Escape from Saddam

by Lewis Alsamari

  “Do you think you could do me a favor?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she replied. “What is it?”

  “I’m not very familiar with the Malaysian postal service. I want to send these photos to my uncle in England, as he was asking for some pictures. Would you send them for me?”

  For a moment she didn’t reply, and I silently cursed myself. As I spoke the words, the plan sounded a lot less probable than it had in my head. But I needn’t have worried.

  “Sure,” she said.

  Thanking her, I wrote the address on the front of the envelope and handed it over. She placed it with the rest of her hand luggage, and the matter was not mentioned again. I comforted myself with the thought that, as a Malaysian coming back to her home country, it was unlikely that she would be searched; and that even if my Iraqi passport was found on her person, it would probably cause her only some small inconvenience, whereas for me it could spell deportation and the horrors that awaited me back in Baghdad.

  And then we landed. As the wheels touched down on Malaysian soil, the familiar feeling of sick apprehension reintroduced itself in my gut, and I found myself wishing to be anywhere but where I was.

  “Are you all right, Adel?” the girl asked me. I nodded. “Well, I guess I should say good-bye. It was nice to meet you.” She gave me her phone number and address in the area of Petaling Jaya and then flashed me a coquettish little grin, which I struggled to reciprocate. As the plane came to a halt, she stood up and went to join her family.

  In the airport terminal I held back at passport control as I wanted to make sure that my Iraqi passport had made it safely through before I presented my documents. I saw the girl and her family waiting to pass through the control booth, and it was with a sense of relief that I witnessed them being waved through without any difficulty. They were Malaysian, of course, but it didn’t seem as if anybody was being questioned in any great detail—not that that did anything to allay the panic I was feeling at what I was about to do. I felt my stomach churning and droplets of sweat dripping down my back; out of the blue I realized how much more crumpled my appearance was than when I had put on my suit the previous morning. It wasn’t long before my turn came.

  I stepped confidently up to the booth and fixed the border guard firmly in the eye as I handed him my forged documents. He leafed through the pages of the passport, stopping only briefly to glance at Abu Firas’s phony Jordanian entry and exit stamps. As he turned the page to examine my photograph, I silently said a prayer of thanks to my architect friend and his dexterous skill. The border guard stared at my photograph for a moment, and then at me. I saw his eyebrows crinkle into a frown as he looked back at the photograph, and I stopped breathing momentarily as he began to examine the document a little more closely.

  “Where have you come from?” he asked politely.

  “Jordan.”

  “How long are you staying, sir?”

  “A week, maybe two.”

  “And where will you go to then?”

  “Turkey,” I said confidently—it was another country UAE passport-holders didn’t need a visa for.

  He continued to look through my documents as he appeared to mull over the answers I had given.

  “How much money have you got, sir?”

  “About a thousand dollars.”

  “Okay.” He continued reading for a moment, then looked me up and down.

  Suddenly, he stamped the passport, slammed it shut, and handed it back to me.

  “Welcome to Malaysia, Mr. Ahmed,” he said with what almost passed as a smile.

  I couldn’t wait to leave the airport, and having collected my luggage I practically ran across the concourse to the exit doors, which slid open with a satisfying hiss. Immediately when I stepped outside I hit a wall of humidity that soaked my skin practically on impact—a very real and tangible reminder of how far from home I was.

  I took a taxi into the center of Kuala Lumpur. The driver made a few attempts to coax me into conversation, but I didn’t speak his language and in any case my thoughts were too much of a whirlwind of relief for me to have been able to talk sensibly to anyone. I kept pulling my UAE passport out of my pocket and looking at it: it was such a small thing, yet it had got me so far. Fifty percent of the way. A ticket to freedom.

