Escape from Saddam

by Lewis Alsamari

  The four AIDS-stricken women were dealt with in a fashion brutal even by the standards of the prison. Stripped of their clothes, they were placed, alive and screaming, into an incinerator so that they and their “vile disease” could be utterly destroyed. In this way Saddam “delivered” our country from the horrific infections of the West and from the iniquities of the “evil Zionist state.” I kept quiet about my maternal grandmother’s Jewish heritage. She was one of only a handful of Jews who remained in Iraq during the great exodus of 1950. Before that time there were about 150,000 Jews living in Iraq; now there were fewer than a hundred, and it would have done me no favors if anybody suspected that I might embrace Zionism.

  Other atrocities took place more openly. As living conditions became increasingly intolerable, many women were forced into prostitution in order to make enough money to feed themselves and their families. It was an occupation deemed unacceptable by the state, punishable by death. The swift hand of justice was left to officials of the Ba’ath party, who were given orders to seek and behead all those suspected of prostitution. The standard of proof required was low, but the enthusiasm with which these officials carried out their work was high. Accompanied by two “witnesses” from the local community, they forced their way into the house of a suspect, then dragged her out into the street, where a specialist executioner was waiting with a sword. He sliced off the head of the screaming woman with one deft, well-practiced stroke. The head hung outside the woman’s house for two days, and her front door was branded with the warning “Hathihee Al-Qahba’a.” “This Is the Whore.”

  I remember a parade down one of the main thoroughfares of Baghdad when I was a child. The road was closed to traffic, and thousands of people joined the march, which was intended to celebrate the glory of Saddam. As the day wore on, however, a small group of insurgents became vocal in their criticism of the regime and started to shout anti-Saddam slogans. There weren’t very many—certainly only a small proportion of the crowd—but the Republican Guard was quick to react. A helicopter immediately flew overhead, and white paint was poured over the entire crowd—insurgents and noninsurgents alike. Heavily armed soldiers were then dispatched with orders to shoot anybody stained with white paint. The whole operation took less than an hour. A few lucky souls with paint only on their clothes managed to escape the crowd and change, but people with paint in their hair or on their bodies, where it was more difficult to remove, fared less well. The military scoured the area and shot dead anybody suspected of being part of the “uprising.”

  The town of Balad north of Baghdad had long been a place of neglect and oppression. Compared to Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, it suffered unbearable poverty and degradation. The people of Balad extended an official invitation to Saddam to come to the town to discuss matters. As a cultural mark of respect, the wife of one of the leading tribesmen arranged for Saddam’s car to be marked with henna. Secretly, the tribesmen arranged for militia armed with RPG-launchers to be stationed on rooftops on the street where Saddam’s fleet would pass; their instructions were to destroy the henna-marked car on sight.

  As arranged, the militia destroyed the marked car, along with nineteen other cars. They then came down to street level and destroyed all except three of the remaining vehicles, which retreated with great haste. A checkpoint guard who was collaborating with the tribe reported that Saddam was in one of those three cars. His head of security had been suspicious and arranged for him to be moved to an unmarked vehicle.

  The entire town immediately fled to Mosul or Samarra: everyone knew retribution would be swift and uncompromising. Within hours, armed helicopters arrived and laid waste to Balad. Then bulldozers arrived to destroy whatever was left of the place. In twenty-four hours, a whole town was turned to rubble; any civilians unlucky enough to have remained in what was left of their homes were bulldozed or burned to death.

  During my teenage years, I made no secret to my family of the fact that I wanted to leave all this. As I grew up, I witnessed more and more of my friends in Baghdad—many of whom were older than I—somehow managing to make it across the border. Some made the dangerous trip into Iran, others made it to Kurdistan. I even heard that some claimed asylum in Israel. I longed to do the same. “At least finish your schooling,” my mother would beg me. “Then at least you will have some sort of grounding.” So I persevered at school, but with a certain reluctance: I simply saw it as an obstacle to be got out of the way before I could make attempts to leave the country.

  But there were other obstacles too. In 1990, when I was fourteen, my father—who was by now back from England—took me against my mother’s will and my own to live with him at the College of Forestry and Agriculture near Mosul, where he was based. I didn’t want to be there, but my father had a hold on me, and there was little I could do.

  From an early age it had been drummed into me that the best career path I could possibly follow would be medicine. Doctors would always be in demand, it was said, and medicine would be a noble calling. To gain a place at medical school, however, was not easy. Applications to university were accepted on the basis of your average mark for your final exams in high school. Unfortunately for me, academic merit was not the only factor to be taken into account when this final mark was calculated. If the father of a student was an active member of the Ba’ath party, for example, the student would receive an extra five points; if the father was an officer in the military, the student would be awarded another five. It was reasonably common for students to finish high school with an average mark of 110 out of 100.

