Escape from Saddam

by Lewis Alsamari

  But I knew my success would come at a high price. No doubt they wanted me for my interpreting skills, so that I could listen in to Western messages intercepted via radar and satellite and translate them for my superiors. But inexorably I would be dragged into a den so deep I might never come out of it. Al-Mansour was a fearsome place, and those who worked there more fearsome still. As a member of military intelligence, it would not even be called into question that I would betray my friends, even my family if need be, for the greater good of the country and its glorious leader. The transfer was a prison sentence in itself, one that would last for the rest of my life as I was turned into the very symbol of everything I wanted to escape.

  Indeed, escape would be farther from my reach than it had ever been. As it stood, the dangers involved were too terrible to think about; but if a member of the intelligence services was caught betraying his country, the consequences were unimaginable. If I was caught absconding from Al-Mansour, I would be tortured and killed, certainly, but the retribution would not stop there. Whether the authorities apprehended me or not, they would without question go after my family. My parents and grandparents would undergo horrific cruelty—they would perhaps even be murdered—and I could not be sure that my little brother and sister would not be brutalized in some way.

  These were not idle fears: they were part and parcel of life in Iraq—accepted facts that touched every family across the land. I remembered talking to my friend Kamall one day. The heat of the summer was beginning to subside, and heavy clouds in the distance threatened one of the tumultuous deluges that sometimes fell upon Baghdad, turning its wide streets into rivers. Out of the blue, I decided to ask Kamall the question that had been nagging at me ever since we had met: “Where’s your father?”

  Kamall was silent for a moment. “I don’t know,” he told me, looking intently down the street at nothing in particular. For a moment he didn’t elaborate, and I sensed that it would not be tactful to press him; but gradually he opened up. “He was a pilot.”

  “In the air force?” I asked quietly, thinking that perhaps he had been one of the many casualties of the war.

  Kamall shook his head. “No,” he replied. “For the state airline.” Al-Khutoot Aljawiyaa Al-Irakia—Iraqi Airways.

  It transpired that he and another pilot had spoken out against part of the airline’s safety policy and were arrested. The other pilot agreed to retract his objection, but Kamall’s father wouldn’t. Only a few days later, the authorities came for him. Kamall remembered two white security vehicles pulling up outside the house. There was a knock on the door; Kamall’s father opened it to see three or four men in civilian clothing brandishing handguns. They did not need to say anything. They just looked at Kamall’s father and then at Kamall himself, who was no older than ten, and gestured that they should follow them to one of the security vans. Kamall’s father held up his hands. “Okay,” he said. “Take me. I’ll come with you now without any struggle. But please, leave my family alone.”

  “Our instructions are to take you and your son,” one of the intelligence officers replied.

  A horrible silence ensued. “Please,” Kamall’s father begged quietly, “he’s only a little boy.”

  Suddenly, Kamall’s mother started to scream. “Don’t take my little one!” she shouted. “Please, don’t take my little one!” She held her son tight to her body.

  The intelligence officers looked around nervously. They had no wish to be recognized by other members of the general public for what they were, and the screams of Kamall’s mother were bound to attract attention. “All right then,” one of them said to his father, “just you. But move quickly.”

  Kamall’s father nodded. He held his wife for a few brief moments, then bent down to hug his son, but no words were spoken. And then he walked out of the door with the guards. He was never seen again.

  At home that evening, I told Uncle Saad the story as we sat playing chess. “Yes,” he said. “I knew Kamall’s father. He was at school with me.”

  I wanted to know more about what I had heard. “Would they really have taken Kamall?”

  “Who knows, Sarmed. I suspect not. More likely, I think, that they were saying that to make his father come quietly. The officers would not have wanted a fuss. They wouldn’t have wanted neighbors to see their faces—much better for them to keep their identities under wraps as much as possible.”

  “What do you think happened to his father?”

  Saad shrugged. “A bullet in the head, if he was lucky. Something more inventive if he wasn’t.”

  “Inventive like what?”

  Saad slowly moved one of his chess pieces. “You don’t want to know, Sarmed.”

  “Maybe they just put him in prison. Maybe he’s still there.”

  “Maybe,” replied Saad with an indulgent smile. “But there aren’t enough cells in Abu Ghraib to house everyone who has disappeared in the last ten years. Not by a mile. And besides, who’s to say that a bullet in the head isn’t preferable to what goes on there?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, Sarmed. It’s just rumors. Forget about it.” He obviously didn’t want to talk about it anymore, so the fate of Kamall’s father was left to my imagination, as it had been to Kamall’s these past few years.

  In a horrible, warped kind of way, Kamall had been lucky; I had no reason to assume that my family would be so fortunate.

  “What if I say no?” I asked Taha.

  He was evidently surprised—he thought he was offering me a tempting promotion, perhaps by way of recompense for my agreeing to introduce him to people in England should he ever visit. He was giving me a way out of being a simple soldier, looked down upon by everyone, and the look he gave me was quizzical; but of course, he had no inkling of my escape plans.

  “If you say no,” he replied slowly, “then I will inform the authorities that, having been allowed to spend time in England as a result of the government’s generosity, you have now declined to serve your country in return.” He held his hands out and shrugged. “They will decide what action to take.”

