I remember that morning when we woke up, my siblings and I wondered why we weren’t woken up to go to school! Mother said that the war had started. We didn’t make much of it. It was January 1991, I was only 13 then. We heard that war was bad, but at least there was no school. Dad didn’t go to work. There was a real sense of family in the house, everyone was there: dad listened to the radio all the time, and mom joined him when she didn’t have to do housework, and we played and messed around all the time until there was a moment of peace – lunchtime or dinnertime.
Every evening we would enjoy the flashes that lit the dark winter nights followed by loud bangs. There were times when warplanes were very loud, and my uncle – who lived nearby and who would come over in the evening to share stories with my dad and listen to the news of the war – would say “That's gotta be B-52”. And mother would start crying, but we didn’t understand why.
There was no electricity, so in the evening we would light kerosene lamps around the house. I liked those dim evenings. My uncle would bring us parts of the adventures of Rocambole, a novel by French writer Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail, translated into Arabic, and my siblings and I would sit around a kerosene lamp and one of us would read aloud, in a clear, low voice that reflected the silence of the night, and every now and then the walls would tremble, as a reminder of hope.
As the days went by, the war accelerated. One of my uncles from my mother’s side was a soldier in Kuwait. The Iraqi forces were forced out of Kuwait by the U.S.-led coalition forces, most of them were killed. My uncle, however, didn’t come back, so we believed that he’d died in the war. Everyone was feeling sad, and mother would sit in her bedroom and cry for hours. I heard my dad saying that despite the official ceasefire the Iraqi army convoys crossing the border back into Iraq were bombed and soldiers shot dead by the Americans. But one day my uncle actually came back home. He came carrying his rifle and all of his gear including a military radio set. So heavy a burden he had carried on his shoulders for hundreds of miles. He would tell us stories of his survival: how his fellow soldiers were killed before his eyes, and how he walked through the night across the desert, and how he hid in a truck at night to transport him along a highway and when he woke up in the morning he found out that the truck was packed with bodies of dead soldiers being transported. He was everybody’s hero. He was a young man of 25, forced to join the military service at the age of 17.
Many people would have loved to leave the country. Life was never good, but most people had given in and were content. People lived in fear under a brutal dictatorship. Flattery and submission were characteristics of most people. However, the war led to uprisings: the Kurdish uprising in the northern provinces of the country, and the Shia uprising in the south. Both, of course, were later savagely suppressed. Within the first two weeks, most of the Iraqi cities and provinces fell to rebel forces, and during a month of unrest, tens of thousands of people died and over two million people were displaced. The revolution was held back from initial success by Saddam’s internal special forces divisions, but also by the lack of anticipated American support. Saddam’s Ba’ath Party regime managed to maintain control over Baghdad and soon suppressed the rebels in a brutal campaign conducted by loyalist military forces spearheaded by the Iraqi Republican Guards.
In the southern provinces, the rebels killed many Ba’athist officials and officers. Their dead bodies filled the streets, on sidewalks and in public squares. The rebels threatened the local people not to clean up the corpses. In response, thousands of unarmed civilians were killed indiscriminately by loyalist forces when the government forces regained control, and many historical and religious monuments in the south were targeted and destroyed. Saddam’s security forces detained and summarily executed thousands of people at random in every city they entered, in a policy of collective responsibility.
The south plunged into the dark ages of suppression, poverty, and illiteracy. I remember when Saddam’s army tanks and armored vehicles entered my native city. Rumors had it that ‘the army’ was heading towards the city after it regained control over neighboring cities. So my father decided that we move to the countryside, where he had relatives in a village five miles away from our town. Everybody believed that the army was going to bombard the city due to street fights. We didn’t have a car and it wasn’t possible to get one. It was a mass migration from urban areas to the countryside. Few people decided to stay in their homes. Everyone was in fear - fear of an uncertain destiny. We carried everything we could take and walked the five miles. Rural areas were deemed safer due to two reasons; the first was the lack of urban density - so walls don’t fall on you - and the availability of underground shelters; and the second reason was that, unlike urban areas, villagers could protect their villages and drive away foreign fighters who tend to use civilians as human shields.
