Escape from Saddam

by Lewis Alsamari

  That afternoon he made the call. “This is officer Saad from Al-Zaafaraniya compound. My nephew is having trouble with an official in Samarra who is being slow in processing his application to travel before he goes to university, and time is becoming short. Is there anything you can do to help things along?”

  Approval from Samarra came through the very next day.

  One final hurdle remained between me and the Jordanian border. The approval from Samarra had to be taken to the central military office in Baghdad for the final document to be stamped. Saad and I went there that day; I was buoyant with excitement at the prospect of being able to leave as soon as the final piece of this interminable jigsaw of bureaucracy was in place. Outside the huge, revolving glass doors a crowd of bearded Iraqis wearing dishdash sat at small portable tables, umbrellas protecting them from the sun. These were the statement-makers: anybody with a request to be made had to pay one of these statement-makers to draw the request up as an official document before it could be taken to one of the clerks inside the office. Some of them had old-style cameras on tripods with black hoods at the back, because all documents required an accompanying photograph. We paid several hundred dinars to one of these men to produce our written request, and he attached my papers to it using a needle before giving it to us to take inside.

  A harassed-looking official took my papers and looked at them. After a few moments he shook his head. “Too late,” he said.

  “What do you mean, too late?” Saad asked.

  “My friend, we have tens of thousands of applications. It will take at least four weeks to process this—they need to be thoroughly examined by military intelligence. By that time he will have only a week in which to travel—it won’t be worth it.”

  “I can spend a week traveling!” I butted in.

  “It’s not up to you, young man,” the official told me. “If we say it’s not worth it, it’s not worth it.” He handed the papers back to me.

  “But it’s only late because we were delayed by the official in Samarra…” I started to argue, but he had already moved away to join his colleague.

  Crestfallen, I turned to Saad. “Come on, Sarmed,” he said quietly. “We’re wasting our time here. Let’s go home.”

  Saad tried to approach his high-ranking contact once more, but that door seemed shut to us. “This is the second favor,” my uncle was told. “I have a job to do—I can’t keep sorting out your problems.”

  Saad looked demoralized as he put the phone down. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I feel as though I’ve let you down.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve been let down,” I told him, “but not by you.” We sat in silence for a while. “It was my father, wasn’t it? He tipped off the official in Samarra about my application and asked him to delay it.”

  Saad nodded. “It can’t have been anybody else.”

  “No wonder he was so relaxed about me leaving. Why does he have to be like this? I thought he wanted me to study medicine.”

  “He had his reasons.” Saad muttered the platitude, unwilling to speak badly of my father in front of me; but the steel in his eyes told of less forgiving thoughts.

  “There must be something I can do,” I almost whispered. “I can’t stay here—this place is making me mad.”

  Saad looked at me closely. “I’d hoped that you would be able to get out legally,” he said after a while. “There is another option, but it is very dangerous.”

  “What is it?”

  “You would be taking a great risk.”

  “I’m not a child anymore,” I said impatiently. “What do you have in mind?”

  He still seemed reluctant to tell me. “I have heard that there are Kurds who are willing to smuggle people north into Kurdistan. They would forge a document saying that you are their son. From there they would get professionals to create false papers and take you over the border into Turkey.”

  We were silent for some time. Both of us knew the implications of what he was suggesting. If I was caught trying to leave the country without the proper permissions, the chances were that I would be escorted to Abu Ghraib. Once there, I would hope that the guards did not decide to become creative in their dealings with me. I did my best to dispel those thoughts. “Do you know anyone who does this?” I asked Saad.

  He shook his head. “Not directly. And it will take a while to find someone—I can’t just approach people in the street and ask them if they are willing to smuggle my nephew to Turkey. It could take some weeks. You’ll have to start at university in the meantime.”

  I shrugged. “If it’s only for a few weeks…”

  “You can’t make this decision lightly, Sarmed,” my uncle told me almost with impatience. “It’s not a game, and you know what will happen if you get caught. Maybe you should think about staying—get your degree and see how you feel then.” His piercing eyes looked straight at me. “I understand why you want to leave, but everybody wants you to stay.”

  “I know,” I replied, humbled by the affection my uncle was showing me. “But please, Uncle Saad, find out what you can.”

  “Okay, Sarmed. I’m not promising anything, but I’ll do my best.”

  With a heavy heart, I enrolled at university to study accounting and finance, hanging on to the hope that Saad would find someone who could help us, and soon. I did not consider what would happen if I was caught—such thoughts were too unpleasant to dwell upon—and in any case I was single-minded in my determination not to stay in Iraq for a day longer than was necessary.

  My attendance at university was poor. As I look back now I realize I should have made the most of it, but thoughts of escape were foremost in my young mind. I was not to know that my actions would precipitate everything that followed, but my enthusiasm for the course was nonexistent, and in any case I did not expect to be around long enough to make it worth my while to even show up. Once my nonattendance hit a certain level, I knew that republican law dictated that a letter be sent to Samarra—probably to the same official with whom I had had dealings before—and I would be tracked down and called in. I would then be given a choice: find another course and attend it properly, or enlist in the army. But by the time that happened, I was convinced, I would be well on my way to Turkey.

