The first day of the Gulf War had been exhausting and unnerving.
After arriving at my friend’s house, we started talking about the chances of being stuck in Basra for the duration of the war and potentially what a dangerous location it would be. Plus, naturally, I wanted to be with my family. Should I stay, or should I go?
In Basra all phone communications had been cut and, after our conversation a couple of days earlier, I couldn’t talk to my parents. At this stage, I didn’t know exactly where they were—and they didn’t even know whether I was alive or dead.
I explained my predicament to my friend and the engineer. No sooner had I said I was thinking of heading back to Baghdad than the engineer was urging me to make the journey. And he made no bones about telling me he wanted to go as well, although he didn’t explain why. He quickly latched onto the fact that I had a car and asked if I could take him.
If only the decision had been as simple as that. Sure, I had a car—a ten-year-old blue Toyota Corona. My family had bought it new and I’d looked after it, so I didn’t doubt that the car itself was up to the task of making the journey to Baghdad. The tyres, though, were a different matter. They were Iraqi made, which wasn’t the best quality to start with, and they were quite badly worn. But there weren’t any other tyres available and we’d have to take our chances with them. My other major concern was fuel. I had barely enough to get us halfway to Baghdad, roughly 550 kilometres away. Petrol, of course, was a rare commodity because the Americans had bombed the oil refineries and any available petrol was being reserved for the Iraqi armed forces.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ the engineer said. ‘I have some connections in Samawah. We can get petrol there.’
There are two highways between Basra and Baghdad—the old one to the east and the new one to the west. The eastern highway essentially goes from city to city. Samawah is about halfway to Baghdad on the western highway. Unfortunately, the western highway was by far the more dangerous of the two roads. Even in peace time, it’s a tricky, potentially dangerous drive—where it crosses large tracts of desert, it is extremely isolated.
Now, at the start of the war, there was another troubling factor. The western highway runs directly past the Imam Ali Air Base—the biggest military air base in Iraq and an obvious target for American bombers. There was no secret, even at such an early point in the conflict, that it was being bombed constantly. Driving on the highway amid those air raids, we could be hit by a bomb, rocket or machine-gun bullets and it would be very easy to be caught by the shrapnel fragments which, inevitably, would be flying around in the maelstrom. There was a genuine possibility that along the way we would become what is euphemistically called ‘collateral damage’.
So, I had to face the fact that this was not going to be a routine and relaxing drive from Basra to Baghdad. First, we had to cross a remote desert region, then we had to beg, steal or borrow enough fuel to get us all the way to the capital. Because of the extent of the bombing, we couldn’t be certain the road remained intact and open the whole way. The tyres may or may not last.
And, of course, the biggest danger was driving past an air base that was under relentless attack by the most powerful military force in the world.
Even while I was still considering the options, the engineer was pressuring me to drive back to Baghdad. Obviously he was anxious to return to the capital, and he saw me and my car as his main chance. His logic was that within a few days, the air raids would be replaced by a ground invasion and Basra would be taken by the coalition. He believed once that happened, Basra and the south would be set up as an autonomous region and we would be stuck there. He didn’t want to take that chance.
After some thought, I agreed to do it and as soon as I’d made the decision, the engineer took charge, saying, ‘We must leave early in the morning; any later and the bridges will all be bombed and we’ll lose our chance of getting through.’
The wisdom of his words was underlined by the events of the evening and night. The bombing of Basra continued, targeted at military and logistical objectives, but still inflicting extensive damage on the city. And it was clear an invasion was to follow.
Despite the air raids, I had ventured out during the evening to look for my university friends from Baghdad. I wanted to offer a place in the car to anyone who wanted to head back to the capital. But they were nowhere to be found. My guess is that most had already sought safety somewhere else.
So, by default, it was me and the engineer.
The atmosphere was tense and sleep was hard to come by that night. We had no idea what fate held in store for us.
We started making preparations early the next morning, as the engineer had suggested. I removed my belongings and packed them into the car. The engineer brought a few things with him. Finally we left Basra about seven o’clock.
I was thinking of smearing mud over the car so it would be camouflaged, if only a little. But the engineer said, ‘Don’t bother. The Americans will know what’s a military vehicle and what’s civilian.’ To this day, I’m not sure I share his confidence!
