Escape from Saddam (14 page)

I told him.

“You’re from Iraq?”

I nodded.

“Which tribe?”

“The Alsamari.”

“And what happened to you?”

I repeated the story about my car being stolen, taking care to make sure the details I relayed were the same as those I had told earlier. The driver listened without much interest. “Where do you want to go?” he asked when I had finished.

“Amman.”

“It will cost you thirty-five American dollars.”

Thirty-five dollars. A sizable chunk of the money my grandmother had given me only three days before, but I wasn’t in a position to haggle. I immediately fished inside my bag and brought out a handful of crumpled notes, counted them out carefully, and handed them to him. He nodded curtly and indicated to me with a flick of his thumb that I should board the bus.

Painfully, but with some sense of relief, I climbed down from the car and approached the two men who had given me the lift. “Thank you for your help,” I told them simply.

The driver didn’t respond—he just walked back to the car. But his friend gave me a little more time. “
Bilsalamah,
” he said. “
Inshallah
you’ll find your car.” We exchanged a meaningful look, and as our eyes met I realized he probably hadn’t believed a word of my story.

“Thank you,” I said again as he walked back to the car. I stood there for a minute, watching the car head off along the road, before I was hurried onto the bus by the conductor.

The bus itself was packed with maybe forty people. They all looked at me curiously as I climbed on, but by this time I was too exhausted to allow their stares to worry me. There was no chance of a seat—even the conductor was sitting in the aisle—so I dumped my bag on the floor and prepared myself for a long, uncomfortable journey to Amman.

It didn’t take much time for the other passengers to grow used to the sight of me, for the mild excitement caused by my arrival to subside. And now that it was clear to the conductor that I was not a threat to him, he started to become a bit more friendly, asking me questions that I didn’t really want to answer. What was my name again? How many people were there who robbed me? What did they take? What was I going to do? His questions were well-meaning enough, I suppose, just intended to pass the time, but I was in no mood to answer them with anything but the curtest responses, and eventually he fell silent and left me to my own thoughts.

Everything had happened so quickly in the last few days that I had scarcely had the chance to organize the events in my head. It seemed impossible that only five nights ago I had still been in the confines of the army barracks near Basra, a place that seemed a million miles away from me now. As I thought back over the events that had followed my escape, I realized how lucky I had been. Had the coin fallen differently on any number of occasions, I would have been enjoying circumstances very different from the ones in which I found myself. It made the discomfort of the cramped bus seem a bit more bearable. Every time the vehicle slowed down, though, I had to suppress a shudder of fear, and I realized that I had been living with constant terror of being stopped and searched. Just because I had managed to cross the border didn’t mean that I could simply shrug that terror off. My passport, with its fake Jordanian entry stamps, would not stand up to prolonged, professional scrutiny, and although checkpoints and security guards were not a part of daily life in Jordan as they were in Iraq, I did not find it easy to escape the paranoia that had been with me for most of my life.

It was not just fear of capture that knotted my stomach; it was fear of the unknown. Up until now I had focused solely on making it across the border into Jordan. All my energy had been channeled into that one aim, but I had not given much thought to what I would do once I arrived here. I had very little money and I knew nobody. Had anyone asked me, I would have told them that my plan was to travel to England to live with my uncle; but at that moment England seemed like an impossible dream.

The bus trundled on, and I remained lost in my thoughts.

I was awakened from my daydream by the sound of a woman’s voice. I looked up to see her sitting there—an old lady, clearly an Iraqi, next to a young child—telling him to move and let me have his seat. I shook my head. “It’s okay,” I told her. “I’m fine. Don’t worry.”

But with quiet firmness, she insisted. “Come and sit here. You’re tired; you’ve had a rough day. The boy can swap with you—he’ll be fine.” The child looked at me with wide eyes and nodded, so I gratefully accepted the old woman’s offer and took the seat by the window. We started chatting, but somehow I did not find her questioning as intrusive as the conductor’s. I told her my name and repeated the story of my car being stolen, and even proudly told her that I was traveling to Amman en route to England. It made me feel better to tell her that, almost as if I was making the plans in my head more concrete. I refrained from asking her too many questions about what she was doing in Jordan, because I knew she was unlikely to have had much difficulty being granted permission to leave Iraq. It was the way with elderly people—too old to be of any use in the country, they were allowed to leave so as to be less of a burden. Saddam had no use for old ladies; it was fit young men like me that he wanted.

