopter crash in 1989. There were always rumors that Saddam had Khairallah killed; earlier that year there had been a family dispute, when Saddam imprisoned his eldest son Uday for killing his favorite bodyguard and Uday’s mother and close relative of Khairallah’s tried to intervene. It was not the first time a prominent military figure had been killed in a helicopter crash. Khairallah’s was the only Baathie statue to remain untouched in Baghdad after the destruction and looting of 2003.

  Nizar Khazraji Chief of Staff of the army 1985–88, defected to Jordan in 1996. Khazraji spent much of the ’90s conspiring with other exile groups, from exile in Denmark. Human rights groups demanded his arrest for crimes against humanity for his involvement in the Anfal campaigns against the Kurds, but he fled prosecution before the war in 2003 and was last spotted in southern Iraq just after Baghdad fell. He has since disappeared and is rumored to be living in Saudi Arabia.

  Barakh Haj Hunta Special Forces General, friend of Kamel Sachet’s and famous for throwing Kurds out of helicopters during the Anfal operations. He was involved in an officers’ plot against Saddam just after the uprisings of 1991.

  Major Nejar Special Forces officer and Kamel Sachet’s sometime adjutant. In 2003 he fought with Ali Hassan al-Majid in the south against the British.

  BAATHIES

  Sabawi Ibrahim Hassan Saddam’s half brother and head of Mukhabarat during the 1991 Gulf War, head of the Amn from 1991 to 1996, later a Presidential adviser to Saddam. When the Americans invaded he sought refuge in Syria from where he organized insurgent operations inside Iraq until the Syrians handed him over to the Americans in 2005. He was put on trial in Baghdad for crimes against civilians during the 1991 uprising and sentenced to death in 2007.

  Sultan Hashem The popular and well respected commander of the First Army Corps on the northern front in 1988. Sultan Hashem later served as Defense Minister at the time of the American-led invasion of 2003. After the fall of Baghdad he went into hiding in Mosul; General Petraeus offered him a dignified surrender and there were intimations of a brief detention, but the new Iraqi government put him on trial on Anfal charges and he was sentenced to death, along with Ali Hassan al-Majid, in 2007. His execution has been delayed as the Sunni faction in the Iraqi government argues that he was just a career soldier discharging his duty and President Talabani has stepped in, refusing to sign his death warrant, saying that Sultan Hashem had good connections with the Kurds while he was serving in the north.

  Ali Hassan al-Majid Held many key posts in Saddam’s regime: head of the Mukhabarat, Defense Minister, Acting Governor of Kuwait. But it was his role as Saddam’s ruthless instrument of the Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1987–88 that defined his career. He oversaw the forced deportations of Kurdish villages and was given the nickname Chemical Ali in reference to his enthusiastic gas attacks against civilians. In 2003 he was Commander of the South and was captured by American forces soon after the fall of Baghdad. In 2007 he was convicted on Anfal charges in the same trial as Sultan Hashem and also sentenced to death. At the time of writing he is still pending execution.

  Aziz Salih Numan Governor of Basra, Najaf and Kerbala during the eighties, Governor of Kuwait during 1990–91 occupation, Baath Party Chief of Maysan province early nineties. In 2003 Numan was Regional Baath Party Commander for West Baghdad. He was captured by American forces near Baghdad in May 2003 and remains in detention awaiting unspecified charges.

  Hussein Kamel Saddam’s son-in-law and cousin. Rose through the ranks of the Mukhabarat to head Iraq’s Military Industrial Complex until 1995 when he defected, along with his brother and both their wives (Saddam’s daughters), to Jordan. For several months he gave information to Jordanian intelligence and to UNSCOM and the International Atomic Energy Agency, about Saddam’s weapons programs and capabilities. Unbelievably he and his brother were persuaded to return to Iraq in mid 1996. Apparently they trusted that their family status would offer some immunity; instead Saddam forced his daughters to divorce them, and then ordered the house where they were staying surrounded. Hussein Kamel and his brother, Saddam Kamel, were killed after a twelve hour shoot out.

  Saddam Kamel Hussein Kamel’s brother, also married to one of Saddam’s daughters. Head of the Republican Guard in the mid eighties, afterward consigned to “Presidential Adviser.” He died along with his brother after their defection to Jordan. His wife and children, together with Saddam’s other daughter and her children, now live quietly in Amman.

  Arshad Yassin An Air Force Lt. General, Saddam’s cousin, brother-in-law, sometime chief of his bodyguards and personal helicopter pilot. Yassin was notoriously involved in the looting of archaeological treasures from Baghdad’s National Museum in the nineties and selling them abroad. He was captured by American forces disguised as a poor farmer in November 2003 and remains in American custody in Iraq.

  Sheikh Khalid Al Janabi Adnan Janabi’s elder brother, close friend of Saddam’s and Mayor of Baghdad. Died in Rome in 1996, Adnan suspects, poisoned on Saddam’s orders.