The early stages of the drive were tense, but relatively straightforward. Out of the bomb-ravaged city of Basra, through the suburbs and into the surrounding areas, everything went to plan.
As soon as we got out of Basra province, we had to cross the Euphrates River and a series of other waterways. The bridges were the only crossings, but they’d been mercilessly bombed. So had the suspended stretches of road over the marshes. Apart from the dangers of actually being bombed en route, the damage inflicted by the US-led aerial assault meant sections of the road were likely to be impassable. But we were in luck that day. Knowing the military and strategic significance of these crossings, Iraqi engineering teams were replacing the bridges and suspended roads almost as quickly as the Americans were bombing them.
In that part of the country, the Euphrates is about 750 metres wide from bank to bank and covers a vast floodplain. Aware the river crossings would be an obvious target, Iraqi engineers were prepared. After the bridges were bombed, they quickly laid hundreds of sections of massive water or oil pipes side by side to create the foundation of a new bridge across the river where the coalition bombardment had struck. The pipes allowed the water to maintain its usual flow while sand packed tightly on top of the pipes created a makeshift roadway. The new road was usually in place within a day or two of a bombing attack—an enormous task to be carried out so swiftly.
The pipe-based replacement roadways were very ingenious and effective—at least until the next bombing raid, although at some crossings where the engineers were still making repairs there was a floating military bridge as a temporary crossing.
While I was very grateful that all the bridges we encountered were in working order, driving across them was still a frightening experience because they were rough and a constant target for the coalition bombers. These huge aircraft were rumbling around in the skies above us all the time—we could hear them constantly—and at any moment a plane could plunge down and bomb the bridge we were approaching.
But, as fortune would have it, again that day they obviously had more important targets than my old Toyota Corona or the bridges we traversed.
Driving over the bridges was nerve-wracking enough. But, just as we had anticipated, the most terrifying part of the journey was alongside the Imam Ali Air Base a couple of hours out of Basra.
I was at the wheel—and driving through the danger area as fast as I could. I guess we were going about 100 kilometres an hour at that stage. Which may not sound particularly fast, but you have to remember the road was rough and peppered with bomb craters. Then there were the Toyota’s seriously worn and unsteady tyres. Adding to the tension, parts of the road were shrouded in the smoke and dust haze caused by the constant pounding of the air assault, bombs and rockets. And as we rumbled relentlessly along, we had to not only keep our eyes on the road but also keep watch on the skies so we knew where the next attack was coming from.
We approached the air base about nine o’clock in the morning. To the right of the road, we could see what we were getting ourselves into. The air base is in the middle of the flat, open desert and there’s nothing else around. No settlements, no trees, nothing. Even from a distance we could see the smoke and the coalition planes sweeping across the skies. Then, as we neared the base, we could hear the dull thud of bombs dropping all around us.
While I was panicking, throughout the ordeal the engineer seemed calm and composed in the passenger seat. He was clearly much braver than me. It was almost as if this was a familiar experience for him. It certainly wasn’t for me. Realising how terrified I was, he kept up a stream of advice, telling me not to look at anything other than the road. He said the Americans would be bombing the air base, not the road.
‘You need to drive as fast as you can,’ he instructed urgently but calmly.
Which, believe me, I did.
From the time we arrived in the general vicinity of the air base until it was well behind us, we were bombarded with the non-stop wail of American aircraft above us and the thunderous noise of the explosions. I could hear and feel the thudding as the Americans hit their target time and again. The impact of the explosions was so powerful they seemed to be only a few metres from the car and they were shaking us as well as the vehicle itself.
I was convinced we would be hit by a bomb or debris from the constant blasts. I thought I was going to die.
There was smoke everywhere—I could hardly see in front of the car. I just kept my hands gripped on the steering wheel and my right foot on the accelerator, pressing it as hard to the floor as I could. We had our heads ducked down as low as we could to make our bodies as small a target as possible.
All the time, the engineer was talking to me, trying to keep me calm.
That drive felt like it dragged on for hours. In reality, it probably took no more than fifteen minutes. But they were fifteen minutes of sheer, utter terror.