  I remained silent as we both considered the ominous threat implicit in his last statement.

  “I take it you want me to proceed with the transfer?” Taha asked finally.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied in a small voice. “Thank you, sir.”

  My telephone call to Saad that evening was urgent. I could not tell him explicitly of my fears, of course—no doubt somebody was listening in—but he immediately understood the implications of what I told him. “They are transferring me to Al-Istikhbarat in Al-Mansour,” I said as soon as the pleasantries were out of the way.

  Saad fell silent. “How long have you got?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, they haven’t told me.”

  My uncle quickly directed the conversation elsewhere. Some minutes later, however, quite out of the blue, he said, “Next time you’re home on leave, we’ll pay that visit to your family in the north.” There had been no plans to visit anybody, of course. Saad was trying to tell me something else.

  I spent the next few days in a state of the highest anxiety. The summonses to see Taha had come to a halt, and I felt in a state of limbo. I called Saad again a few nights later.

  “You know that thing we were talking about?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I replied apprehensively.

  “I’ve found out another way to go about it. We’ll try it next time you’re home.”

  It was two weeks until my next leave, but I started to make my preparations long before that. Saad’s comment had been ambiguous, but I fully expected that I would never see the unit again. I presented my leave papers to the arif for stamping in good time. “Please,” I asked him, “stamp it carefully.” It was a bold request, and he gave me an irritated glance but stamped the flimsy piece of paper slowly and forcefully. I took special care to wait until the ink was dry before stowing it away with my military ID—I could not risk it smudging. The night before
I was due to leave, I packed my bag with no feeling of nostalgia: I would not be sorry in the least to leave this place.

  The following morning I did not loiter. At sunrise I left the barracks, and as I passed through the gates I breathed the cool morning air deeply, barely able to suppress the excitement I was feeling. Without looking back at my unit, I walked straight to the bus station as quickly as I could—the hour-long trip took me no longer than forty-five minutes—and boarded a bus to Baghdad. The bus was almost full, but I managed to find myself a seat toward the back.

  We passed the first couple of checkpoints without being stopped. As we approached the third, a number of my fellow passengers were snoozing—we had all been up with the sun to catch the early bus—but I was in no state of mind to sleep. We were still two hundred kilometers from the capital, and already my mouth was dry with anticipation. I did not know what Saad had lined up for me, but the quiet confidence in his voice the last time we had spoken had given me reason to expect that things had been put into motion.

  The driver sent his assistant—a young boy of about fourteen—around the bus to shake the slumbering passengers. “Checkpoint,” he told them. “Have your papers ready so that we can pass through as quickly as possible.”

  Everybody fumbled around for their documents; mine were already held tightly in my fist, although I made sure I did not touch the stamp to avoid any risk of it becoming smudged by the sweat from my hand. As we approached the checkpoint, the bus slowed down, coming to a halt at a gesture from one of the Red Berets. The doors opened, and a large, unsmiling border guard walked on. His skin was dark—swarthy, almost—and he had a thick and immaculately groomed mustache. Nobody spoke. The Red Berets were vile: often they reminded me of the villagers from Hamam Al-Aleel—vicious and uncaring. Ordinary Iraqis referred to them as zanabeere—wasps—because of the way they swarmed threateningly the length and breadth of the country. No good could come of a conversation with a zanboor. Slowly he walked the length of the coach, scrutinizing every passenger’s papers carefully before handing them back and moving on. I had no reason to be nervous—all my papers were in order—but somehow the silence in the coach was enough to make even the most law-abiding citizen feel edgy.

  Finally the man reached me. “Papers,” he said curtly, and I handed him my documents. He gave them only the most cursory of glances before putting them in his pocket. “Go down,” he instructed me.

  “Why?” I asked. “I’ve got…”

  “Don’t ask any questions,” he interrupted. “Just go down.”

  I left my bag in my seat—I was confident that I would not be detained—and asked the person sitting next to me to save my seat. But the guard interrupted again. “Take your bag with you,” he told me.

  The side of the road was swarming with people—both guards and ordinary citizens, who sat in the dust eating food or talking animatedly. None of them paid me any notice as I stood by the side of the bus waiting for the guard to finish his checks. Eventually he alighted from the bus and indicated to the driver that he could leave.

  As the bus left, my hope left with it. The guard told me to walk over to a square concrete building. Once there I was led into his office, where he took a seat, leaving me to stand opposite his desk. Another Red Beret sat in the same office, not even bothering to conceal his interest in what was going on.

  “Haven’t I seen you before?” my captor asked.

  “No,” I replied.

  “Yes, I have,” he insisted. “I saw you only last week. You’re forging papers for leave.”

  I shook my head as I felt my stomach twisting. “No,” I assured him, “these are genuine.”

  “Forging papers,” the guard repeated as though he had not heard me. “Very serious.” He looked at me expectantly.