  Uday Hussein Saddam’s eldest son, head of Iraqi Olympic Committee, Commander of Saddam Fedayeen, main oil smuggler during the sanctions years and heir apparent. Uday was notorious for his drinking and playboy ways and for his psychotic sadism. He tortured his friends and raped whatever pretty girl was unlucky enough to walk into his view. In his two more famous bouts of murd
erous excess he killed his father’s personal servant at a party in 1988 (in front of Suzanne Mubarak, wife of the Egyptian President, who was a guest), and shot his uncle Watban (wounding him only) at a family party in 1995. He survived an assassination attempt in 1996, but the eight bullets he took left him with seizures and a limp. After the American invasion he and his brother went on the run until they were betrayed to the Americans in July 2003 for a combined $30 million reward. Both were killed in the house where they were hiding in Mosul after a four hour battle with American troops.

  Qusay Hussein Saddam’s second son, quieter and more responsible than Uday, sometimes tipped as Saddam’s successor over his brother. He oversaw the intelligence and security services, the Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard. In the final shoot out with the Americans, Qusay’s fourteen-year-old son, Mustafa, was the last to die inside the house.

  POST INVASION

  Ayad Allawi Secular Shia and former Baath Party member, later Prime Minister of the interim Iraqi administration under the American occupation. In the mid seventies Allawi left Iraq to pursue medical studies in London and began to break with the Party. In 1978 he and his wife survived a vicious ax attack at their home, widely believed to be an assassination attempt by Saddam in retaliation for plotting against him. In the eighties and nineties he remained politically active among exile groups, eventually founding the Iraqi National Accord and maintaining myriad links to foreign intelligence services. In 2004 he became the Prime Minister of Iraq in a temporary government responsible for drawing up a constitution before national elections. Allawi’s party polled only 14 percent in the election in January 2005, much to the disappointment of his American backers, his secular model of liberal democracy losing to a coalition of Shia parties. His party continues to be represented in the Iraqi parliament, although his MPs withdrew their participation during a boycott in 2007 and Allawi now spends much of his time in London with his family and traveling throughout the Middle East, maintaining his networks and garnering support for the future.

  Ahmed Chalabi Hailing from a prominent Shia family, Chalabi left Iraq in 1956 and has spent much of his life in the United States and Britain. In the seventies he headed Petra Bank in Jordan, but was forced to flee over fraud charges, which have never been reconciled. In the mid nineties Chalabi founded the INC, Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group, funded by the Americans, among others (he always had close ties with the Iranians) and based himself in Kurdish controlled northern Iraq from where he tried to overthrow Saddam. In the run up to the American invasion, he was the Pentagon’s favorite to run the country, but reports of his fraud and unpopularity with Iraqis curtailed American support. In particular Chalabi was accused of supplying some of the faulty intelligence used by the British and American governments as part of their arguments for the urgency of a war. In post-Saddam Iraq Chalabi has proved himself a wily chameleon, allying himself to the Shia parties in power and positioning himself as acting Oil Minister and head of various political committees, ever the operator.

  Jalal Talabani Leader of the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurds Party) and currently President of Iraq. Talabani fought Saddam from the Kurdish mountains for almost all his life. After the uprisings of 1991 Kurdistan became a de facto autonomous enclave, divided between Talabani’s PUK and his rival Masoud Barzani’s KDP (Kurdish Democratic Party). Despite a civil war in 1996 between the two, Talabani was instrumental in establishing a reasonably functional administration in Kurdistan during the nineties. After the war he became President of Iraq, a largely ceremonial position, to which his grandfatherly elder statesman air is well suited.

  Moqtada Sadr Head of the Sadr political block in the post war Iraqi parliament and one of the largest militias, the Mehdi Army. Often referred to as the “firebrand cleric” by Western media, Moqtada’s sudden rise as the champion of millions of the poor urban Shia underclass surprised many Iraqis as much as the Americans. He has consistently opposed the American occupation, alternately fighting an insurgency, clashing with rival Shia parties and their militias and then offering periodic ceasefires. He remains a key player, one of the few in the current political firmament who remained in Iraq throughout the Saddam years.

  SCIRI Supreme Council for the Islamic Republic of Iraq, now renamed, more tactfully, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council. During the Saddam years it was based in Tehran and funded by the Iranians. It is one of the main Shia parties of the post Saddam Iraq and maintains its own militia, the

  Badr Brigade Now renamed the Badr Organization. SCIRI and Moqtada’s party and militia have continued to battle for control over southern Shia cities, in particular Basra.