  I found myself a shabby hotel in a backstreet in one of the less salubrious quarters of the city—it was all my meager budget would allow. Dirt cheap, my room was little more than a couple of meters square, with filthy bedding and cockroaches as roommates. Sleep would be difficult, as the constant clatter of Malaysian families washing their dishes in the courtyard of the shabby tenement block opposite rang through the air seemingly twenty-four hours a day. But the squalor didn’t bother me in the least. If all went according to plan, I would be there for only a few nights before I managed to book my passage to London. Of far greater concern was the fact that I had to leave my precious passport at the reception desk. I wanted to guard that little document with my life—it was my life—and I had tried to argue with the hotel owner, to persuade him to let me carry it with me. He was adamant: the rules were there to be obeyed; and if I wanted a room, the passport would have to be stashed in the open pigeonholes behind his beaten-up desk. Anyone could have taken it—I knew from my experiences over the past few months how vibrant the market in stolen passports was—and this guy had no incentive to keep it safe. And so, several times a day, I found myself wandering back to the hotel to glance at the pigeonhole and check that my passage to freedom had not been stolen.

  The following day, I scoured the local travel agents and, having begged the receptionist to let me have my passport for an hour in return for my room key, bought my ticket to London. That, at least, I could keep with me, and it didn’t leave my person while I spent the next few days until my flight wandering the streets, taking in the sights and sounds of Kuala Lumpur. It was such an alien place to me—four thousand miles from home, and a culture that could not have been more different from Baghdad or Amman. I made calls home, speaking once more in my roundabout way so that my family would know that I was safe without learning anything that would incriminate them. When the time came to eat, I spent my money on cheap fast food from Western-style restaurants because the local food was too strange for me to enjoy. And at night I lay on my small, uncomfortable mattress, listening to the scratching of the insects under the bed, waiting for the time when I could board my plane to England.

  When the day arrived, I donned my suit once more, reclaimed my passport with an overwhelming sense of relief, and made my way to the airport. Having checked my luggage in, I strode confidently to passport control—my previous success had invigorated me, and I knew nothing was to be gained by a diffident approach—and handed my documents to the officer. As he began to check my papers, I looked around properly for the first time. All around me were armed policemen, thick, bulletproof jackets protecting their torsos and evil-looking weapons slung across their chests. One of them caught me looking at him and returned my gaze with a flat, emotionless look. There was a certain swagger in his stance, as though he took sinister pride in his position of authority, and I remember wondering at that moment how much different my life would have been had the same sense of pride been instilled in me when I had joined the military. No doubt this man would have nothing other than contempt for a deserter like me, because although the world had branded Saddam a criminal, it would no doubt scorch me too if I was caught escaping his terror in this way. The gun and that flat stare were harsh reminders of how unwelcome I was.

  “One moment, sir. Wait here, please.” The passport control officer broke me out of my daydream by addressing me. He turned and walked to a side room, leaving me with a line of people behind shaking their heads in disapproval at the unwanted delay. But I was well used to this by now, so I simply held my head up high and did my best to bristle with confidence. A few moments later the officer returned, tapped the keys of his computer, then handed me the passport and nodded me
on. I was through.

  I waited at the gate, for some reason more nervous than I had been at passport control, and started muttering prayers under my breath. I knew that Malaysia was a hub for people-traffickers trying to smuggle people from the Middle East out, mostly to Australia and Japan but also to Europe. I wouldn’t feel safe until I was in the sky. It was with huge relief that I boarded and felt the now-familiar press of gravity as the plane took off. This time there was no pretty girl to distract or help me—just a faceless businessman who spoke not a word to me for the entire flight. He did not notice, as our airline meals were cleared away, that I held back the plastic serrated knife and secreted it up my sleeve; or if he did, he didn’t mention it.

