1956
During the Suez crisis, Britain, France and Israel attack Egypt in response to the nationalization of the Suez Canal.
1957
Frank Lloyd Wright visits Baghdad before designing the Baghdad Opera House. Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius are likewise commissioned to design public buildings.
1958
Rushdi participates in successful negotiations with British Petroleum. Iraq’s share of its oil revenue increases to 80 per cent.
In a coup d’etat on 14 July, the entire royal family is murdered, except for Princess Badiya and her children.
Prime Minister Nuri Said hides in Thamina’s house, then is taken to her in-laws in Kazimiya.
On 15 July, Rushdi is arrested with Abdul Amir Allawi and Fadhil Jamali.
Nuri’s location is discovered. He seeks refuge with the Istrabadi family but is shot dead alongside Bibi’s old friend, Bibi Istrabadi.
Thamina’s husband Saleh is arrested for helping Nuri Said.
Britain officially recognizes new Iraq government on 1 August.
Hadi arrives in London in September and is joined a month later by Ahmad and Ghazi.
Rushdi is released from jail and put under house arrest.
1959
In January Bibi joins Hadi in London.
In March, Rushdi and his remaining siblings try to escape by car to Jordan. Their attempt is thwarted.
Rushdi’s house arrest ends in July. He leaves for London to join the rest of the family.
Thamina’s husband, Saleh, is released from jail.
The Mahdawi court – known as ‘the clown court’ – is set up to try officials of the old regime. Four are executed.
Saeeda dies.
1960
Bibi and Hadi move to Beirut. The rest of the family will follows in following years. Only Hassan and Jawad remain in Baghdad.
1961
Ahmad is admitted to MIT.
1962
Hadi is given permission to visit Baghdad briefly. It was his last visit.
1963
In a Ba’ath coup, President Abdul Karim Qassim is executed in Baghdad. Shortly thereafter, General Abdul Salam Arif becomes president.
1967
Arab countries suffer a major defeat in the Arab–Israeli War.
1968
A second Ba’ath coup d’etat takes place, leaving the Ba’athists in charge.
Ni’mati dies.
1969
Hassan is the last family member to leave for Beirut.
Ahmad returns from the U.S. with a Phd in Mathematics, then travels with Hassan to Iran to meet with Mulla Mustafa Barzani, a Kurdish leader fighting the Ba’athists for Kurdish autonomy. Ahmad takes teaching post at the American University of Beirut.
1975
The Persian Gulf Treaty is signed in Algiers, resolving a dispute between Iran and Iraq over the Persian Gulf and reneging on a promise to allow Kurds autonomy in Iraq.
Civil war breaks out in Lebanon.
1978
Ahmad establishes the Petra Bank in Jordan.
1979
The Iranian revolution overthrows the Shah. An Islamic government led by Ayatollah Khomeini emerges. Saddam Hussein takes over as president of Iraq.
Saddam accuses several Baghdadi Jews of espionage and executes them. He then executes leading religious scholar Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and his sister Bint al-Huda. He liquidates many members of the Ba’ath Party disloyal to him.
1980
The Iran–Iraq war is provoked by Saddam Hussein.
Entire communities, predominantly Shi’a, are forcibly deported from Iraq.
1982
Israel invades Lebanon.
1988
Hadi dies and is buried in Damascus.
Saddam Hussein launches the genocidal al-Anfal campaign against the Kurds. Civilians in Halabja are gassed with chemical weapons. As many as 182,000 people are killed.
The Iran–Iraq war ends in stalemate, with over one million dead.
1989
Bibi dies and is buried next to Hadi, despite her wish to be in interred in Najaf.
Ahmad is in Jordan when martial law is declared. Under threat of handover to Saddam, Ahmad flees Jordan and enters fully into opposition politics.
Ahmad and his family move to London.
1990
Saddam invades Kuwait. The First Gulf War, led by U.S.-coalition forces, forces Saddam to withdraw.
1991
United Nations sanctions are imposed on Iraq.
1992
The Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella group for all forces opposed to Saddam’s regime, holds its founding conference. Ahmad plays a leading role. He later moves to Iraqi Kurdistan, to a U.N. no-fly zone, where the INC holds its first conference on Iraqi soil.
1994
Tamara first visits Iraq.
1996
Saddam Hussein’s forces attack Arbil, a town in the no-fly zone, kill INC members and demolish their set up. Many flee to the Turkish border.
1998
Rushdi dies and is buried in London.
Ahmad plays leading role in lobby for Iraq Liberation Act that is passed by U.S. Congress.
2001
Najla dies and is buried next to Hadi and Bibi are now in Damascus.
Al-Qaeda attack of the World Trade Centre in New York City. The U.S. declares war on the Taliban in Afghanistan.