  I saw Saad every day. Sometimes we played chess; other times we just sat and chatted. Every day I asked him how his inquiries were going; every day he skirted around the issue. “I need a few more days,” he would say. “Be patient, Sarmed. I’m working on it.” And I knew he was.

  It was acknowledged without words that Saad was more of a father to me than my father had ever been. He was beginning to look pressured, however, and although he would not admit it, it was clear to me that he was having trouble finding one of these mysterious Kurdish smugglers. Most of the Kurdish population was centered around Mosul, and Saad had no contacts in that part of Iraq.

  One morning, the local Ba’ath party official knocked on our door, and my mother answered. “Sarmed Alsamari must report to the military headquarters in Samarra.” There was no point asking questions: it was couched as a request but was very much an order, and if I failed to show up, then the Red Berets would soon come asking for me. Once more, Saad and I found ourselves on the route to Samarra. “It’s okay,” Saad told me. “They will offer you another course—you had better attend this one!”

  The same military official was dealing with my case. “It appears your attendance at university has been poor,” he told me with more than a hint of satisfaction.

  I could not deny it. “I didn’t find that I was suited to it,” I lied. “I would like to find a different course to study.”

  “It’s too late for that,” the official told me. He handed me a sheaf of documents. “These are your call-up papers. You are to report immediately to Baghdad military training center. You will undergo three months’ training before being assigned to your unit.” His words fell upon me like body blows as he turned to Saad. “And there is no point asking your friends to rap my k
nuckles this time,” he told him. “If he fails to attend university, he joins the army. Republican law, and there is nothing you can do about it.”

  CHAPTER 3

  THE ROAD TO AL-MANSOUR

  Every month we were granted leave from the army. Papers would be issued by an arif, stating how long the leave period was and the date on which it ended. Leave periods were dictated by the army. You could request time off under exceptional circumstances such as the death of a close family member—after inquiries had been made and only if the death was not politically connected—but otherwise you could go home only when you were told.

  In the absence of genuinely exceptional circumstances, some soldiers went to the most extreme lengths to engineer them. I saw desperate young men deliberately open fire on their feet—often causing the loss of toes and legs—in order to be awarded temporary or permanent leave from service. I saw them breaking their own arms or cajoling others to do it for them. I saw them firing their AK-47s close to their eardrums so that they could sustain deafness and be sent home to recuperate.

  Whenever any soldiers were granted leave—for whatever reason—I envied them with all my being. The wake-up call would be blown about half an hour after the early-morning call to prayer, which itself was about half an hour before sunrise so that the faithful could complete their prayers before daylight. But everyone who was going home for a few days would be up well before that, preparing their bags and getting ready to leave. I would pretend to sleep through the noise, not wanting to listen to their good-natured gloats about what they would get up to at home.

  When it was my turn for a break, however, it was a different matter. I too would be up before the sun, hastily collecting my things and checking more than once that I had my leave papers all in order. They were thin, easily crumpled pieces of parchment, and the stamps were often blurred and unreadable. Checkpoint guards relied more on the fact that a color-rotation system was used than on their ability to read the stamps, but it was common for soldiers to be escorted back to their unit simply because their perfectly valid leave papers were illegible.

  Once outside the gates, the soldiers who had been granted leave bought watermelon or bottles of water for the journey. The richer ones flagged down a taxi to take them to the bus station. The rest of us had to walk, but the hour-long trip to the station was always completed with a lighter heart than the trip back. The journey to Baghdad took a good six hours, and I counted every kilometer impatiently, desperate to get back to the comforts of home, such as they were. Once there, I spent a glorious five or six days in the little house my mother shared with my siblings and grandparents, simply relaxing, away from the regimented horrors and brutality of the army.

  My mother would ask me what I had been up to, but I would answer her only vaguely, keen to protect her from the realities of what was going on. Uncle Saad, on the other hand, had no need to ask. He had been through army life and he knew of its bitter realities. I did my best to speak to him regularly from the unit, but all our calls were monitored so there was no way I could ask him about the one thing that was constantly on my mind: his attempts to smuggle me out. Back home, it became clear that things were not going well. Smugglers did not advertise their services on street corners, and they had every reason to be suspicious of this ex–army officer making inquiries about their illegal activities.

  The night before I had to return was always a time of bitter despair and anguish, but there was nothing I could do to avoid the inevitable fact that I had to go back. My farewells to my mother and my brother and sister were emotional; my grandmother cried, while my grandfather, who seemed older every time I saw him, sat quietly in the corner of the room, his head nodding. I knew I could not allow myself to prolong the moment, however: if I was late getting back to the unit by even an hour, it would mean the loss of a whole day when my next leave came around.