Relatives welcomed us into their homes. We rested and had food, and shared stories. A few days on, remote explosions were getting ever closer, warplanes were getting louder - despite a no-fly zone imposed by the UN. Many people didn’t want to sleep inside their houses fearing that they would collapse. These were one-story mud houses, a mixture of earth, hay and other natural materials. They were pretty solid. People instead slept outside in makeshift shelters. One night, we were with my mother in an underground shelter covered with wooden beams and planks, then rattan mats and a top layer of dirt. The place was packed with women and children. They brought in a kerosene lamp which released dark smoke. The air was contaminated with smoke. But outside, we could hear the bangs of explosions, and the ground would shudder. Mother said “let’s go out. We can’t stay here. The air is too heavy to breathe. If we are to die, let’s at least die in the fresh air!” So we creeped out through the small opening at the corner of the ditch. And mother mumbled “Stupid villagers!”
Days went by in constant fear, horror at night and labor during the day. To drink water, take a shower or wash our clothes, mother had to carry water in buckets from the river. All women did so. There was no piped water in the countryside. To drink the water, they let it sit in a clay pot for a while. It was surprisingly fresh and tasted really good. There wasn’t a proper shower room nor a bathroom, so hygiene was a real challenge and every one of us got sick. The countryside in Iraq lacks basic public service; there's almost nothing. There are no roads cut, no piped water, and no sewage. Total negligence. The population has always been neglected; children don't have to go to school, and illiteracy is utter. But we had to put up with all of this to stay alive. The peril was real, and father and mother knew that very well, so they did what they had to do.
About a week on, one afternoon I was playing with my brother and other kids - we usually played wrestling or soccer - when a young girl came running to deliver a message that mother summoned us. My brother had just turned 16 and I had just turned 15, a few days before. When we got to our mother we saw the horror on her face, the sadness in her eyes. “Run, run…” mother said. “Follow him - pointing at an older kid - to your dad, quickly.” We asked nervously, “what’s going on?” “The army is on the edge of town. They are detaining everyone above 15.” So we ran with other men from the village to hide in a ditch far in the fields. When we got there, we saw the ditch was full of men and teenagers. My dad was there among them. We joined him. And we would be hiding there for hours, with men speculating about their future and what was going to happen to them.
They said that the army was collecting people into groups and gunning them down in mass graves. Some claimed they were burning them alive, men, women and even children! We were, I guess, scared. Many of these stories turned out to be true. The loyalists' army gathered men, above a certain age, in certain neighborhoods, detained them and killed them in mass graves, especially in areas where it met fierce rebel resistance. Many locals were taken by the loyalists' army and never came back to their families. They simply disappeared. Luckily for us, the city didn’t resist, except for small pockets of resistance here and there, and that was because lots of rebels and sympathizers had rushed to “protect” the holy Shiite cities of Karbala and Najaf - which eventually fell so badly in the hands of Saddam’s army and special forces - the notorious Republican Guards. Most of the rebel fighters didn’t make it out and they were lost forever.
My dad had a cousin who was a colonel in Saddam’s Republican Guards, and ironically his wife and children were on the run with us, in the same village. So, the news came that Colonel Hasan was heading the army that entered the province. That was good news. A big relief! We were still hiding until an army vehicle came with a few soldiers in it. By the colonel’s order, they escorted his wife and children to their home. Colonel Hasan spared the village for being family. Father decided that it was safe to return home. The city and all of its surrounding villages have fallen again under the army’s control. Relatives gave us a ride back home. There were army checkpoints all over the place, and the passwords we used were “Col. Hasan” and “20 Miles” -- the name of the village.
When we got home, we found that our neighbors’ house had been hit with a mortar shell. The shell hit the front corner of the house, which was the kitchen roof. It pierced the concrete roof and the brick walls, creating a “manhole”, and causing the glass of the front window to shatter all over the room. The neighbors’ dad had decided to stay at home after he sent his family somewhere else to safety. He had been lucky. When the shell hit, he was in the bedroom on the other side of the house. Our house was intact, but the army had set a checkpoint right at the corner of our street, a few yards away from our house.