It was an enormous relief to leave the Imam Ali Air Base and the bombing behind; the journey was much safer from there on. We could still see the American planes, but their targets that day didn’t include anything else on the western road to Baghdad. Our troubles weren’t over, though. The car would soon run out of fuel. We had to get to Samawah, where the engineer had contacts. In the meantime, if the car stopped, there would be no one to help us.
The images we passed along the way told a story of destruction and death—Iraqi military vehicles that had been hit by the coalition attack lying abandoned on the side of the road. The only times we saw any other operational vehicles were at the river crossings, where a handful of cars might be queuing to drive over the makeshift bridges. To be among the only cars on what was normally a busy six-lane highway was surreal and unsettling, but not surprising—no one without an extremely good reason was foolhardy enough to expose themselves to the air attack, particularly near the air base.
As we reached Samawah, we saw that the bridges there had also been bombed and replaced by the pipe-based roadways. All the nearby power plants had been comprehensively attacked as well. Unlike the bridges, they remained rubble; there was no way they could be swiftly repaired.
The engineer, who was obviously very familiar with the town, directed me to an official building of some sort. I have no idea exactly what function it served and there were no signs on the exterior to indicate its purpose. He went inside and a little while later came out with a letter. Again, I have no knowledge of what the letter said; I didn’t read it and he didn’t brief me on its contents. But clearly it was some form of authority to get petrol.
We drove to a checkpoint a couple of kilometres away, where the engineer showed the letter to the military officials at the barricade. I sat in the driver’s seat, terrified, but trying to look like I’d done this many times before. Surely, we’d be refused entry—or worse. I could hardly believe it when the officials sent three soldiers to take us to a petrol station. The gates across the front of the petrol station were locked, but the soldiers opened them and we filled the car with fuel.
As we were leaving I quietly asked the engineer whether I needed to pay someone. He just shook his head and said, ‘Don’t worry. Keep driving.’
And so I did—non-stop through Hillah, near the old city of Babylon, and from there to Suwayrah where I would hopefully find my parents and the rest of my family. I had a rough idea of the location of the house they had rented. In our last phone conversation, they’d told me it was just down the road from the soccer stadium.
We reached Suwayrah around sunset and, after driving around for a while, we found the house. When I walked in, alive and unharmed, my mother collapsed with relief.
My parents had gone to Suwayrah because they thought it would be safe. But from day one of the war, the town had been heavily bombed. They only found out later that there was an undercover Iraqi helicopter base about 5 kilometres down the road, and 15 kilometres to the south, a rocket launch base which was firing missiles. Between Suwayrah and Baghdad was a major nuclear reactor.
My family had walked right into the thick of the war.
Driving into the town, I’d noticed wide stands of palm trees and citrus. Beneath them, on both sides of the road, parked like cars, were helicopters. The coalition had bombed the original helicopter base until the bunkers were destroyed. The Iraqis had then moved the remaining choppers under the cover of the trees.
Worse signs of war were to come. From a distance, the soccer stadium looked fairly normal—we could see the empty seats in the stands and the terraces—but the playing surface itself was packed with tanks covered with camouflage netting. One division of the Republican Guard was based there to protect the approaches to Baghdad. It was another obvious target for the coalition bombs—although, strangely, it never was attacked.
My family said the town and surrounding area had been bombed every day. Almost every official building had been flattened. It wasn’t surprising considering the concentration of Iraqi military hardware nearby.
I decided to stay with my family in Suwayrah but the engineer still needed to get to Baghdad. Two of my uncles who were at the house were going back to the capital that evening to pick up some belongings, so the engineer went in the car with them. That was the last time I saw him. And to this day, I can’t remember his name.
Under normal circumstances, Suwayrah is a relatively sleepy rural town of about 45,000 people. The Tigris River runs through it and provides the water for the farms that dominate the surrounding region. Most of the people are poor, but there are wealthier families, mainly living close to the river.
The house my family had rented was large and comfortable, in a residential area close to the commercial centre. It was a smarter part of town. But its location didn’t provide any respite from the war. When we went to bed that night, we were kept awake by the noise of planes overhead and the sound of explosions not far away. We could see the blasts and flying shrapnel from the bombs, but we couldn’t identify the specific targets.