  My father had no military or political connections. I was not a bad student, but my final mark of 86 was always going to be insufficient for me to achieve what I wanted to. I applied for medical school, but I knew that I was unlikely to make the grade against people whose marks had been doctored as a result of their parents’ connections. Sure enough, I was rejected.

  I made other applications too. My father persuaded me to apply to the College of Forestry and Agriculture—he would be able to keep an eye on me, he said, and make sure my grades were good—and I was offered a place. But I had no desire to live with him any longer than I had to, so I also did some research into which colleges in Baghdad were likely to accept me, and I was offered two other places: one to study veterinary medicine, the other to study accounting and finance. I made the applications without much enthusiasm and chose to enroll in the latter course almost at random. I never expected to attend; I already had made other plans.

  There was a period of two months between the end of high school and starting at university. During that time, if the proper applications were made, the government allowed students to spend a brief time traveling outside Iraq. My dream had always been to return to England, but that would not be allowed. However, I reasoned, if I could at least make it to Jordan, where border control was less strict, I could apply for a student visa and make my way to the UK. My plans were hazy but bolstered by an inexorable desire to leave. Secretly I made contact with a college in England, and I was accepted for a basic medical course. My mother’s brother, Faisal, was a doctor in England, and I was sure that my uncle would help me study to become a doctor myself. But first I had to get there.

  In order to make my application for a visitor’s visa, certain papers needed to be compiled. During my final few weeks at school, I applied for a certificate of nationality. When that came through, I had the most difficult hurdle to cross. I approached my father with a certain amount of trepidation. As part of the application, I needed his written permission, and I had no reason to believe that he would give it willingly. I fully expected to have to beg, cajole, and finally argue furiously with him.

  My relationship with my father was an unhappy one. When I was a child, he had taken me from my mother in Baghdad and forced me to live in a place I hated, in the north: the compound of the College of Forestry and Agriculture, which was next to a village called Hamam Al-Aleel, near Mosul. Hamam Al-Aleel was something of a Sunni stronghol
d, a bastion of Saddam’s supporters. The village was populated by people who were loyal to the regime, and a significant proportion of the Special Republican Guard was recruited from that area. The college itself was part of a massive compound that included not only living quarters for the lecturers and the students but also a vast expanse of forest. Surrounding it all was a high, concrete wall that made it resemble a prison. But the fortifications were not to keep students in; they were to keep the vicious inhabitants of Hamam Al-Aleel out.

  In places, the wall had crumbled and toppled, so the compound itself was never completely secure. Sometimes, groups of young men entered the college and attacked anyone they saw wearing good clothes—not because they needed or wanted clothing but simply because they could. Nobody was going to argue with these fearsome animals brandishing Kalashnikovs. On other occasions these marauding groups wandered around looking for girls—there were a good number of female students at the college—and broke into the female residence halls. Sometimes at night I lay in bed and heard the yelling. The police and other authorities, many related to the villagers, typically turned a blind eye. These people were loyal to Saddam, and an unspoken law gave them carte blanche to act more or less as they wished.

  I occasionally spoke on the telephone to my family in Baghdad, but fear of my father kept me rooted in Mosul. Nevertheless, all the years I spent in that place were filled with a desire to leave. So it was that I carefully waited until he was in what passed for a good mood before I brought the matter up with him. “If I am to make an application for students’ leave, I will need your permission,” I told him.

  “Indeed?” he replied with an uncharacteristic note of joviality. “Well then,” he stretched his arms out in front of him, “you have my permission!”

  I was so astonished I barely knew what to say. I looked hard at my father and could sense that beneath the veil of helpfulness something was not right. Over the past few years he had gone to all sorts of lengths to keep me close to him, ranging from bribery to abduction to physical and mental violence. Why was he now surrendering me without a fight?

  “I need your permission in writing,” I told him.

  “Certainly,” he said and accompanied me to my school to sign the piece of paper that I hoped would be my ticket out of Iraq: “I, Saadoon Alsamari, give my permission for my son Sarmed to travel out of the country before returning to attend university.”

  I couldn’t believe how readily he had granted his permission, but I still required permission from my school. It was not simply a matter of gaining a signature from the right person, however. I approached the registrar with gifts of baklava and bananas—which were scarce at the time because of the sanctions—and literally begged him to take the relevant document to the dean to be signed.

  The next step was to take the three documents to military headquarters in Samarra, for that was where my paternal family was originally from, along with the application fee of 15,000 dinars—at that time worth about $300. “Sure,” said my father, “I’ll take you to Samarra.”

  “When can we go?”

  My father shrugged. “Two weeks, maybe three.”

  “But it’s already the middle of July,” I told him. “They would expect me back in the country at the end of August—it won’t give them enough time to process the application.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Sarmed. I’m busy here—I can’t just drop everything to take you to Samarra. You’ll have to be patient.” Suddenly his attitude seemed to be changing, as though he knew I was going to encounter these difficulties but was pleased that I would not be able to pin them precisely on him.