  I knew that I had to destroy my UAE passport to avoid any chance of deportation once I arrived in London, but in my youthful naïveté I supposed that it would be better to do this once I was in European airspace in case I was somehow discovered while we were in the jurisdiction of some place less friendly. It was foolish of me to think, of course, that the plane would be forced to land on account of one stray Iraqi soldier, but I wanted to play it as safe as possible. The hours until we were cruising over the West ticked slowly by, but eventually, as we were flying over Germany, I excused myself and made my way to the toilets. Once safely locked inside, I took out my passport and my knife and proceeded to shred that precious document into indistinguishable ribbons. It took an age to slice my way through the laminated paper. When I was finished, I was left with an unrecognizable mass, which I dropped, slightly regretfully, into the toilet bowl and flushed away. Those bits of paper and plastic that had afforded me safe passage so far disappeared in seconds. I then made my way back to my seat and did the only thing that was left for me to do: wait.

  Gradually I began to feel the familiar sensation of the plane losing altitude. It bumped and wobbled its way through the cloud cover, and as it did so my hand gripped the arm rest tightly. The sudden turbulence was making me nervous, certainly; but I could not separate the vague sense of panic I was feeling because of the juddering from the increasing apprehension that seemed to saturate every cell in my body now that I was nearing the very end of my journey. In the next hour I would find out if all the advice I had received, from Abu Firas and others, was sound; in the next hour I would know whether or not I was to be sent back to Iraq; in the next hour I would know my fate.

  Suddenly the plane burst through the clouds. I looked expectantly through the small window at the scene below. It was a bleak December day, misty and gray, the sort of weather that I remembered with a nostalgic vagueness from my childhood, and that I never would have hoped to see in the arid dryness or torrential rainy seasons of the Middle East. Fields stretched out like patchwork blankets, their shades of green and brown seeming strange to my Arab eyes. There was the occasional town, gray and sprawling, and long lines of traffic, the car lights on high beam to brighten the way through the foggy atmosphere. It was a bland, chilly, uninviting scene; but I wouldn’t have welcomed that sight any more had all the golden palaces and riches of the East been spread out before my eyes. It was breathtaking. Impossible. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing.

  Twenty minutes later we were thundering down the runway. Through the drizzle I could see the sights and sounds of the airport as the loudspeaker crackled into life and made me jump. “Ladies and gentlemen,” spoke the voice of the captain that I had heard but not listened to at any point during the flight, “welcome to London.”

  I felt my eyes fill with tears, and I continued to look resolutely out of the window so that my neighbor could not see that I was crying. I had made it. I had arrived.

  As we passed through the gates, there were immigration officials standing by. I held my breath as I walked past them, knowing from hearsay that my life would be made a lot more difficult if I was stopped by one of them. Fortunately they were simply chatting among themselves, so I joined the line at the official booths of Heathrow Terminal Three passport control. I watched with amazement the ease with which my fellow passengers were ushered through—their British passports seemed to give them genuine authority that was unavailable to me.

  And then my turn came.

  I approached the booth with a sense of expectation—excitement, almost—and a smile that was not reciprocated by the surly uniformed woman who received me; but after the aggression I had experienced in the past week, that was not going to worry me. I took a deep breath and, with a slight crack in my voice, spoke the words that I had been practicing in my head for days and days, the words that I knew, hoped, would finally mark the beginning of a new life, free from the tyrannies of my homeland.

  “I want to claim political asylum,” I said.

  CHAPTER 12

  A KNOCK AT THE DOOR

  “Where’s your passport?” The woman stared at me with suspicion.

  “I want to claim political asylum.”

  “Where…is…your…passport?” She repeated her question slowly, emphatically, as if talking to a child.

  “I don’t have one.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t process you without a passport.”

  I shrugged my shoulders, not knowing quite what to say. We stared at each other in silence until she finally broke the deadlock. “What is your name?”

  “Sarmed Mahmoud Alsamari.”

  “Wait here,” she said abruptly, then left her post. A couple of minutes later she arrived back with two immigration officers who eyed me up and down as if I was a criminal before leading me to a nearby interview room. They interviewed me in a waspish, perfunctory manner, and I told them what I had done with my passport. One of them looked straight at me, one eyebrow raised and a superior, authoritative look on his face. “If we decide to, we can recover your passport, piece it back together again, and deport you. You do realize that, I hope.”