The next morning, we heard knocking at the door. The visitor’s face was familiar—it was the husband of one of my mother’s cousins—but unusually he was wearing his helicopter pilot’s uniform. He never visited our family in uniform, so this immediately rang alarm bells. He explained that he was stationed at the nearby base and had heard from other relatives that we were in the area.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he said as soon as the front door closed behind him. ‘This is not a good place to stay.’
My mother sat him down to eat something while he quickly explained that the helicopter base was close by and had been constantly bombed. He stayed only briefly, repeatedly warning us of the dangers, then returned to the base and his duties.
Life in towns like Suwayrah went on regardless of the bombing, because the housing in the town itself wasn’t being targeted. I was told that for the first couple of days of the war, air-raid sirens had been sounded to warn everyone to take cover in the shelters. But the bombing raids were constant so the whole exercise quickly became futile. People stopped hiding because they realised that the bombs weren’t hitting the residential area of the town.
From time to time, I went to the top floor of the house to watch the American planes coming in on their bombing raids and hitting the military targets, especially the rocket launchers. They were obviously avoiding non-military targets.
Fortunately, within a couple of days the immediate danger of bombing raids close to our house diminished when the Iraqi Army mobilised the tanks from the nearby soccer stadium. The order brought a flurry of military movement all around the town and it was a relief to see them disappear from our neck of the woods.
For me, one of the saving graces was that the library in the town was still open. It meant that every day I could go there and continue my studies. The library was a legacy of the days of Qasim’s presidency. In four years, he’d done a lot for the town. As well as the library, he’d ordered the building of the soccer stadium. The people of the area loved him and hated Saddam.
There was also one bright side to the military damage for the people of the town—ice cream and milk were being given away free!
I remember on one visit to the downtown market I watched a large refrigerated truck from a nearby dairy factory pull up at the edge of the stalls, then the doors were thrown open and containers of ice cream were given away. It was an odd sight—people were stopping to grab free ice cream while coalition planes were flying overhead on bombing missions. It transpired that the American raids had cut the electricity to the area and the factory had no way of keeping the ice cream cold. So the people running the factory decided to take the produce into town and give it to the local community.
The factory was also giving away free milk, but you had to be on your toes to make the most of that opportunity. The milk arrived in the town immediately after it was picked up from the farms each morning so you needed to be at the market with a container at about 7.30 a.m. to have any chance of beating the thirsty throngs.
The market itself was flooded with Iranian products—canned food, chocolate, cookies. We found out that as soon as the war started, border controls collapsed. The Iranian border is only about 100 kilometres from the town, so opportunistic traders simply brought in all their goods and sold them where they could.
With no work available we had plenty of time on our hands and my uncle, the sculptor, decided he wanted to create something to keep us occupied and provide a minor distraction for the town. He went into the countryside and found a dead eucalyptus tree he thought had a particularly attractive shape. I helped him dig the tree out of the ground and we cut off some branches until it was about 5 metres long, then dragged it back with my car.
My uncle planned to make the tree into a statue, so we took it to a residential area and placed it on the corner of a street. It transpired that a bank manager lived on that corner and at first he came out of his house shouting, alarmed because he thought the Americans would think it was a rocket! Then he saw my uncle—who was very famous in Iraq—and decided it was okay for the tree to stay. So we dug a hole and cemented in the foundations.
There was another, smaller dead tree on the other side of the road; this one was about 1.5 metres tall and my uncle decided that it would also feature as a statue. My uncle painted the two trees very artistically. We spent about three or four days working on them and by the end they looked fabulous.
About a week later, we read a front-page story about this work of art in a national newspaper. The story said that this was an example of the Iraqi people showing defiance—which, frankly, was considerably overstating the case. We largely did it to keep ourselves occupied; there wasn’t much else to pass the time. Still, it made a good headline.
On another occasion we were lucky not to become a headline ourselves. In such a sensitive military area, it wasn’t difficult to fall foul of the authorities and a group of us was very nearly captured and questioned on suspicion of being American paratroopers. My cousin Ismail and his sisters Ava Jasmin and Asia, who were staying with our family in Suwayrah, were good musicians and one day we decided, amid the military mayhem, to head out into the calm of some remote fields and play guitars. My cousins, being half German, had very fair skin and, for no particular reason I can remember, the two young women were wearing khaki tops. We were walking along in a lightly wooded area, carrying the guitars in cases, when suddenly we were intercepted by heavily armed paramilitary guards. We didn’t know it, but we’d wandered into a high security area. The guards saw we didn’t look like normal Iraqis, so they assumed we were American soldiers on a specific mission, carrying guns in the guitar cases!