It was much lighter by now, and as we journeyed on I found myself gazing out of the window. Every few minutes we passed a hostel of some description on the side of the road, and only then did it suddenly sink in that I was not only in a different country but almost in a different world. It was small things that spoke to me, things the Jordanians no doubt took for granted, but they jumped out to me as sights that I would never see in Iraq. Some of the hostels were advertising ice cream; others had bananas hanging from the walls. I was astonished. Bananas on display? Nobody would be so idiotic in Baghdad as to do that—someone would steal them within minutes and probably attack the owner for good measure. But the thing that made my eyes pop out more than anything were the crates of Coca-Cola, full of one-liter bottles piled high outside the hostels. Flashing signs advertised the distinctive logo. I hadn’t seen Coca-Cola for years, not since the sanctions had been established against Iraq in 1990, just before the first Gulf War, and the sight was as curious to me as piles of gold bars would have been to a Westerner. If crates of Coke had been spotted in Baghdad in such numbers, they would have been fallen upon by thirsty young Iraqis like vultures pouncing on dead meat. It was that, more than anything else, that brought home to me the fact that I was no longer in a military state. This was a place where tourists came, with their sunglasses and their disposable income to spend on luxuries like ice cream and Coca-Cola. I found the sight vaguely comforting. Resting my head against the window, and watching these places as they sped past, I soon fell into a deep sleep.

By the time I awoke it was about nine o’clock, and the scenery around me had grown more urban as we drove through the outskirts of Amman. The road was better here, and modern-looking buildings were intermingled among the white tenement blocks and the colorful domes of the many mosques. Expensive cars shared the road with run-down vehicles, and I even saw other buses full of tourists. It was an unfamiliar sight: very few people came on vacation to Baghdad.

Eventually the bus pulled up outside a line of white buildings. “The hotel,” my newfound companion said shortly. I looked at it through the window. There was nothing to indicate that that was what it was, but as I looked, the passengers started to get their belongings together and head for the door. I realized that this was some sort of package that included accommodations at the hotel, which suggested to me that a room would be cheap. If I was going to stay there, it would have to be—my money was already dwindling and I had been in Jordan for only a matter of hours. I approached the hotel with the old lady and her young companion, and we waited our turn at the reception desk.

“How much for a room?” I asked the bored-looking hotel employee when our turn came.

He quoted me a figure much too high for my meager budget, and the concern must have shown clearly on my face because the old lady instantly came to my aid.

“It’s okay,” she told me. “You can stay with us.”

My eyes flickered toward the desk clerk, but he was perfectly uninterested in my sleeping arrangements.

“Thank you,” I told the old lady. “I’ll give you some money…”

But she dismissed my offer with a wave of her hand as though she were brushing off a troublesome insect. “For a night or two it will be fine. But perhaps you would be good enough to help us carry our luggage upstairs.”

The hotel was far from glamorous. A small elevator took us up several floors to our room, which was sparsely furnished—a couple of beds and a wooden table. I put the old lady’s luggage down, then rather sheepishly laid my putrid robes on the floor as a makeshift mattress.

“You look tired,” the woman said, and she was right. My few hours’ snooze on the bus had done nothing to alleviate the desperate fatigue I was feeling, but I knew there was no chance of sleeping now. My mind was dancing with the excitement and apprehension of being in a new city, but I also had something urgent to attend to.

My bullet wound had not received any attention since the Bedouin’s house. Since then I had gone through a punishing amount of physical exertion, and I knew from the sinister throbbing in my leg that the wound needed cleaning. The last thing I wanted to do was take myself to a doctor or a hospital, so I realized I would have to attend to it. I excused myself to my benefactor and went in search of a pharmacy. It didn’t take long to find one, and I spent a few of my precious dollars on clean bandages and an alcohol solution to disinfect the wound. Back at the hotel I was relieved to see that my roommates had gone out, so I sat on one of the beds and removed my jeans. The wound was as bad as I expected: blood had seeped out and stained the bandage a dirty brown, then dried in streaks down the length of my leg. I gingerly unwrapped the bandage, wincing slightly as it unpeeled from the wound, then steeled myself for the inevitable sting as I dabbed the alcohol solution onto the raw, exposed flesh. As I did so, the memory of falling in the desert, not knowing if the wolves were ahead of me or behind me, flashed in front of my eyes; I felt suddenly giddy as the enormity of what I had gone through in the last twenty-four hours hit me yet again. It took a moment for me to regain my composure; then I tightened a clean bandage over the wound and pulled my dirty jeans on once more.