  “Okay,” I replied, “I’ll take the coach to Baghdad and get Uncle Saad to take me.”

  My father turned stony-faced, as he always did when my uncle was mentioned. “Saad, eh? Arrooj. Peg-leg. Very well.”

  I had one more favor to ask. “I need the application fee,” I told him. “Fifteen thousand dinars.”

  His eyes went flat. “I’m not going to give you that sort of money,” he told me adamantly.

  “Please,” I begged him. “If you don’t lend me the money, there’s no way I can get out of the country—no way I can study to become a doctor. The only other way I can raise it is to sell all my stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “My computer, my bike…”

  “They’re not yours to sell. They’re mine—you only borrow them. Everything in this house belongs to me.” He turned to leave the room. “If you need money,” he said with a hint of sarcasm, “maybe arrooj can give it to you. But somehow, I doubt it.”

  My father left me to simmer on that thought for a while. The following day I called Saad. I told him about the conversation as he listened quietly. “Okay,” he said when I had finished. “Get the coach to Baghdad and we’ll sort it all out.”

  “What about the money?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about that—I’ll get the money.”

  “Where from?”

  “I said don’t worry about it. Just get here.”

  My father seemed uncharacteristically unconcerned when I informed him boldly that I was going to Baghdad. With any luck, I was to be departing Mosul for the last time before leaving Iraq, but he clearly did not think my chances of success were high. “I’ll see you soon,” he told me before I left. It was almost as though he knew something I did not.

  The office in Samarra was deliciously cool, and the immaculately dressed military official who was to authorize my application made a stark contrast to Saad and me, rumpled and sweating from the torturous heat of the car journey from Baghdad. The room itself was bleak—a table, three chairs, and an old metal filing cabinet in the corner—but the official maintained an imperious bearing nevertheless. We needed this man’s help, so we made every effort to be scrupulously polite. “What is the boy’s name?” he asked as he examined my papers. His voice was thick with the accent of Samarra.

  “This is my nephew, Sarmed Alsamari. He wishes to make an application to travel outside the country.”

  “I’m sure he does.” He eyed me with suspicion. “What is his status?”

  “He has just finished high school, and will start university in Baghdad in September.”

  “Who is his father?”

  “Saadoon Alsamari.” A flicker of recognition crossed the officer’s face. “You will see from the documents that he has given his permission for the application to be processed. He has asked me to accompany Sarmed today.”

  “Indeed?” questioned the officer skeptically. “He should be here himself. Why could he not come?”

  “He is an important lecturer in Mosul,” Saad replied smoothly. “A very busy man. I’m sure you understand.”

  The officer remained expressionless as he placed my documents into a folder and scribbled something on a piece of paper. “Here is a telephone number,” he told Saad. “You can call it to check the status of your application. Good day.”

  “But we were under the impression that the application could be approved today.”

  “Then I am afraid, my friend, that you were under the incorrect impression. There are a number of checks I have to make.”

  “What sort of checks?”

  “Just checks,” he replied evasively. “Now, if you don’t mind, I am extremely busy.”

  Saad looked pointedly at the empty desk. “So I see,” he said and led me from the room. “Something’s not right,” he told me once the door was closed and we were out of earshot. “There’s no reason why he shouldn’t have processed that application immediately. There’s something he wasn’t telling us.”

  We phoned the number every day for the next couple of weeks, but on each occasion the official made himself unavailable.

  “We’ll have to go there again and talk to him face to face,” Saad decided. “If you’re to get out before the end of August, time is short. Someone is leaning on this pen-pusher to delay the application, and I think I know who it is.”

  The military of
ficial was, if anything, even less welcoming this time. “Listen,” he told us impatiently, “I told you that checks need to be made.”

  “Well, have you made them?” Saad put him on the spot.

  “It’s a very busy time of year.” The official avoided the question. “The schools have all finished. There’s a great deal to do.”

  Saad eyeballed him for a few moments before leaning back in his chair and breathing deeply. “Okay,” he said quietly. “Akhee [brother], I am very well connected in Baghdad. People high in the military. It is only a matter of one phone call to military headquarters for me to find out what is going on. Now, are you sure you don’t want to move a little more quickly?”

  The official gazed back impassively. He had no way of knowing if Saad was bluffing—my uncle was not from Samarra, so no word of this pushy ex-officer with a false leg and a smooth tongue from Baghdad would have reached his ears—but he decided to take the risk. “You do what you have to do,” he replied. “I know my job.”

  But Saad was not bluffing. As we drove back to Baghdad he seemed quietly confident that he could get things moving. “I have a favor to call in” was all he would say. Back at his compound in Baghdad, he elaborated. “I have a contact,” he told me. “He sometimes comes to visit us here. He is very high up, a deputy minister, and I have his private number. I’ve never made any requests of him before now, and this will be a small matter for him. I’m sure he will help us.”