Being the naïve young people we were, we initially couldn’t work out if they were serious. It soon became clear that they were, indeed, deadly serious. They refused to let us go until we explained, several times, what we were doing. Then we added that my uncle, the sculptor, was a very close friend of a high-ranking official in the town and we gave them all his details. We found out later that emergency floating bridges were being stored in the area and we were suspiciously close to them.
I stayed in Suwayrah for the rest of the war, although I did make a couple of fleeting visits to Baghdad.
On one occasion in February I ventured to the capital to check on the family house. I drove up during the day, which meant getting past various strategic installations that had been severely bombed. The nuclear reactor and the Dora refinery were both badly damaged. But I was surprised that the Diyalla River bridge hadn’t been touched. Neither had the Nahawind region, which was the capital of the old Persian Empire.
I stopped overnight in Baghdad and went downtown to see the damage for myself. At that stage, Baghdad at night was like a fireworks show. The anti-aircraft guns would fire haphazardly into the sky so the American planes couldn’t penetrate the shield. The bridges were camouflaged by a smokescreen of burning tyres on both sides of the river. And to a degree it was successful.
Baghdad has fourteen bridges. The American bombers managed to destroy the suspension bridge, which was heartbreaking, because it was such a beautiful old structure. Al-Jumhiria Bridge had been hit as well and, while they had damaged the Sinik Bridge, cars could still use it. The other bridges were completely intact, although the areas surrounding them had taken a severe pounding. The lack of major damage was amazing considering the technology the Americans were using and the fact that the bridges are huge. You’d think they’d have managed to find the target on all of them, not just a few.
That visit was an emotional experience. I felt my city, my home had been violated. I felt sadness, fear and insecurity. We simply didn’t know what would befall us. At the same time, I felt anger—why was all this happening? What was the point?
My anger and resentment wasn’t so much against the Americans, it was more against Saddam—especially because, at that time, my cousin Saheel was missing and we had no idea what had happened to him.
Saheel was the son of my uncle who was with his German-born wife and our family in Suwayrah. Saheel, who was ten years older than me, was in the Republican Guard—the elite force that had been held back on the outskirts of Baghdad to defend the city and Saddam himself. He had been stationed at Al Taji, an Iraqi Army airfield, tank maintenance centre, chemical weapons production facility and the main Republican Guard base to the north of Baghdad. It was a huge base and, naturally, it was a major target for the Americans. It had been bombed extensively and constantly.
Saheel was in a bunker at Al Taji when it was hit in an air raid about seven o’clock one evening. The bunker collapsed under the onslaught and Saheel was buried alive in the rubble. He wasn’t dug out until two o’clock the next morning—and the entire time he lay trapped amid the concrete and twisted metal, not knowing whether he was going to die or be rescued.
Those few days were traumatic for our family because we didn’t know where Saheel was, or if he was still alive. Then one night when I was in our house in Baghdad I heard a knock at the door and answered it to find Saheel.
He was a pathetic figure. He was still wearing his tattered uniform, but he was covered in faeces and smelled of stale urine. His hearing had been damaged by the blast. But worse than his physical condition was his mental state. He was suffering dreadful post-traumatic stress. He had been dumped on our doorstep by the Republican Guards as soon as they had released him from the rubble.
Another cousin, Ammar—an electronics engineer who had worked on some of Saddam’s most secret and sophisticated missile projects—was staying with me at the house. We quickly brought Saheel inside, removed his clothes and gave him a long warm bath. It was winter and Saheel was freezing. We had to heat as much water as we could on the stove, because there was no running hot water. That restored Saheel’s physical dignity, but he didn’t talk to anyone for days afterwards. All he would say was: ‘I was buried alive!’
When we left Baghdad, we took Saheel with us to Suwayrah. Everyone was relived and happy just to see him alive. But he was in no fit mental state to adjust back into the family. We mostly left him alone because he was behaving very strangely. Every time a door banged shut in the house or a bomb exploded, he would become hysterical and we’d have to reassure him and calm him down.
