Escape from Saddam Read online

  At first it seemed as if the driver had been a bit disingenuous. He drove slowly and carefully, taking care not to drive over any bumps in the road. But as his confidence, and mine, increased, so too did his speed. Grim faced, I held on as the wind blew in my face, my eyes half closed to protect them from the elements. It didn’t take long for my arms and the rest of my body to become stiff and uncomfortable, so I occasionally allowed myself to let go with one hand as I shuffled myself into a less stressful position before holding on tightly again as the car shuddered at high speed over the less-than-perfect road surface.

  As we drove, my mind was doing fireworks. How had I got myself into this position? The wolves were still fresh in my thoughts, and as I squinted out at the bleak expanse of desert that was just starting to lighten up with sunrise, I wondered how many more of those awful beasts were out there. It wouldn’t do to find myself alone again at the side of the road—I clutched on to the roof rack with renewed vigor and tried to put all thoughts of falling from my mind.

  The road remained fairly empty. Occasionally a car would pass us traveling in the opposite direction, its headlights announcing its presence on the long, straight road a long time before it was actually upon us. Whether their occupants found the sight of a frightened young man clutching on to the back of the car they passed a strange one, I can’t say. Nobody stopped to look, and the driver of our car was traveling too fast for anyone to overtake us from behind. It was a far cry from how things would be a few miles up the road in Iraq, where the fear of checkpoints and border guards would have made this way of traveling an impossibility for me. The scenery around me might have been practically identical, but already I could sense the differences between the two sides of the border.

  We drove like this for nearly an hour, by which time my arms and wrists were aching from the exertion of holding on so tightly, and nausea was encroaching on me. Every time we hit a bump, I felt the shock, unsoftened by the car’s shoddy suspension, reverberate through my whole body. Occasionally my mind wandered as I reflected on the almost dreamlike sequence of the night’s events; but I was brought harshly back to reality when I realized that my grip on the roof rack was not as firm as I thought it might be.

  Suddenly I felt the car slow down slightly, and the driver veered into the middle of the road, forcing me to steel my body against the force in the opposite direction. I swore under my breath—what was he playing at?—but then I noticed that the driver had put his hazard indicators on. I peered over my shoulder. Behind me were the unmistakable lights of a bus’s headlights, and in the instant I became aware of them, there was a deafening noise, a screeching siren of a horn as the bus driver tried to stop the strange car ahead from driving so dangerously. My nerves already frayed, I wanted to close my ears with my hands, but that wasn’t an option as I had to maintain my grip on the car; instead I scrunched up my face and tried to calm my body from the shock the noise had given me. The car’s driver, however, remained firm. He stayed in the center of the road, gradually slowing down and waving his arm out of the window to indicate to the bus driver that he should pull over. Whether it occurred to the bus driver that this was strange behavior—more befitting a bandit trying to hijack the bus or a couple of drunks fooling around—I don’t know; certainly I remember simply feeling relief that I might soon be able to find myself a more comfortable mode of transport. After ten minutes of driving like this, the two vehicles gradually came to a stop in the middle of the road.

  The two men climbed out of the front of the car and walked toward the bus. “Stay there,” one of them told me as they passed. “We’ll do the talking.” I did as I was told.

  There was a hiss as the bus doors opened, and after a few seconds’ pause, two men climbed out of the bus—the driver and conductor, I presumed. One of them, a short, squat man with an ugly face, was carrying what looked like a piece of heavy metal piping strapped to his hand with a sturdy length of leather. The way he was holding it made it perfectly clear that this was something that had been specially adapted to be a weapon, and that he was perfectly prepared to use it without any qualms. For a moment nobody spoke, and the threat of violence hung in the air.

  “What do you think you’re playing at?” the man holding the piping finally growled at my two new acquaintances.

  The man who had been sitting in the passenger seat pointed at me. “He needs a lift. We can’t travel with him like that for much longer.”

  None of the suspicion left the other man’s face. “Does he have any money?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll ask him.” He walked back to me. “Well, do you?” he asked.

  “A little,” I said warily. “American dollars.”

  He reported this back to the coach driver, whose eyes softened slightly although he maintained his grip on the metal piping as he walked up to me. “Okay,” he asked, “what’s your name?”

  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 s
earched. 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

  Amman 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.