Back before the displacement, and after the war broke out, food became scarce. There was no flour, no bread to eat. So we bought wheat, or sometimes barley because it was cheaper, and ground it into flour. We used a traditional hand mill made of millstones, called “rahha” - a pair of millstones: the turning runner stone sitting on a bedstone, which was stationary. Grinding is done by turning the runner stone by a wooden shaft attached to its top surface, meanwhile adding grains through an opening in the top center, called the “eye”. Ground flour is then channeled to the outer edges of the stones where it can be collected. My siblings and I would sit around the rahha and take turns grinding wheat and sometimes barley. One of us would read a book aloud under a kerosene lamp. And this would be our job, almost every evening. Many nights we had only bread to eat, and it was portioned out. We cooked on charcoal without a grill, so tomatoes had bits of charcoal sometimes, and we would make a fuss. But many nights we had bread only for dinner.
The war destroyed all power plants and stations and water treatment plants. Gas stations ran out of fuel. We had no electricity and no running water. People had to fight and scuffle in big lines at gas stations to fill their buckles and containers with kerosene or gasoline, or to get cooking gas bottles. Life was getting harder and harder. So when the fighting stopped we thought things would go back to normal. But they didn't. The Shiite revolution started out of the vacuum created by the war, and things became even worse. Institutions were looted and destroyed: hospitals, schools, police stations, government offices, everything. Many people got killed in the chaos, for vengeance and feuds. I went to my primary school and saw how it was left in a mess, archive rooms had been set on fire. The town looked like it was hit by an apocalypse. I saw people carrying guns, different types of rifles, grenades, military equipment, hospital beds, etc. I was strolling with some friends and cousins. There was a woman carrying a screen monitor, so we asked her, “Ma'am, what are you doing with this?” “We don't have a TV at home, so I thought we needed one.” She replied. My cousin told her, “This isn't a TV. It's a cardiac monitoring device.” After she was convinced it wasn't a television, she leaned toward the river and tossed the monitor in the water, murmuring in disappointment “I'd been carrying ‘you’ for miles!”
Many people took up arms and held checkpoints in support of the revolution. Among these were our next-door neighbors. They were four brothers, two of them became revolutionary soldiers, and they actually went up north to fight Saddam's army heading to the Shiite “holy” cities of Karbala and Najaf. They were both lightly injured and had to come back home after the army swept through both cities. This rebel control lasted over a month. So when the army regained control and we came back home we learned that everything everybody did had been monitored and recorded by government loyalists. The army had been tipped off about our neighbors’ participation in the revolt, and soldiers had entered the neighbors’ house, broken furniture and left it in a complete mess. The neighbors were gone of course. A few days later, a group of soldiers headed by an army officer came to the neighbors’ house with a loader and broke the wall and outer door and forced people to go and loot everything. The officer came to us and told my dad to go and take stuff from the “traitors’” house. When my dad hesitated, the officer was like “Do you support the rebels?”, my dad replied, “No, of course not!” “Then go and take whatever you want.” The officer roared a command. So, my dad and brother brought big sacks of grains and other small stuff. We couldn't take much, because the house was stormed by neighbors who were grabbing whatever they could lay their hands on. A few months later, neighbors came back home - they were pardoned somehow - and we gave them back what was theirs. Not all neighbors returned what they had taken, though!
I have two uncles who took up arms in support of the uprising. They were young men still in their twenties. One had been a soldier who survived the Kuwait war. He had been forced to join the Iraqi army and be deployed later to Kuwait. The other, the younger, was a deserter from the army, he was just 21 years of age. They both went to the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf to fight against Saddam's army. They survived the massacre there to tell stories of horror. My younger uncle came back later after the two cities had already fallen under the army's control. He tells me how he and his fellow fighters were trapped between a relatively high building and an open field. The army was in front of them, advancing with a mighty force. To get to a safe zone, they had to run across the open field and into a valley. The problem was that the army snipers had had a good view of the open field, and the rebels could see their comrades being taken down by snipers as they made the run. Uncle said that the fear had been indescribable:
“you could see dead bodies all over the field, and you're trying to bet the chances of survival”. “If I stay, I'll surely die, and if I run across the field, I might survive. I waited until a man next to me started running hysterically to safety, then I gave it a try. I ran as fast as I could, past the man. I suddenly heard an explosion of breath behind me, and I knew the poor man was hit by a sniper bullet. I kept taking a zigzag course. I remember seeing a bullet or two hit the ground ahead of me. And there came the moment when I threw myself down the valley. When I got up, I knew I had broken my right collarbone, but I was thrilled to be alive!”
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