It took months and months, but Saheel gradually improved. He never returned to the army. A relative in Suwayrah was a doctor and gave him medical certificates saying he wasn’t fit for duty. And he wasn’t. Even now, all these years later, he still has some residual trauma from being buried alive.
While we were in Suwayrah, my family was also devastated by the infamous Ameriya Bunker disaster, which occurred in the early hours of 13 February 1991. The bunker was about 8 kilometres from the centre of Baghdad and, at the time, the US said it was attacked because it was a well-known military telecommunications complex and Saddam might have been hiding there. If that genuinely was the intelligence they received, someone should have been called to account for abject incompetence. Or the claim was simply fabricated. Either way, it was completely wrong.
In reality, Ameriya Bunker was a public shelter, which had been designed to resist an atomic bomb attack. It was similar to the bunker at my old college and was built of heavily reinforced concrete with huge metal doors which automatically slammed shut in the event of an aerial assault.
That night the air-raid siren had sounded and the shelter was packed with civilians sleeping in air-conditioned comfort—when the US planes attacked. The first of the two laser-guided missiles went into the ventilation system to open up the bunker. The second slammed through the hole in the ventilation system and exploded inside.
My aunt Alham—who was married to one of my mother’s brothers, Layth—was eight months pregnant with her fifth child and had come to live with us in Suwayrah to escape the bombings in Baghdad. Alham normally lived with Layth, their family and Alham’s older sister, Ahlan, and her family in a house close to the bunker. Altogether, there were ten of them in the household.
We feared the worst the moment we heard that the bunker had been bombed. We knew Ahlan and her children sought safety in the bunker every day.
Alham hadn’t heard the news and we specifically didn’t tell her. We kept her away from the radio and the battery-operated TV we had in the house so she didn’t hear any news bulletins. Broadcasts of Iraqi TV were sporadic by that stage, but Iranian TV was readily available.
My uncle and I drove to Baghdad to find out what was happening and discovered a dreadful tale. The streets in the vicinity of the bunker were eerily quiet when we arrived. Very few people were around. We quickly worked out why. Almost everyone who’d lived nearby had been killed in the attack on the bunker. To add to the horror, there was an awful smell of burnt flesh permeating the area.
All but two members of Alham’s family were in the bunker when it was attacked. Her husband and my mother’s brother Layth, her sister Ahlan and six of the families’ children were burnt alive—along with about 400 other innocent people. When the first American bomb penetrated the bunker’s ventilation system, the heavy metal doors had snapped shut automatically, trapping everyone inside and delivering them a certain, tortuous death. It later emerged that those who hadn’t been burned alive in the inferno were killed by boiling water which burst through parts of the shelter when the water tanks ruptured.
The only survivors from Ahlan’s family were her youngest son, who was asleep at home, and another son Riadh, who was in his thirties and had stayed behind to guard the property.
My uncle and I went to the bunker again the next morning but the authorities wouldn’t let us in. They were still carrying out bodies—all of them horrifically burnt, just charred skeletons, unrecognisable as human beings. The victims couldn’t be identified, but we knew they were all locals from the surrounding homes.
We learned from speaking to other people who had come to look for relatives that when the recovery operation started, the would-be rescuers had to water the doors of the shelter for hours before they were cool enough to touch. They then cut the doors open to reveal the horrors inside. But before they could begin the grim task of bringing out the remains of the victims, they had to hose down the inside of the bunker because of the tremendous heat which had been generated.
I had never seen anything like it and I hope I never witness such an atrocity again.
By chance we later met Riadh in the street. Understandably, he was devastated and weeping profusely, in a state of deep shock. He’d just lost nearly all his family in one incident. That was the last time I saw him.
After the tragedy, my aunt Alham went back to Baghdad to see her nephews, but returned to Suwayrah to have the baby—a daughter she named Ahlan after her sister who died.
Months after the war finished, I went back to Ameriya Bunker. By then, Saddam had regained control of the country and the shelter had been turned into a museum with lights inside. Even then, you could still smell the burnt bodies. You could see the destruction inside the bunker—everything was still charred. On the walls were handprints in dried blood where the people trapped inside had desperately tried to claw their way out. But there was no escape. More than one in three of the victims were children.