Again it struck me how tired I was, that perhaps I should try to get some sleep. But time wasn’t on my side. I couldn’t stay in this room forever, no matter how benevolent the old lady might be feeling. I had to make arrangements for myself, and to do that I needed to get my bearings and make inquiries. I needed to head to downtown Amman.

CHAPTER
8

THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS

A
mman is a city of refugees—Palestinians from the west, Iraqis from the east. It is a melting pot of cultures. For some it is a new home, for others simply a staging post on the way to somewhere more hospitable. For me it was ideal: I could blend into the scenery and, without the constant fear of the Republican Guard around every corner, perhaps even allow myself a little breathing space. But I couldn’t become complacent. My passport was fake, as were the stamps on it that allowed me access to Jordan. Even if they fooled people, I was allowed to be in the country for only six months, after which time, if anybody scrutinized them I risked deportation back to Iraq and all the horrors that awaited me there. I needed to start work immediately on gaining passage to the West, to a place where I could claim political asylum from oppression. To England.

I was a stranger in a strange country. I had no friends, little money, and no idea where to go to get the help and information I needed. I had overheard some of the Iraqis on the bus saying that when they arrived in Amman they would head immediately for an area called Hashemite Square, and the hotel desk clerk confirmed with something of a sneer that this was where the Iraqis in Jordan tended to congregate. His manner suggested that he had opinions of his own about such people, but he kept them to himself and I followed his directions to find this place.

Hashemite Square seemed a lively, built-up area. Along the side of the main road was a vibrant collection of shops, behind which rose a hillside covered with a crowded jumble of white houses and tenement blocks. On the other side was a verdant parkland with trees and lakes. A stark white, modern clock tower stood in the middle, and at its base groups of young men sat talking animatedly. The whole area was full of people milling around, and the air was thick with the distinctive Iraqi dialect of Arabic. Nobody paid me any attention whatsoever—to them I was just another face, and I found that blanket of anonymity a comfortable one. I realized how thirsty I was, so I took a seat in a nearby fast-food joint and ordered a milkshake—cold and sweet, just what my body was craving. After my first few thirsty gulps, I slowed down and pulled out a piece of paper from my pocket. Crumpled and dirty, it was the scrap on which Saad had written the name and phone number of his friend Wissam. I remembered Saad’s words: when I arrived, I was to hunt up Wissam.

I felt uncomfortable making the call. I had no idea who this man was, and I didn’t even know what I was going to ask him. Surely my call would seem suspicious—the chances were good that he would want nothing to do with this unknown Iraqi boy with nowhere to stay and hardly any money, never mind who his uncle was. I didn’t know what kind of favor Saad had afforded this man to make him so sure he would help me, but I did know that some favors were soon forgotten and reluctantly repaid.

Still, experience had taught me that I could trust Saad’s judgment in these matters, and besides, I didn’t have any other choice. That crumpled-up piece of paper was the only collateral I had. I slurped the remainder of my milkshake and went to find a telephone.

I dialed the number. The phone rang several times. I was on the verge of hanging up when someone finally answered. “Hello?” The voice at the other end growled its greeting rather unenthusiastically.

“Good afternoon,” I replied as politely as possible. “My name is Sarmed Alsamari. I’m the nephew of Saad Al-Khatab from Baghdad.”

The sound of his voice was like the sun coming out. “Saad Al-Khatab!” he exclaimed. “Of course! How is he?”

“He’s well, and he sends his regards.”

“Saad is a good man. What can I do for you, Sarmed?” His voice was booming and jolly.

I lowered my voice slightly, though for what reason I can’t say—probably out of habit. “I’ve just arrived in Jordan from Iraq. I don’t know anybody here, so Saad suggested I call you…” My voice trailed off.

“Of course.” His voice became more sober. “Where are you now?”

“In Hashemite Square.”

“And where are you staying?”

“In a hotel on the outskirts.”

I heard him sucking on his teeth in thought. “Okay,” he said finally. “I’ll tell you where I live.” He recited an address in an unfamiliar-sounding area, before explaining which bus I would need to take to get there. “It’s a little way outside of Amman,” he told me. “Let’s meet tomorrow and we’ll see what we can do for you.”