  The first evening back at the base was always the worst. I felt lonely and far from home, somehow divorced in every way from the bustle of activity around me. Sometimes I walked to one of the farthest corners of the camp, where nothing but a thick wall of barbed wire separated us from the expanse of the desert, and I watched the sun set; other times I lay on my bed and played one of my cassettes of Western music, closing my eyes and thinking of happier times. It was on one of these occasions that an arif walked through the dormitory. I can’t remember what music I was listening to, but instead of reprimanding me he took a sudden interest to it.

  “Do you understand what they are singing about?” he asked curiously.

  I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “You speak English?”

  “I spent some time living there when I was younger.” He nodded attentively, then left me alone to spend the rest of the evening as I saw fit.

  The next day I was summoned to see the commanding officer of the camp: to his face we called him “sir,” of course, but behind his back we always referred to him by his real name, Taha. I walked into his office and saluted; he continued to scribble on a piece of paper before looking up. “At ease,” he told me.

  I let my arm fall to my side, but my body remained rigid. Summons to this office normally led to a punishment of some kind. I didn’t know what I had done wrong, but I needed to make sure I was on my best behavior. “How’s your English?” the officer asked out of the blue.

  I was caught momentarily off guard—it wasn’t the question I had expected. “Good, sir,” I replied hesitantly.

  He turned to a radio on his desk and switched it on. An English news program crackled into life. “What are they saying?”

  I listened briefly, then translated what I heard into Arabic. The officer nodded slowly to himself. “Good,” he muttered. “Good. Where in England have you lived?”

  “Manchester,” I told him.

  “Ah,” he said with a nod of the head, “Manchester United! You like it in England?” His face was expressionless as he asked me, and I hesitated, unsure as to whether this was a trick question or not. “It’s okay,” he encouraged me. “You can answer me honestly.”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied quietly. “I like it in England.”

  “I would like to visit there myself. If I were to do that, could you arrange people for me to stay with?”

  It was such an unusual request. Although Taha maintained his superior demeanor, this was a conversation that I might have had with a casual acquaintance on the streets of Baghdad. “Of course,” I replied. “I have family there. I would have to ask them first, but…” My voice trailed off.

  “Naturally,” he replied. Then, suddenly: “You are dismissed.”

  I saluted and left.

  Over the next few weeks I received more of these curious summonses. Each time, Taha would ask me more about England, sometimes sounding as if he was merely wanting to satisfy his own curiosity, at other times firing questions at me in quick succession as if trying to test the truth of what I was saying. “Who did you live with in England?” he asked.

  “My parents and my brother and sister, to start with,” I replied. “Then just with my father, when my mother went home.”

  “Why did she not stay?”

  I stared ahead, impassively. “Their marriage ran into problems, sir.”

  “What sort of problems?”

  I had no desire to tell this man the full truth. As I stood there considering his question, I could not help but remember the sorry image of my mother weeping in the corner of a room, distraught by whatever furious words had been exchanged between her and my father. It happened so many times that even I did not know the full truth of what had gone on behind closed doors, but these images had remained locked in my head for too long for me to start discussing them now, especially here. “Just the usual problems couples have.” I shrugged it off. “It often happens in the West.”

  On other occasions, Taha would ask me in more detail about whom I knew in England, and about the lifestyle, and he would listen to my answers with what seemed to me to be great interest. I
would be asked to translate songs and news programs, and I gradually became aware of the fact that I was turning into teacher’s pet. My interviews did not go unnoticed. My colleagues started to tease me—“Hey, don’t mess with him. He’s got special contacts now!”—and even the arifs started to treat me with less disdain, clearly unaware of the content of our conversations.

  Some time after our first meeting, I was summoned to see Taha once more. He had in front of him a file that he casually flicked through. “I see you live in Al-Mansour,” he commented.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How would you like the opportunity to be based back there?”

  I felt a shudder of excitement. “I would like that very much, sir.”

  “Excellent,” replied the officer. “Then you will be pleased to hear that I have arranged for you to transfer to the military intelligence compound. I’m sure they will find your skills to be of great use.”

  Al-Mansour military intelligence compound was a stone’s throw from my grandparents’ house. The officer was offering me a ticket out of the unit I hated so much, straight into the arms of my family. It was very rare for a soldier to be transferred to intelligence—the privilege was almost unheard of for a lowly recruit like me. As a member of Al-Istikhbarat, the intelligence services, I would occasionally be allowed to wear civilian clothes and would start to earn a decent wage. If I worked hard, I could even become rich, driving expensive cars and brandishing exotic weapons just as I had seen important people in Baghdad do. I don’t deny that I had sometimes considered that path—in a society where power was everything, everybody dreamed of having a little. The only way you could ensure a high standard of living for yourself and your family was to become part of the system, a cog in the massive machine of terror that Saddam had constructed to keep himself in a position of omnipotence.