2003
In January, the INC crosses on foot into Iraqi Kurdistan.
In March, U.S. coalition forces attack Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime.
The Iraqi Museum and National Archives are looted.
Ahmad, Tamara and the INC group arrive in Baghdad on April 15.
In May, U.N, Security Council Resolution 1483 declares a U.S.-coalition occupation of Iraq. The Iraqi Governing Council is appointed in July. Ahmad is one of 9 rotating members. A Coalition Provisional Authority is formed. The Iraqi Governing Council is appointed during this period.
Saddam Hussein is captured in a hole in the ground by U.S. forces.
A Special Tribunal is established to try Saddam and senior Ba’ath government members for crimes against humanity.
2004
Transitional Iraqi government is established.
Bibi’s remains are transferred to Najaf.
2005
First nationwide elections are held in Iraq.
Ahmad Chalabi becomes Deputy Prime Minister.
2006
Saddam Hussein is executed.
2007
Hassan visits Baghdad for the first time since 1969.
Prologue
THE KITCHEN WAS bare, an abandoned room. The sole trace of its former occupants was a squat, white bone-china teapot. I reached for it, turning it over in my hands. On its underside were stamped the words ‘State of India’. Alone in this silent space, the teapot spoke to me of a bygone era that had come to an abrupt end.
It was 19 April 2003, ten days after the fall of Baghdad to the US-led coalition forces, and the city, depleted and derelict, was grappling with a new reality. The heat of the day was intolerable, and I could feel my very eyeballs become coated in perspiration, a strange and unwelcome sensation. This was my first ever visit to Baghdad, my father’s home, his parents’ and grandparents’ before him, and theoretically mine as well. I had arrived in the capital after a long car journey from the south in the company of my father – Ahmad Chalabi, a leading opposition figure to Saddam Hussein’s fallen regime.
Everybody asks me about my father. He has been labelled a maverick, a charlatan, a genius. He has been named as the source of supposedly faulty intelligence that led America into the war in Iraq. He has been called a triple agent for the US, Iran and Israel. But this is my story. He has his own tale to tell, although I acknowledge that my father has played a pivotal role in shaping my relationship to his country, Iraq. As with everything in the Middle East, nothing makes sense until you understand the past, and the past is never
straightforward.
During this, my first visit to Baghdad, whole convoys and fresh hordes were descending on the capital: the streets were busy with an assortment of opposition leaders, formerly exiled professionals, gold diggers and prospectors, sceptical foreign journalists – and ordinary Iraqis: doctors, lawyers, carpenters and shopkeepers who were returning home. For many, their homecoming was clearly a source of mixed emotions. For my part, as I entered the city with a large group of Iraqis who had been working for the opposition in exile, I swiftly understood that my life here would not be governed by a familiar set of values based on logic, chronology and order.
All of my companions, including my father, had their own personal memories of Baghdad. Like little children, they sparked with enthusiasm and anticipation when we entered the city in which they had been born. Many kissed the ground in tears before rising hastily, anxious to find their relatives and loved ones. I had none to find here. I stood by, silently searching their faces for an emotion I could recognize. None came. I felt cold and detached. This place was as foreign to me as any other, and I had no memories to draw upon to make me feel otherwise. What came instead was an image of Beirut, my birthplace. I remembered clearly the feelings of comfort, safety and warmth I always had deep inside whenever I was on a plane coming in to land in Beirut, the sea shimmering against the horizon. As much as I wanted to push that image away and connect with the ground beneath my feet in Baghdad, I couldn’t.
It quickly became clear on our arrival that the promised ‘liberation’ had not happened. The sense of excitement and expectation with which I had travelled was replaced by a deep foreboding as I entered a shattered world. I went to my grandparents’ house in Baghdad. Forty-five years had passed since they had been forced to flee the country. A big, solid, four-storey home, it was designed in the Bauhaus style and built in the late 1940s. The clean lines of the windows, the large rooms and elegant staircases were all suggestive of that era’s faith in a better future. The place smelt the same as my grandparents’ subsequent homes in Britain, infused with an aroma of rice and something indefinable. In London, they had recreated what they could of all that was soothing and familiar to them, building altars to their old life through the objects that had followed them into exile – their photographs, silver and precious carpets. However, they had merely been repeating a process they had already been through during an earlier period of forced expatriation, in Beirut, before the Lebanese Civil War drove them on once more.