  His words had a desperate, crushing impact on me. I had just landed in this foreign country—I didn’t know what the laws or the rules were, so I had no idea that they probably were saying this merely to make me uncomfortable. The elation I had felt before I claimed asylum was suddenly replaced by a horrible fear: what if everything I had been told was not true? What if I wasn’t going to be granted asylum after all? Everything would have been for nothing, and I would be sent back to where I came from, left to fend for myself, to fight a battle I couldn’t possibly win. I could think of nothing to say to them, so I remained silent.

  They continued to process me. They searched through all my luggage and took photocopies of any documentation or literature I had—my library card from the British Counsel in Amman with my false name on it, and a pile of tourist leaflets from Kuala Lumpur that I had stashed away to prove that I had been in Malaysia. They filled in forms and asked me questions, all the while with not so much as a smile or a welcome. We will tolerate your presence, their behavior seemed to be implying, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that you are in any way wanted here. I steeled myself against their attitude. Nobody wants to be made to feel unwelcome, but I knew what the alternative was.

  “What are the grounds of your claim for political asylum?” they asked me.

  I had thought long and hard about how I would answer this question. I had been warned that if I revealed that I had been in the Iraqi military, they would take a special interest in me. I would be thrown into a holding cell and investigated, to ensure that I had not been responsible for any atrocities or war crimes. The process could take months. And so, although I was bursting to tell them my story—to persuade them that I was not simply the opportunist they so clearly took me for, to persuade them that I was a political refugee and not an economic migrant—I held back.

  “I don’t want to live under a tyranny,” I told them, rather weakly to my ears. “I don’t want to serve a dictator and a criminal.”

  The officers gave no reaction. They simply wrote my words down.

  Just as I was beginning to feel that I might never again see a friendly face, however, they rele
ased me into the care of some other officials, who took me for x-rays, medical checks, and blood samples. I was manhandled, prodded, poked, and ordered around, but I was at least treated with a little respect, even an occasional moment of friendliness. I was asked if I had family in the UK, and I told them about my uncle Faisal in Leeds. A call was put through, he confirmed that he would receive me, and I was told to wait.

  Eventually, twelve hours after we landed, I was allowed through. The sense of release brought tears to my eyes for a second time that day.

  Faisal arranged for a friend of his to pick me up from the airport. I spent that night in the spare room of an apartment somewhere on the outskirts of London, and the following day I was driven to Leeds, to see the man I had been looking forward to meeting for so long.

  Faisal was a hero, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, and a POW; his name was mentioned with hushed reverence in my grandparents’ house back in Al-Mansour. I had not seen him since I was six years old; my grandparents hadn’t seen him for twenty years. He had been a good boy, I remembered my grandmother saying. When he was a child, his brothers spent their pocket money on bicycles, whereas he spent his on hijabs for his sisters. He was a humble, caring, and religious man. “Faisal,” my grandmother would mutter. “He is an angel.” And as I traveled up to see him, the words my grandfather had whispered to me when I left Al-Mansour for the final time also echoed in my head: “May God be with you, and inshallah you will reach your uncle Faisal in England.”

  Inshallah. God willing. As I was driven to the north of England, I reflected on the fact that God had indeed been willing. I had completed my journey, and meeting Uncle Faisal was to be my reward.

  To my grandmother, Faisal might have been an angel; to me he was more than that. When we first met, I remember being alarmed by the somewhat horrified look he gave me. I now realize that he must have been shocked by my appearance. Gaunt and exhausted, with skin hanging from my bones, bags under my eyes, and a haunted look on my face, I must have cut a very different figure from that of the well-fed six-year-old he remembered. He asked after his parents and siblings, but I had the impression that he would rather not know the true answer, having seen the state I was in.