Escape from Saddam

by Lewis Alsamari

  And so I inquired about loans. I lost count of the number of banks, building societies, and loan sharks I spoke to, but they all gave me the same reply: no. I had no collateral, no equity. To borrow the sums of money I was talking about—tens of thousands of pounds—simply wasn’t going to be possible.

  I grew more and more demoralized as the doors in front of me shut one by one. Then I received another call.

  This time it was from my uncle Musaab, Saad’s brother. His voice was breathless, concerned, but he tried to keep it level for the benefit of the third party who we suspected was probably listening in.

  “Habibi, you know those neighbors of ours, the ones you were trying to write to?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “I know the ones you mean.”

  “They’re in a bit of trouble.”

  “What sort of trouble?” I asked the question with a nonchalance that I did not feel.

  “They’ve been taken away. Locked up.”

  I caught my breath. “Locked up?” I repeated, stunned by this information. “Where?”

  There was a pause before Musaab answered. “Where do you think?” he asked me, his voice dripping with meaning.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE DEVIL, IBLIS

  In Iraq, they tell the story of a merchant who had a servant. One day the servant went to the marketplace in Baghdad, where he bumped into what looked like an old man. The man turned to look at the servant, who saw that it was in fact Death himself. Death gave him a strange look, and the servant fled back to his master. “Master,” he said, “I just saw Death in the marketplace, and he gave me a meaningful look. Please may I borrow your horse so that I may travel to Samarra and avoid what he has in store for me?” The merchant lent the servant his horse, and the servant fled.

  Later that day, the merchant went to the marketplace himself, where Death was still waiting. “Why did you scare my servant?” he asked.

  “Scare him?” replied Death. “I didn’t mean to scare him. I was just surprised to see him in Baghdad. You see, I have an appointment with him in Samarra this evening.”

  Al-Haakimiya. Al-Mukhabarat. The very words encapsulated everything that was evil about life in Iraq. Al-Mukhabarat was Iraq’s General Directorate of Intelligence and Al-Haakimiya was its prison; I had been running for fear that I might end up there, to learn firsthand all the horrific secrets its walls contained, but instead my good fortune had been monstrously inverted and my family faced imprisonment.

  My sister had been spared. Rumors reached my ear that she had caught the eye of somebody with a certain amount of influence, an official of some kind who had been stalking her, following her in his car when she left the house, and taking an unwanted and unnatural interest in her affairs. By a horrible irony, this unasked-for infatuation had protected her, but that protection was not extended to Saad, to my mother, or to my brother.

  It is hard to find the words to describe how I felt when I heard the news. My mind was a maelstrom of powerlessness and indecision. There I was, stuck in the UK, unable to return and make amends. I had no wealth or influence, no strings I could pull or arms I could twist. There was nothing I could do. Worst of all, I had no information, no way of knowing what was being done to my family, or whether they were dead or alive. It was left to my imagination to picture what was happening to them, the desperate kind of state they were in, and my imagination ran riot. Not until much later did I discover what had actually occurred.

  Everyone in Baghdad knew about Al-Mukhabarat’s prison. Word of its horror was common currency. But few people who had experienced it firsthand ever spoke of it in detail, and even in the time that was to follow, my family was reluctant to describe it. To this day my mother will not speak of her time there, but from conversations with my brother I know this much to be true: The cells in which my family were placed were tiny—two meters by three—with five or six people in each cell. There were other prisoners, like them, who had done nothing that right-thinking people would consider to be wrong; but there were also plenty of genuine criminals—murderers and thieves—who were not segregated from those accused of lesser crimes. The prison walls were filthy, stained in places with stubborn splashes of dried blood that attracted the always-present flies. The concrete floors were similarly unpleasant, covered with bits of old food, human urine, and clumps of hair; this debris attracted not only the flies but other scavengers, especially cockroaches, which made sinister, shuffling noises at night. The air was ridden with mosquitoes and fleas, and you found lice in your own hair within hours of arriving, so unhygienic were the conditions.

  The smell of the cells was matched by the smell of the prisoners: they too reeked of sweat and urine. Their clothes bore visible reminders of the squalor in which they were living: they would sweat in the heat of the day, and the sweat would dry as they continued to perspire. The result was thick, visible marks of salt on their clothes where the sweat had dried. There were prison baths, but they were seldom used, and even when they were used, prisoners came out scarcely any cleaner than when they went in. The paint on the sides of the baths was peeling to reveal rusty old metal, and the sides were covered in a distinct kind of grimy mucus.

  Everyone was constantly hungry. The food consisted only of rice or a thin bean stew. In either case it was clear from the taste that the raw ingredients had been putrefying somewhere, because there was always the taste of rot. The only time that taste was ever masked was when salt was added to the food; but when that happened, the salt was added in such gargantuan quantities as to make the food almost inedible. No matter how unpalatable it was, however, the food was always eaten because it was so scarce.