It’s hard to say that anything positive came out of the Ameriya disaster, but at least the US forces recognised the depth of the tragedy and, as a direct result, the coalition severely restricted the bombing of shelters in Baghdad.
My immediate family stayed in Suwayrah until the military conflict was over. Saddam ordered the withdrawal from Kuwait on 26 February 1991, two days after the coalition forces had launched a ground assault in Kuwait and Iraq, and accepted ceasefire terms on 3 March.
Once Saddam announced the retreat, it started raining heavily in Suwayrah. The downpour lasted for two days and was the most eerie rain I’d ever seen. It was black. If you opened your hand to catch the rain, you could see it was black against your palm. You could see the soot. One of our cars was white and when it rained the vehicle took on a grey appearance. I don’t know whether the black rain was a result of soot from the burning oil wells in Kuwait or the American bombing nearby, but it was a strange, almost surreal experience.
By the time the rain finished, the dusty terrain around Suwayrah became a quagmire—another hazard for the defeated Iraqi soldiers, who by now were retreating in shambolic disarray back towards Baghdad. The initial part of the Iraqi withdrawal was along Highway 80, which runs for around 100 kilometres between Kuwait City and Basra along with Highway 8 to the east. Collectively they became known as the Highway of Death.
With complete control of the skies, the US Air Force embarked on a series of sorties, dropping anti-tank mines, which blocked the road ahead of the retreating Iraqi Army. Effectively, this stopped the Iraqi troops in their tracks and created a massive bottleneck of tanks, military vehicles and soldiers stretched out along the highway. They were sitting ducks—and the US Air Force simply picked off their mostly defenceless targets.
Some of the Iraqi Army tanks had managed to divert off Highway 80 and Highway 8, but their escape was short-lived. They were targeted by US artillery and helicopter gunships and were destroyed over an 80-kilometre stretch of the roads and desert.
It was absolute carnage. The wreckage of the Iraqi Army was littered across the landscape in what became some of the signature images of the First Gulf War.
Amid the death and destruction, there was a backlash by disillusioned Iraqi soldiers who felt they’d paid an inordinately high price for Saddam’s adventurism. They were encouraged by a couple of radio broadcasts from President Bush, who even before the Iraqi retreat, told the world: ‘There is another way for the bloodshed to stop—and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside and then comply with the United Nations’ resolutions and rejoin the family of peace-loving nations.’
The message was reinforced after Iraqi forces had withdrawn from Kuwait.
‘In my own view,’ President Bush said, ‘the Iraqi people should put [Saddam] aside and that would facilitate the resolution of all these problems that exist.’
Even in the early stages of the Iraqi retreat, the internal unrest bubbled to the surface. In the south, the catalyst came on 1 March, when an Iraqi Army tank shelled a giant image of Saddam hanging in Basra’s main Saad Saad Square. The action was applauded by other army officers, who then raided nearby military buildings.
Quickly, other disaffected soldiers and many locals joined the rebellion and, within a day, they had taken over police stations and prisons as well as the Ba’ath Party Headquarters and the Secret Service building in Basra. The rebels showed no mercy for the members of the Ba’ath Party.
The first areas that succumbed to the uprising were the poorest suburbs—places like Fire Mile, Khamsa, Al Hayania and Al Jumhiria. They were followed by the middle-class districts. The last areas to fall were Al Jzer and Al Junayna.
My cousin Mohammed lived in Al Junayna, a suburb that is divided by a major road. The eastern side was under the control of the rebel soldiers and the western side was held by the Iraqi Army. A hail of bullets was fired across the street as the battle rolled on.
Mohammed’s house was on the corner of the major road. He and his family—his wife Sundus, their eight-year-old son Duraid and two daughters, three-year-old Doaa and six-month-old Haneen—had been staying with relatives who lived in a safer area. But they had run out of water, so Mohammed and his family went home to have a shower.
As they approached their house, they saw an army tank parked in front of it. Mohammed was carrying Doaa and his wife was carrying Haneen. They were walking into the house when, from the other side of the road, one of the rebels fired a rocket-propelled grenade, which hit the front gate and exploded. Mohammed and his family were all knocked to the ground by the blast. When the smoke and dust cleared, they pulled themselves to their feet—and Sundus looked down to see that Haneen had been hit by shrapnel from the grenade. Half her skull was missing and her brain was in Sundus’s lap. The poor child had been killed instantly.