I thanked him profusely and put the phone down feeling more confident than I had in days.

Before I could walk away, there was one more phone call I had to make. I lifted the receiver, dialed the operator, and for half an hour waded through the bureaucratic red tape that was necessary to make a call to Baghdad. Eventually, a familiar voice answered. As I spoke, I could hear my own voice cracking. “Uncle Saad,” I said quietly. “It’s me.”

Saad was silent for a moment, as though he did not dare hear the answer to the question he had to ask. “Where are you?”

“In Amman,” I told him, unable to withhold a grin even though I knew he couldn’t see it.

Saad let out an explosive breath. “Thanks be to Allah,” he whispered. “Did you have any trouble?”

“A little,” I told him, not wanting to worry his mind with the realities of what had happened since I last saw him. “I am meeting with your friend tomorrow.”

“Excellent,” Saad replied. “He is a good man. I’m sure he will help you.” I couldn’t help feeling that he did not sound entirely confident about that. “I’ll tell your mother that you are well. In the meantime, keep your head down and don’t get into trouble. And Sarmed.”

“Yes, Uncle Saad.”

“Don’t forget what I told you.”

His parting words echoed in my mind.
The genuine man never forgets his family. We are sending you to freedom so that one day you may rescue them from this place.

“I won’t forget, Uncle Saad,” I told him sincerely. “Hug my mother for me.”

The conversation lasted no more than a minute.

I spent the rest of the day simply enjoying being able to walk around without fear. As evening fell and the heat of the sun dissipated, I noticed more and more crowds of young people appearing in the area. There were all sorts of nationalities there—Jordanians, Iraqis, Syrians, Lebanese, Saudis—and they congregated in groups, laughing, eating ice cream, having something to drink. Not having eaten since early that morning by the roadside, I approached a stall selling street food. A group of young men about my age were hanging around there, and somehow we fell into conversation. “Where are you from?” one of them asked me.

I looked around nervously. In Iraq, you entered carefully into conversations with strangers on the street, because you never knew who had the ear of the authorities. The idea of spilling my secrets to some person I had just met was anathema to me, but there was something about this guy’s demeanor—a lack of interest that suggested he was making idle conversation rather than pumping me for incriminating information—that made me feel I could trust him. “Baghdad,” I told him. “I arrived today.”

“Staying long?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I want to get to England.”

“To claim asylum?” He sounded as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and I nodded a little warily.

“Have you been to the UN yet?”

“The UN?” The question surprised me. “No. Why would I want to do that?”

The guy smiled at me as if indulging a naive child. “To get yourself on their lists. Sometimes they provide refugees with passage to a safer country. You never know, it might be quicker than whatever else you had in mind.”

Just then one of his friends interrupted. “Be careful, though.”

“What for?”

“There are all sorts of rumors going around that the place is watched.” Without taking his eyes off me, he took a slurp from the glass bottle of Coke he was drinking through a straw.

“Who by?”

“Spies,” he said shortly. “Military police from Iraq or wherever, put there to keep an eye out for people who skipped the country illegally. Not that I’m saying that’s what you did.” He smiled and winked knowingly.

“What about the Jordanians?” I asked, a bit disconcerted by this news. “Is it worth asking them to grant me asylum?” It wasn’t something I had particularly planned to do, but I figured that it was best to know what all my options were.

The guy laughed, a short, ugly bark that betrayed his contempt for the Jordanian system. “Sure, you can try,” he told me. “They’ll put your name on a list and you’ll never hear from them again. At best you’ll be forgotten; at worst you’ll be alerting them to the fact that you’re here illegally. Don’t let yourself feel too welcome in this town, my friend. They only tolerate our presence because of the cheap oil they’re getting from our country—if it wasn’t for that, we’d be out of here faster than you can say ‘Abu Ghraib.’” He laughed again, at his own joke this time, before wandering off with his friends.

It had been a sobering conversation. In my overwhelming desire to get to Jordan, it had not really crossed my mind that such tensions would be something I would encounter, but now that it had been spelled out to me it made perfect sense. And as if to confirm my newfound discovery, as I was wearily making my way back to my hotel an incident occurred that underlined how careful I needed to be. I had just left Hashemite Square and was looking around, drinking in the sights and sounds of the quarter where I would clearly be spending a fair amount of my time, when I passed a group of young men and women not much older than myself. Suddenly one of them called out to me, and it was clear from his accent that he was Jordanian. “
Alaa waaish bidahik,
” he shouted. “What are you looking at?”

