In Baghdad, life was a struggle and the standard infrastructure simply wasn’t working anymore. There was no electricity, which meant no business, school or university, and no petrol for cars. Water was still available for drinking, but the separate supply for the gardens wasn’t working.
To counter the lack of mains power, every household bought generators to create their own electricity supply. But the generators didn’t produce enough electricity to operate the air-conditioning. It was winter and cold, so we used kerosene and gas heaters to keep the house warm and mainly cooked with gas.
Faced with the lack of petrol, the people of Baghdad came up with some ingenious alternatives. For example, they found a way to use gas from the domestic cylinders, which were in almost every house, to provide fuel for their cars. At the bottom of the cylinders, there’s usually some heavy fluid which routinely goes to waste. The locals developed a way to install a new valve in the bottom of the cylinders and extract every last drop of the liquid, then used it in their cars instead of petrol.
I would go to the neighbours’ houses, collect their gas cylinders and drain the last of the liquid to keep my car on the road. It worked really well in the short term, but over a period of time, caused severe damage to the engine of my trusty Toyota Corona, which had carried me back from Basra and through the stay in Suwayrah. And there were a few unfortunate incidents when the gas cylinders exploded as the new valves were being fitted, giving the improvising engineers severe burns. Happily, that didn’t happen to me.
The roads remained largely deserted of cars for two or three months until fuel supplies started to become available again and the service stations re-opened. Whenever I had spare petrol, I drove around Baghdad looking at the damage and visiting my friends—making sure they were all still alive and catching up with what had happened. They all had war stories to tell.
There were military checkpoints dotted around the city, but I wasn’t aware of any looting and there was no need for regular army patrols on the streets. The army regained control of the city in a matter of weeks, but it was months before life in Baghdad began to return to some form of normality. As the day-to-day routine resumed a more standard pattern, shops gradually started to re-open.
But immediately we noticed the United Nations sanctions, imposed in the previous August, were cutting deep into the country’s economy. It’s hard to overestimate the hardship and suffering the embargo on oil sales brought to the homes and businesses of Iraq. At that stage, more than 60 per cent of the country’s income was from oil exports.
The sanctions had been imposed to force Iraq into a parlous economic situation where it would agree to compensate Kuwait for the invasion. Subsequently, they were altered to specifically include the destruction of what were termed Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’. Some time later, when the magnitude of the human impact became obvious even to the harshest of Saddam’s critics, further changes were made to ease the restrictions. The oil-for-food program was introduced, which allowed Iraq to sell more oil and use the money to buy supplies to help out the broader population.
Either way, the economic sanctions created a humanitarian crisis in Iraq. Over time, food was severely rationed and hundreds of thousands of people—a sizeable proportion of them children—died from malnutrition and disease. Clean water wasn’t available across the country, because chlorine—which could be used in chemical weapons—was among the banned imports.
We had been back in Baghdad for about three months before reliable electricity supplies were restored. Only then did the authorities announce that the universities were re-opening.
As soon as petrol became available again, I spent a couple of days with my cousin Bassam—who was in army intelligence and had been one of the first officers to go to Kuwait—working on my car. The engine had been damaged by using the makeshift fuel and we had to replace the cylinders and pistons. That done, I drove back to university in Basra along the eastern highway.
When I got back to Basra, all Saddam’s statues and portraits had been destroyed. The infrastructure around the city had been badly damaged, the telegraph poles had been removed and the cables cut. Eyewitnesses explained that the city had descended into anarchy during the uprising. A cousin told me about the horrific fate of his neighbour at the hands of the rebels. In front of the neighbour, the rebels shot his son, raped his daughter and his wife, then killed them. Finally, they doused the man in petrol and set fire to him, burning him alive.
Others relayed stories of how the rebels went to the Public Records Office, burnt all the paperwork they could find and looted the storage facilities for food. Anything that could be dismantled was taken apart and transported to Iran. Anything they couldn’t dismantle was destroyed. By transporting so much to Iran, it became obvious that they had no intention of staging a long-term occupation. They were just there to rape and pillage the city and its people.
The rebels wore green or black headbands with religious slogans on them. They were fanatics who were taking their orders from the imams in the Shi’ite mosques with close links to Iran. They were also, essentially, thugs and hooligans who committed no end of atrocities.