It must have been obvious to all the soldiers engaged in the battle that this was simply a family returning to their house. The person who fired at them was nothing short of a barbarian whose heartless actions tragically wasted such a young and innocent life.
Not unnaturally, Haneen’s death shattered Mohammed’s family and we didn’t see them for months afterwards. When we did see them again, Sundus had changed completely. Before, she was bright, cheerful and bubbly. Afterwards, she was quiet and withdrawn.
While the largely uncoordinated uprising was going ahead in the south, in the north the two major Khurdish political parties saw the opportunity and enthusiastically launched an anti-government rebellion which won popular support. A rebel force of more than 50,000 took control of most of the region. As the combined rebellion gathered pace, fourteen of Iraq’s eighteen provinces came under their control—and Saddam felt his position was so parlous he offered to share power with the Shi’ite and Khurdish leaders.
The offer was rejected. By now, the rebel leaders had set their sights on complete control and were planning to march on Baghdad. But the offensive stalled. The expected Shi’ite uprising in Baghdad didn’t materialise. Neither did the assumed support from the United States.
Crucially, Saddam retained control of the elite Republican Guard and significant numbers of tanks that had been kept behind to defend the capital. And while the ceasefire agreement prohibited fixed-wing aircraft in coalition-enforced No Fly Zones, helicopter gunships were free to roam the skies.
Gradually, the tide began to turn as Saddam’s regime exercised its massive advantage in firepower, using tanks and helicopters against the rifles and other lightweight weapons of the dissident forces. Retribution against the rebels was swift and vicious. Mass slaughter was launched across the major cities held by the rebels.
In Basra, there were reports of chemical weapons being unleashed on the anti-Saddam forces and the civilian population, although a subsequent United Nations investigation did not confirm the claims. In other cities, helicopter and tank attacks were followed by indiscriminate executions and torture. Even the resistance of the Khurds in the north crumbled under the overwhelming onslaught, although the fighting there continued for months. Tens of thousands of Iraqis died as Saddam’s forces regained control of the country.
In Suwayrah, we saw the defeated Iraqi Army retreating from Kuwait. There were thousands of troops walking the 500-plus kilometres from Basra to Baghdad. They were in awful condition. Some of the soldiers were clad only in their underwear—their uniforms had been jettisoned so they couldn’t be identified by the US Forces. Others were swapping their guns for a sandwich. It was a complete humiliation.
At the same time as the army was retreating, the rebels came to Suwayrah, ransacking official buildings and removing documents.
It was time for my family to go back to Baghdad, too.
We had seven cars and packed everyone, plus our belongings, into them for the return to the capital. For safety, we travelled in a convoy.
Along the way, we passed a constant line of dishevelled soldiers begging for food and trying to hitch a ride. Just past the Tammouz atomic reactor, we reached the Diyalla River to the south-east of Baghdad. By the side of the road was a soaring pile of discarded weapons. The soldiers had all been ordered to drop their firearms before entering the capital. And, just in case anyone still harboured thoughts of supporting an uprising in Baghdad, a line of what appeared to be brand new tanks was protecting the city. The pristine tanks, designated to defend Saddam’s regime, were a stark contrast to the dispirited retreating soldiers.
On our return to Baghdad, we could hear gunfire coming from Sadr City and noticed people weren’t crossing over the canal from there, which meant it had been blocked off by the army. Even in peaceful times, there was regular trouble in Sadr City, which used to be known as Saddam City. Although it was just 5 kilometres from where I lived in Al Mustansiria, I’d only been to Sadr City twice in my life—once, believe it or not, to buy a sheep, and the other time when my car was stolen and I went looking for it. Sadr City was the obvious place to find a stolen car, but that time I was out of luck.
Life in Baghdad had changed dramatically. It was no longer a city of plenty with a comfortable lifestyle. Added to that, my father’s health had declined significantly while we were in Suwayrah and by now he was confined to a wheelchair. So while we had made it home, in the turmoil that followed the First Gulf War, my family’s future had never looked more uncertain.