  I could not decide what he wanted me to do. My instinct told me that he was waiting for an offer of a bribe, but I could not be sure, and I did not want to land myself in more trouble by trying to bribe somebody who was not as corrupt as I perceived him to be. Even if I wanted to bribe him, I had no idea how to go about it. What should I say? How should I say it? I had never found myself in this position before; and besides, I didn’t have a great deal of money.

  “I’m going to conduct some inquiries,” he persisted, “make a few phone calls. I know you’re forging papers, so you might as well confess now. If you do, I’ll send you back to your unit for three months’ solitary. If you don’t, you know where you’re going to end up: military tribunal, then Abu Ghraib. You’ll probably be there for fifteen years.”

  “I’m not confessing,” I said weakly. “I haven’t done anything wrong.” Then it struck me that maybe I had a trump card to play. “I’m to be transferred soon to Al-Mansour military intelligence compound.”

  The guard scoffed. “You? At Al-Mansour? Don’t make me laugh.” He called through the thin door of his office, and another guard appeared. “Put him in the cell,” he ordered.

  The cell was housed at the other end of the building. The small metal door was opened, and I was pushed inside. I had never been in such a filthy place. In one corner was a communal lavatory—little more than a foul-smelling hole in the ground. There was a flushing mechanism above it that clearly hadn’t worked for years, and a small bottle containing water for cleaning yourself. Two fans hung from the ceiling, providing a little welcome coolness but also circulating the putrid smells from the lavatory. Graffiti covered the wall, and a few glum-looking prisoners sat at one end, hunched up with their arms around their knees. I stood for a few moments, not quite able to believe what was happening to me, before, in despair, I sat down to join them. My face fell into my hands in utter desperation.

  Some hours later, the door opened again, and the guard who had detained me put his head into the cell. The moment he appeared, my fellow prisoners rushed up to the door like hungry children to a sweet-seller. They started begging him to let them leave. “I can get my brother to send you some money! Please, let me out,” one of them implored.

  The guard sniffed the air dramatically. “I’m going home now,” he told us. “When I get there, I’m going to sit under the shade of my vine and eat cold watermelon while my wife cooks me a delicious meal. You know,” he said regretfully looking directly at me, “all this could have been avoided if you had simply rustled up a few notes.” He smiled an insincere smile, then slammed the door.

  I stayed in that stinking cell for a week while the army’s interminably slow internal mail system verified that my leave papers were in fact genuine. During that time, other prisoners came and went, and as I talked to inmates more experienced than myself, I began to understand why the guard had picked on me particularly. I was neatly dressed, for a start. I took pride in my appearance, but all the guard saw was a young man from a good home who probably had a bit of money. The Al-Mansour address on my papers had confirmed this impression. My leave was for eight or nine days, and that too counted against me. The guard knew that I had to be returned to my unit before the end of the leave period. If I had only a couple days of leave, the threat of one day in the cell would not have been enough to encourage me to pay a substantial bribe.

  I listened to what I was told, but I took very little of it in. After a while I even stopped noticing the revolting conditions. All I could think of was Saad and my mother. They were expecting me back home, and they had made arrangements. What those arrangements were I did not know, but they had probably cost money and they were most likely time-sensitive. My uncle and my mother had no way of knowing what was delaying me: my mother would be sick with worry that some accident had befallen me, and driven to distraction by the constant questions from my brother and sister—“Mama, when is Sarmed coming home?” Saad, I was sure, would be expecting something more sinister. And every day I spent in the cell, my chances of leaving the country were becoming more and more remote as I became increasingly desperate: the longer I stayed there, the less chance I had of being able to get to Baghdad.

  After a we
ek, tired and dirtier than I had ever been, I was released into the custody of a military guard. Confirmation had come through from my unit that my leave papers were not in fact forged, but it had been decided that there was no point in my going on to Baghdad as I had only a couple days of leave remaining. Wordlessly I was ushered into the back of a military truck with a heavy camouflage canopy with seven or eight other soldiers. Two Red Berets sat at the back keeping watch over us.

  I wanted to cry with frustration as the truck headed back south, trundling along the road that took me inexorably farther from the place I had to be. My companions kept their distance—I assumed it was because I smelled terrible after my week in the cell—and the Red Berets eyed me suspiciously. Clearly they had not bothered to find out why I was being returned to my unit, so they assumed the worst. As I sat there, driven to distraction by my situation, crazy escape plans formulated in my head. Perhaps I could bribe the Red Berets to leave me by the side of the road. Perhaps I could act with more bravado, charge to the back of the truck, and hurl myself out. But my wild plots were the stuff of the Western movies that occasionally found their way onto Iraqi television. This was real life.

  After about an hour of traveling, the truck approached a roadside service area. As well as oil and water for the cars that had stopped, there was a mosque and a restaurant. A line of coasters—small coaches that acted like buses—lined up ready to take their passengers away. The place was humming with people going about their business as the driver and his assistant went to freshen themselves up. They came back with a jug of water and a steel bowl, and the Red Berets allowed us all a few gulps. I was the last to be offered the water. Having drunk deeply from the bowl, I turned to one of the guards. “I need to use the toilet,” I told him.

  “Go and crouch down and piss in the desert.” Soldiers were perfectly used to doing that.

  “No,” I said. “I need to shit.”