  The air was constantly thick with the fumes of cigarette smoke—almost all the prisoners smoked as a way of taking their minds off their desperate conditions—and it was never possible to have any fresh, natural air because most cells were windowless. The windows in the cells that had them were small and high up. As a result, the majority of the prisoners were ill with respiratory diseases—pneumonia and the like. All day and all night there was the sound of sneezing, vomiting, and the bringing up of phlegm. The guards, of course, ignored all cases of ill health other than the most extreme: you had to be unconscious before you were taken off for the rudimentary health care the prison offered.

  The guards themselves treated the prisoners worse than animals, never speaking to them other than in terms of insult, always referring to them as “dogs” and “imbeciles.” Slaps to the face were commonplace and were among the more lenient treatment that could be expected on a daily basis. Often, and without warning or reason, prisoners were told to sit in a line on the floor, where the guards proceeded to kick them in the face and in the stomach until they were little more than bruised and bloodied messes. On other occasions, they were whipped all over their bodies with short pieces of blue rubber hose about the length of a ruler.

  Retaliation, of course, was unthinkable.

  It took a number of weeks for them to be released. All the while, I feared the worst. When I finally received a phone call to say they were out, I almost collapsed with relief. I was overwhelmed with the need to find out how they were, and never did the need to speak in our roundabout, coded way seem so difficult.

  Gradually, though, I was made aware of the realities of the situation. It had been made clear to them that unless I returned, they would be recalled and could look forward to living in the cramped cells of that stinking prison for the rest of their days—however long that should be—enduring on a daily basis the violent whims of whichever prison guard felt like beating them up. This mistreatment was not going to stop now that my family had been singled out, so somehow, however we could, we had to raise the money to pay smugglers to get them out of Iraq. They weren’t an attractive proposition for a smuggler: three of them traveling together, one of them a middle-aged woman who bore the weight of her difficult years heavily. It would cost tens of thousands of pounds.

  Once again I tried to borrow the money but
was rejected. Rachel offered to help, but her credit was insufficient, and Faisal was not in a position to help either. I started to go out of my mind thinking of ways to raise the cash, and all the while my mother and brother could be dragged back to prison.

  While all this was happening, I was temping in the financial departments of various big companies. All day long I was in charge of transferring huge sums of money from one account to another. The transactions were entirely straightforward, and after a while the amounts involved, which often ran into the millions, became meaningless. Just figures. I finally found myself working in the accounts department of the bookmaker William Hill. Thousands of transactions a day passed through this department, and I fulfilled my duties unenthusiastically, always mindful of what was happening two and a half thousand miles away and constantly distracted by Saad’s increasingly frequent phone calls during which he said so little but meant so much. Occasionally the irony struck me that the people around me were spending all their time handling sums of money that would have smuggled a thousand families from under the nose of Al-Istikhbarat, but never did it occur to me that I might be able to use any of this money to help my mother, brother, and sister.

  Until one day, that is, when I felt the Devil, Iblis, tap me on my shoulder.

  I was working quietly at my desk, shuffling papers rather unenthusiastically and without fully taking in what I was reading. Suddenly I became aware of a conversation happening at the desk in front of me between two of my colleagues. They were working at the computer, transferring money from customers’ betting accounts into the relevant bank accounts. Clearly one of them had his own betting account, and it came up on the screen. “Look,” he told his friend, “I’ve won a tenner.”

  I watched as his friend glanced at the screen. “Nice one,” he said. “Shall we transfer it now?”

  The winning employee nodded, tapped his password into the computer, and made the transfer. As he did so, his friend spoke: “Hang on, you’ve transferred a hundred, not ten.”

  The employee nodded, and with another tap of the keyboard transferred the money back. “Nice try,” his friend noted, and they both laughed.

  “What do you think would happen if I’d just left it there?”

  “They’d track you down, mate, and fuck you over.”

  It was as simple as that. Not only had the Devil given me a way to save my family, he had also told me what would happen if I followed the path he showed me.

  I hesitated while I weighed the pros and cons of the idea that was forming in my mind. I told nobody what I was planning to do, not even Rachel, who saw that I was increasingly distracted but just put it down to the stress of the news that was coming from Iraq. The choice was a simple one: do nothing and risk my family spending the rest of their lives rotting in Al-Haakimiya, where they would be tortured and maltreated, or illicitly transfer some of William Hill’s money to my account to pay for their release. Without question, my employers and the police would catch up with me—I wasn’t so naive as to believe that my actions would go undetected—but that probably wouldn’t happen until there was an audit of the company, which would give me several months’ grace in which to get my family out. What I was about to do would be entirely premeditated, and I felt sure that the authorities would be severe with me no matter how extenuating my circumstances. But if I was sent to prison, so be it. At least in British prisons you didn’t get tortured, brutalized, or killed.

  It took me several days to come to my decision, but in reality the decision had already been made for me.

  The first thing I needed to do was to open a betting account. That was simple enough: ten minutes in a bright, buzzing Internet café, surrounded by young people happily typing e-mails to loved ones, oblivious of what I was doing. Next, I had to open a number of bank accounts. The amount of money I was planning to steal was considerable, and I imagined that it would be less easy to trace a number of small transactions to different accounts than one big tranfer. The authorities would catch up with me eventually, of course, but I needed to ensure I had enough time to do what I had to do.

