Escape from Saddam (20 page)

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

“W
here’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 released 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.

“They’re fine,” I told him. “They send their love.”

Faisal took me under his wing. He found me a place to live with two other Iraqis. He showed me around, and he helped me to integrate. Without him, I would have been flailing in the dark.

One day I received a call from Faisal. A letter had arrived at his house, addressed to me. I assumed that it was from Baghdad, secretly sent by my mother or Saad, and as I clung to any small contact I could have with them, I hurried over to read it. When I arrived, however, I was surprised to see something somewhat weightier than what I would have expected from Baghdad. Intrigued, I opened the envelope. As I did so, a sheaf of photographs fell out, along with my Iraqi passport. And with them, in exquisite handwriting on a piece of expensive paper, was a note: “I hope you had a safe journey. Good luck with your new life in the UK.
Inshallah
God will guide you and assist you, and keep you from danger.”

I had not told the girl on the plane anything about my plans to travel to England, for fear of incriminating her. I had not told her that I was illegal. I had not told her that I was making her an unwitting accomplice to my plans. Curiosity must have got the better of her, urging her to open up the package. Either that, or I wasn’t as clever as I thought, and she had seen through it all.

In Baghdad or
Amman, if you stopped someone in the street to ask for directions or for the time, the chances were good that the conversation would lead on from there. Perhaps you would end up going for coffee; you might even be invited back to your new friend’s house, where he would offer to cook food for you. It is the Arabic way: hospitality is prized above almost everything else. And although in Iraq you had to be constantly on your guard for civilians who had the ear of the security forces, constantly aware of the subtext of these impromptu conversations, you nevertheless accepted this friendliness as a way of life.

How different it was in England. The last time I had been here, I was a child, unaware of social subtleties; now I was in the thick of a cultural landscape that could scarcely have been more different from the one I had left. I was lucky, though. At least I spoke the language, and I had a genuine desire to learn everything I could about the country I had set my sights on for so long. For the first six months I was not allowed to work, but the government funded asylum-seekers to study at the local college, so I started working for my English and business studies A-levels—subjects that I thought would help me acclimatize. I also spent a great deal of time simply walking the streets, filling my eyes and ears with the sights and sounds of my new home, looking with wonder at how people were living.

I found English people somewhat colder than their Arabic counterparts—not unfriendly, just not that interested, unwilling to forge immediate relationships with a young Iraqi refugee who must have looked like any number of other foreigners walking the streets. And so, to start with, I spent most of my time in the Middle Eastern communities. Large portions of my day were spent at the local mosque, praying and socializing with people around whom I felt comfortable and, more important, who felt comfortable around me. Mostly these were young British Muslims of Iraqi, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Syrian origin, simple, genuine, good-hearted people who had no need to ask me why I had fled Iraq or what horrors I had endured. They understood. Day by day they taught me about the way of life in the UK, how I should act, how I should talk, how I should behave. They cared for me more than anyone and became like the family that had been denied me by my escape.

Except, of course, they
weren’t
my family. My family was two and a half thousand miles away in a small compound in the shadow of the communications tower in Al-Mansour. My family was still living under the regime that would have me imprisoned, beaten, or even worse if I dared to return to see them. I felt in some strange way as if my soul had been split: half of me reveled in the joy of having made it safely to England in the face of so many dangers and difficulties; half of me ached to see my nearest and dearest again. I could speak to them on the telephone, of course, but that was unsatisfactory to say the least. Calls out of Iraq were limited to ten minutes each, but even when I called Baghdad, we always had to assume that the conversation was being listened to and recorded. On occasion you could even hear the heavy breathing of the silent eavesdropper. We all knew it would have proved deeply unfortunate for my family if they let on that they knew where I was, and so our brief conversations were carried out in a kind of code language that allowed us to establish that we were all safe, but we could never speak the things that we really wanted to say or hear.

As soon as it was allowed by the conditions of my entry into the UK, I started at college. My plan had always been to study medicine, to become a doctor and so give something back to the country that had granted me asylum. But I suppose, in my enthusiasm and naïveté, I had not given proper thought to the realities of such a dream. Any qualifications I had achieved in Iraq were worthless in the UK, and the small exam I had taken when in Jordan was insufficient to get me into a medicine course. Moreover, I would have to pursue more than a decade of study. It would be impossible, not because I wasn’t willing, but because I knew now I was here that I had to get myself a job. I would have to wait three years before I could be funded at university; but in any case I had no desire to live off the state, and besides supporting myself I had to be able to send some of my earnings—through convoluted routes—back to my family in Iraq. I hoped that one day I would be able to help them get out. But that would take money—money that I had to earn. Of course it could never be mentioned during my phone calls home, but every time I heard Saad’s quiet, calm voice I remembered the words with which he had left me:
the genuine man never forgets his family.

I did not neglect my studies entirely, however. In February 1996 I enrolled in an English course, then a business studies course, and in my spare time I earned money painting houses. It was humble work, but I relished it. Whenever I grew disconsolate, I thought back to the grim realities of the Iraqi army, or to the danger I had faced working at the heart of the Hussein family’s operations in Amman. As time passed, I grew my hair long. I discarded the Western clothes that I had believed to be trendy when I was living in the Middle East—T-shirts with the insignias of heavy metal bands like Metallica and Megadeth. I even took an English pseudonym—Louis—in an attempt to appear more Westernized and so that I could travel undetected back to the Middle East if need be. Later I changed it to Lewis. Gradually I became more and more integrated. Although it would be a while before I was granted a travel document that would let me leave the country and return, I even started to have fun. After several months I found myself a more permanent job as a payroll clerk for a big company, and I moved out of my shared accommodations into a small one-room apartment. I spent almost every waking hour working: I had my day job as an accounts clerk, a Saturday job in a department store, and a Sunday job with a real estate agent. The pace was relentless, but I was determined to make the most of all the opportunities that had been afforded me.

Despite the hard work I was doing, my physical health began to improve. The stomach pains I had been suffering were diagnosed as a stress-induced ulcer and I was given treatment, but the fact that my life was now distinctly less traumatic must have played its part in the condition clearing up. Even so, I still found myself afflicted by what I had endured.

Nightly I would awaken from sleep, troubled by dreams of Red Berets, desert wolves, and flat-eyed immigration officials; I would relive my spell in the pit as the sneering
arif
looked on; I would find myself in the cramped cell on the road from my unit to Baghdad, excrement smeared on the floor and no hope of escape. When I woke up, my body would be shaking, my bedding damp with sweat, and I would spend the rest of the night wide awake, waiting for first light, with sleep just a distant and terrifying memory. Panic would overtake me, and I would fret about my family back in Al-Mansour. The military police seemed to have forgotten about me and them—but how long would it be until they remembered or their bribes ran out? Those lonely nights were filled with a series of horrifying
what ifs.
The doctors diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder: a fancy name for what amounted to an uncontrollable fear of my own past. I was referred to a therapist, who spent eight months working with me to try to conquer the PTSD. In the end he judged that it was so severe that I needed medication. I was prescribed maximum doses of an anti-depressant and remained on the drug for the next six years.