I knew this house from the stories of other relatives, stories which had been told to me over and over again, but I could never have imagined the sense of emptiness that echoed down the long corridors and through the airy rooms. I tried to remember the rhythms of my grandmother’s deep voice as she spoke of her former home when I was a little girl: ‘You can’t imagine the wonderful life we had in Baghdad, Tamara. I was like a queen …’
A life-size stone statue of a deer stood in the withered garden outside the house. I knew that my grandfather Hadi had loved that deer as much as his father before him. Someone had beheaded it. My first impression was that the deer looked almost offensive among the unkempt grounds, as it suggested a more carefree time when the people and the country had been very different. It was now a dirty ivory colour, yet there remained a certain sensuality about it as it stood proud, the fluidity of its hind muscles elegantly carved. Even the amputated head lying on the ground was playful. Its large dark eyes were well defined and penetrating, their gaze frozen in time.
My journey to Iraq had really begun in my head many years earlier, in my grandparents’ house in Beirut. It was 1981. I was seven years old. A man’s voice, sonorous and beautiful, cut across a crowded room, singing about a land I did not know.
A man fired an arrow that slayed the child.
Oh my child, they killed a child
Woe is me, woe is me …
Although the singer was tucked away in a corner, his voice held the room captive. I could not understand why the audience wept as he sang about a thirsty child killed in his father’s arms. I had never heard anything like it before. It disturbed my sense of the established routine and quiet of my grandparents’ house.
I crawled through the legs of the grieving adults towards the familiar figure of my uncle Hassan. He sat listening intently, inscrutable in the dark glasses he wore to mask his blindness. I squeezed myself in next to him, watching as he tapped his knee with the palm of his hand in time to the song. I asked him why everyone was crying. He told me that it was in memory of Imam Hussein.
‘Did he die today?’ I asked.
‘No, no, Tamoura,’ he said fondly, calling me by the nickname he had given me. ‘He died a long time ago, before any of us were born.’
‘So why are you still crying?’
He explained that the singer was commemorating the Battle of Karbala, when Imam Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson, was confronted by Caliph Yazid’s forces of 4,000 men. A very long time ago Hussein had gone to war, taking his family along, and a small army of only seventy-two men, many of whom also went into battle with their women and children. When the armies clashed on the banks of the Euphrates River, in the month of Muharam, Hussein was defeated. He, his infant son and his men were slain and the women and children taken into captivity.
My uncle smiled sadly. He said that time did not lessen the sense of tragedy of an act that had the power to haunt people forever. He told me that Hussein had been killed by an evil man for the sake of haqq – truth and justice.
‘But if it was so long ago, then why are you still crying?’ I persisted.
Hassan told me that during the first ten days of Muharam, which were called Ashura, this event and its consequences were remembered. My grandfather Hadi used to host a recital in Baghdad on the last day of Ashura, and hundreds of people would go to his home to commemorate it. He added that Ashura was especially painful for our family, because it reminded us that we had been deprived of our own country.
‘We are foreigners everywhere, and we have lost so much,’ he said. He touched me lightly on the shoulder. ‘You should know these things. They are part of your history, of who you are.’ I hated what he said. Surely I belonged exactly where I was? My uncle sensed my discomfort. ‘Do you deny your roots?’ he asked, smiling. I didn’t understand what he meant; he explained that he, my father, my grandfather and grandmother had once had another country, but that they had lost it. Their homeland was my home as well. I scowled. Lebanon was my country and my mother’s country, Beirut the city where I had been born. I was not a foreigner here.
A slice of chocolate cake soon made me forget what my uncle had said, but on some level I dimly perceived that the grievance captured in the words of the song was the same as that which made my father’s family weep in their exile. They were waiting to return to their homeland. Their lost country maintained a hold over them, the legacy of an inheritance centuries old.
The earliest indications of a settled civilization in the world are found in the region that is known today as Iraq. Between the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, lower Tigris and Euphrates basin cities such as Ur, Uruk and Larsa emerged and stratified societies developed within them. Mesopotamia – as the Greeks referred to the region between the two rivers – covered roughly the central southern part of what is now Iraq. Mesopotamia was also the term used to describe the provinces of the Ottoman Empire that belonged to this region. The ancient history of Mesopotamia is now lost to us, but it was mythologized by the Sumerians in epics such as the story of Gilgamesh, which was first written down in around 2000 BCE and which is a story of kingship and heroism that has informed and inspired people ever since.
The region that corresponds to the north of modern-day Iraq was the birthplace of the world’s first empire. The Assyrians, descendants of the Akkadians who settled in the land of Sumer, engaged in what amounted to a conquest of the known world of their time – from Persia to Egypt. The Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians and later the Babylonians created w
hat are, in effect, the foundations of civilization today. Our seven-day week, sixty-minute hour and much of our understanding of the constellation of the skies are the direct legacies of this defining period in human history. The mythologies of a large cast of gods and goddesses survived from this period too: Anu, the heaven-god of Mesopotamia, was the equivalent of Greek Zeus, while Ishtar or Inana was the goddess of love, war and fertility, and the precursor of Egyptian Isis.
Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family Page 2