  The next hurdle was more difficult to overcome. The transfer of money at William Hill was not part of my job, so I did not have access to the passwords that were necessary to affect it. The passwords themselves were guarded quite jealously: all the employees who needed them had their own separate passwords and were unlikely to reveal them to anybody else because they knew that the system would be open to abuse. Moreover, the passwords changed regularly. Once I discovered a password, I would have to move quickly.

  I started to fall into casual conversation with the colleague whom I had overheard transferring money in the first place. Over a period of a few days we became as friendly as the stifling office atmosphere would allow. I loitered by his desk, drinking coffee and chatting while he carried on with his work. He was a talkative guy, and we had no difficulty keeping the conversation going. He showed no signs of realizing the ulterior motive behind my sudden camaraderie, and as we spoke, I was able to glance at his fingers while he was typing. It took a few tries, but eventually I managed to work out his password. I didn’t worry that my using it would land him in trouble: why would he use his password to transfer money to my account? In any case, I had no intention of doing anything other than tell the whole truth about my actions when the authorities did finally catch up with me.

  I had everything I needed. The following day, I waited for everyone to leave the office at lunchtime, while I stayed behind. I approached a computer terminal and, my heart in my mouth, typed in what I hoped was the correct password.

  It worked.

  To start, I transferred only a small amount of money—a hundred pounds, I think—just to check that it would work. As soon as I finished, I logged out and walked quickly away from the terminal. No one had been watching, but I couldn’t dispel the hot flush of unease that swept across my body at the thought of what I had done. I felt sick and continued to do so for the rest of the day.

  Next morning, I checked my bank account. Nothing. The following morning I did the same. Nothing. But on the third day, it was there.

  Suddenly I was filled with misgivings. You can’t do this, Sarmed, I told myself. It’s not right. There has to be another way. That lunchtime I returned to the computer terminal and transferred the money out of my account and back to William Hill.

  I didn’t sleep that night, my mind awash with conflicting thoughts. It had been so easy to make the transfer; so easy to walk down the route that I knew would lead to huge trouble for me; so easy to decide, after all, not to do it. And maybe that was the right thing. Even if I sent Saad the money he needed, there was no guarantee that my family wouldn’t be thrown back into prison. Perhaps I should simply hope and pray that no harm would come to them, that when their captors realized that I was not going to come back, they would release them unharmed. Deep down, though, I knew that was a vain hope. What went on in the prisons of Baghdad was no secret; indeed Saddam no doubt wanted his people to be aware of the evils that awaited them if they transgressed. And as I was growing up I had heard of enough people who had disappeared never to be seen again. The thought of that happening to my family was too much for me to bear. I resolved to go ahead with my plan.

  The following day I hacked in to the computer once more—this time, into several accounts. I transferred the very least I knew I could get away with to ensure my family’s release from prison and subsequent escape from Iraq. It wasn’t a very exact calculation, but it was based on my rough idea of how much I would need: £37,500.

  The instant the money hit my accounts, I transferred half of it, through the convoluted routes I had become used to, to Saad. When word came back that he had received it, I rested a little more easily. My relief was to be short-lived, however, as any expectations I had that the transfer of money would effect an immediate release were shown to be optimistic. Two weeks passed, then three, and from Baghdad there was nothing but silence. Saad was trying to make the pa
yment to the necessary people, but it was an excruciatingly slow process. Meanwhile, I felt an increasing sense of paranoia: every time the phone rang, I jumped; every time I saw a policeman, I hid. Since arriving in England, I had forgotten how it felt to be a fugitive, but now that sensation was with me once more.

  To keep myself occupied, and mindful of the fact that time was not on our side, I started making inquiries about how I could use the remainder of the money to spirit my mother, brother, and sister out of Iraq. Through acquaintances in the Iraqi community in the UK, I made contact with people-smugglers to determine the best way to get my family out, and how much it would cost. In Baghdad, Saad did the same. It became apparent, even with the remainder of the William Hill money, that it would be expensive: the smugglers saw our desperation and increased the price accordingly. We soon realized that we still did not have the funds to pay someone to organize the whole thing for us, so I decided that we would have the professionals arrange their transfer to a neighboring Middle East country; the remainder of the journey I would organize myself. Had I known what awaited us, I would never have made that decision.

  My mother, brother, and sister had a thick wad of passport photographs taken in differing disguises and then sent to me in England. A Kurdish smuggler met them at home and gave them cloned Iraqi passports with false Kurdish names. It would be most difficult for my brother. He was nearly old enough for military service, so the penalty for leaving the country illegally would be especially severe for him. He had the benefit, though, of looking much younger than his real age, and his passport stated that he was several years younger than he actually was. My mother donned her hijab to make herself less recognizable, and within a couple of days of arriving home they said good-bye to Saad and to my grandparents and left with the smuggler in one of the familiar orange and white taxis that swarmed the streets of Baghdad.