I stopped, suddenly frozen by the aggressive sound in his voice, and didn’t answer.

I shook my head. “I’m not,” I mumbled.

“What is it? Do you want to fight me?” He was walking toward me now, his gait lurching in a way that suggested he had been drinking. I took a step backward, but he continued to bear down on me. He pushed me heavily against my chest and I stumbled.

“Look, my friend,” I started to say. “I’m not looking for trouble…” But as I spoke I saw the sight of a uniform at the other end of the street. Immediately my fear of the confrontation was supplanted by my inbuilt horror of uniforms. Every instinct in my body shrieked at me to get away, to avoid being asked questions I didn’t want to answer by a figure of authority.

I walked briskly away with the words “Fucking Iraqis!” ringing in my ears.

First thing the
following morning, having showered at the hotel so that my body at least was a little cleaner, I made my way to UN headquarters. I had not forgotten the warning I had heard the previous night, but I had decided to take a calculated risk. If these talked-about Iraqi spies were real, how would they spot me from among the tens of thousands of other Iraqis in Amman at the time? My passport was good enough to pass a cursory examination, and after all this was the UN. If I didn’t feel safe there, where would I?

The headquarters was housed in a quiet residential area of Amman, surrounded by pretty gardens and tall metal railings. A number of people were milling around outside, but as I approached the gate with as great an air of confidence as I could muster, I avoided meeting anybody’s eye because I didn’t want to betray my nervousness. I have legitimate business, I kept telling myself over and over again. I have a right to be here.

Nobody approached me as I walked in. The scene inside could not have been more different from the calmness of the exterior. It was bedlam. Despite the early hour, all sorts of people were there, refugees from Sudan, Somalia, and all over the Middle East, chattering loudly to one another in languages that I did not understand. I stood there for a moment in a daze, not quite sure what to do, before joining a line marked “Asylum Requests” and awaiting my turn to be interviewed.

When my turn came, I sat down at the desk nervously. “Fill this in,” the official in charge said without even looking at me. I scrawled the few details that were required of me on the sheet, then handed it back. Finally the official looked me in the eye, his contempt and boredom written plainly across his face. “Where are you from?” he asked me in a tone of voice that immediately reminded me of the corrupt checkpoint guard who had detained me on my way back to Baghdad.

“Iraq,” I told him, shifting uncomfortably in my seat. This was not the welcome I had expected from the UN.

“Do you have permission to be here?”

I shook my head.

“Why do you need political asylum?”

“I believe my life is in danger if I return to my home country.” I thought this sounded dramatic, but the official had clearly heard it a thousand times before. He looked at me with suspicion, as if deciding what to do with me—though in truth I don’t suppose he had the authority to do anything other than process me as he had everyone else. Finally he stamped my form and gave me a date several weeks hence when I was to return for further interviewing. He beckoned the next person in line before I even stood up to leave.

I left the room feeling slightly bemused. I had expected UN headquarters to be a haven, a place where I would feel safe, where my past would be something to invoke sympathy, not suspicion. In reality, I was just another number, an illegal alien, a statistic. Nobody was interested in me as an individual. With a start I realized that I could rely on nobody but myself to ensure my safety—and the fulfillment of my dream to make it to England.

Hitching the small bag that contained everything I owned farther up on my shoulder, I stood at the gates of the UN for a moment to gather my thoughts, this time taking in my surroundings in greater detail. There seemed to be more people outside now than when I had gone in, and I took a brief moment to scan the faces of those around me. Some of them were hanging around in groups, others sitting on benches across the road. On the street corner I noticed one man just standing there, loitering. He was wearing Western clothing, and he would have been entirely unremarkable had it not been for the fact that he was staring directly at me. I tore my gaze from him and tried to look nonchalant, but when I glanced back his eyes were still fixed on mine. Immediately I found myself short of breath, with nauseous waves of panic crashing over me as the warning I had received the previous night rang in my head. I started walking briskly away in the opposite direction. Desperately I tried not to look back so as to avoid calling attention to my nervousness, but in the end I couldn’t stop myself.