  Dawa Party The Dawa Party was founded in the sixties by a group of prominent Shia leaders, some from the Shia religious establishment, as a political party that would promote religious laws, use Islam as a framework for governance and combat the secular promises of the Communists and Baathists. By the early seventies it had attracted a strong following among young disenfranchised Shia from the South and was militantly opposed to the new Baathie regime. There followed the inevitable brutal crackdown. The Dawa Party was naturally attracted to the success of Khomeini’s Shia revolution in Iran, although there were fundamental ideological differences between them. When the Iran-Iraq war broke out fragments of the Dawa Party fled to the safety of Iran, split into SCIRI, ideologically and financially much closer to the Iranians, and continued to organize attacks on the Baathie high command inside Iraq. In fact it was Dawa assassins who tried to kill Saddam Hussein in 1982 in the town of Djeil. This assassination attempt was punished with a mass execution of local men and it was these murders which provided the case against Saddam for which he was ultimately hanged in December 2006.

  Dawa returned to Iraq from impoverished exile after Saddam’s fall and became part of the Shia ruling coalition, along with SCIRI and Moqtada’s party, based on their bloc victory in the 2005 election.

  Nouri Al Maliki Leader of the Dawa Party, was chosen as Prime Minister as a compromise after weeks of stalemate between the other Shia candidates.

  SECURITY SERVICES OF SADDAM’S IRAQ

  The Iraqi people were subject to a vast and overlapping network of state security agencies. In general terms it’s easy enough to think of the Mukhabarat as the CIA and the Amn as the FBI; but in Iraq this comparison is a bit disingenuous. Both agencies pummeled the private lives of Iraqi citizens in the cause of state security.

  Mukhabarat Mukhabarat simply means “intelligence” in Arabic, but it’s a word which virtually all Arabs, no matter which king/dictator/Emir/President they find themselves subject to, have learned to utter in a whisper. In Iraq the Mukhabarat attracted the cream of the Sunni state bureaucratic elite; its senior officers were often erudite and more flexible and cunning in the discharge of their duties than the more thuggish Amn.

  Amn Amn means “security” in Arabic. The Amn, with its various branches, operated in the space between the police and the Mukhabarat. The Amn were responsible for the mid-level, everyday business of state control: piles of gray files containing handwritten reports on teachers and doctors, Imams and café proprietors. Matters of petty but terrifying concern were recorded: a brother who lived in Frankfurt, failure to regularly attend Baath Party meetings, a critical comment overheard in a restaurant, a nephew who was a military deserter, an application for an exit visa, a new car in the time of sanctions that might indicate a black market income, an overly religious cousin…

  Istikhbarat Military Intelligence.

  Fedayeen Translated as “those who sacrifice.” Throughout the Middle East the word Fedayeen has come to refer to volunteer militias who are devoted to their cause and will fight until martyrdom in its service.

  In Iraq Saddam created the Saddam Fedayeen, “Saddam’s men of sacrifice,” as an elite military cadre of around 30,000 men. Saddam’s Fedayeen swore loyalty to Saddam rather than to Iraq and are widely reported to have been used as a death squad, in particular exterminating prostitute
s as part of a crackdown on vice in the nineties.

  Peshmerga Kurdish fighters. Peshmerga in Kurdish means literally “those who face death.” The Kurdish peshmerga fought a series of effective (although not necessarily victorious) guerrilla campaigns against Saddam’s government much as they fought for independence from virtually every government in Baghdad over the past century. In the post-Saddam Iraq the peshmerga remain a military force.

  OTHER IRAQI COMPLICATIONS

  OF A RELIGIOUS NATURE

  There are two main sects of Islam.

  Sunni and Shia The split has its origins in seventh century battles over the succession to the Caliphate; today Sunni and Shia are separated by differences of religious culture, traditions and observance. The Shia, for example, revere early Shia martyrs and Imams, the most famous being Hussein, almost as saints, while Sunnis find this idolatrous.

  Throughout the world the Sunni are the majority of Muslims. But the Shia heartland is in the south of Iraq around the shrine towns of Kerbala and Najaf. Estimates differ, but perhaps 60 percent of the Iraqi population is Shia, concentrated in the poorer south, while the Sunnis are in the center and the north of the country, and historically formed the trading and political elites in Baghdad and Mosul. During the Ottoman period, the British mandate, several dictators and twenty four years of Saddam, Iraq was governed mostly by Sunnis. Herein lies part of the resentment which has given rise to the sectarian violence of the post Saddam era. It should be borne in mind, however, that the preceding paragraph is a vast over simplification; that Shia and Sunni Iraqis all come essentially from the same tribal and Bedu traditions that migrated out of the Arabian peninsula during the Muslim conquests, that many tribes contain both Sunni and Shia and that intermarriage, particularly among the middle classes, is common.

  Wahhabism A Sunni strain of Islam based on the fundamental teachings of the eighteenth century Islamic scholar Mohammed ibn Wahhab. Wahhabism is a strict form of fundamentalism which emphasizes the literal application of the Koran and the Hadith, the book of the Prophet Mohammed’s sayings and teachings. For example, Wahhabis often grow a long beard but keep their mustache trimmed carefully above their top lip and wear their dishdashas short, at mid calf level, according to the example of the Prophet Mohammed. Wahhabism is espoused by the Saudi royal family and is the predominant strain of Islam in Saudi Arabia.