When the Iraqi Army and the Air Force moved back into Basra, they faced some resistance, but the government forces quickly regained control of the city. Their tactics were equally as brutal and effective as the rebels. The Iraqi forces had their own informants, with photos and videos that helped identify the people who’d been involved in the uprising. One by one, they were hunted down by Saddam’s troops and executed without trial. Street executions were an everyday part of life in Basra throughout that time.
As the city gradually recovered from the devastation of war, the government forces went about recovering all the weapons and stolen goods they could find. They would surround streets—mainly in the poorer areas—and drive in with trucks. Soldiers announced over loudspeakers that anyone who still had weapons or had looted goods from government buildings or palaces could deposit them in the trucks. After that, there would be a house-by-house search and anyone found with contraband would have their home destroyed. In this way, the regime disarmed the locals and regained control.
The atmosphere was very different to the Basra I had left at the start of the war. Everyone seemed scared and I could see evidence of the uprising throughout the city. Shops were re-opening and the locals were repairing the damage, but it felt like the heart had been torn out of the city. And I immediately noticed that more of the women were covering their heads.
Saddam’s palace in Basra had been looted. The Sheraton five-star hotel on the Shatt al-Arab waterway was badly burnt, although it was still standing. But the Gulf Hotel, another five-star establishment, was so damaged that the whole structure had collapsed. The Secret Service building in Basra was burnt as well.
The government started erecting new power poles, but the electricity worked for only about three or four hours a day and was constantly interrupted. There were no phone lines, either—and that was how it remained for the rest of my time in Basra. Petrol supplies were limited. We had to use coupons to buy fuel and, even then, there were restrictions. Petrol was available for owners of vehicles with even number plates on even-numbered days. Vehicles with odd-numbered plates could be filled on odd-numbered days. It meant we couldn’t drive long distances and had to preserve what fuel we could get hold of. Most food was rationed, too. Everything except meat. But meat was expensive so it was a luxury a lot of people couldn’t afford.
Despite the surrounding chaos, I managed to plough on with my first-year university studies. This included going to the Al-Talemi hospital every day. The hospital had generators that maintained regular power supplies, but it was still constantly frustrating because some of the facilities we needed had disappeared. The anatomy laboratory, for example, had been hit and severely damaged by bombs.
There was a noticeboard in the foyer of the hospital where you could freely write your opinion about political events and developments. It was the first time in Iraq I had seen anyone openly expressing their views. One fifth-year medical student wrote about the atrocities. Saddam was saying he had won the war, but the medical student ridiculed that. He was very critical of the government and asked: ‘What kind of victory was it?’ He was talking about the massacres and the officers walking back to Baghdad with no shoes and in their underwear. He wrote about the number of casualties and the destruction in Basra. The student’s attacks on Saddam and the government were savage.
I thought the author of these comments was either suicidal or a member of the Ba’ath Party who was communicating with sympathisers, though in fact I didn’t know who he was and I never saw him. None of my friends knew who he was, either.
He put up these comments for more than a week. We were all eager to read what he had written, but we were also frightened to be seen reading his comments in case we were viewed as collaborating with him. No one else wrote comments—we were too scared of the consequences. I had been told that a few of the hospital’s doctors were executed for helping the uprising, but I didn’t know any of them.
The Ba’athists were facing a complete dilemma with the noticeboard. On the one hand, they regarded the messages as being little short of treason. On the other, they couldn’t take down the board or prosecute the author because it was seen as sacred by the vast majority of people at the hospital.
Then, all of a sudden, the comments stopped. No one knew what happened to the author. Although of course we had our suspicions.
Gradually, Basra’s resilience conquered the terrible traumas it had suffered and the city started to return to a routine. But the transition was much slower than in Baghdad, which hadn’t experienced nearly as much turmoil and deprivation. Restaurants opened and one of the major advances was when ice cream became available once more. But, despite its collective strength of character, Basra was never quite the same as it had been.
Before the war, we used to fly from Basra to Baghdad for a weekend. But after the war the No Fly Zones meant going home by plane was no longer an option. I went back to Baghdad only once and that was by train—which, even then, was a dangerous journey.
The train line had been restored, but some of the soldiers who’d been involved in the uprising retreated into the marshes close to the railway tracks. The trains were especially vulnerable at that point because they had to go slowly through the marshes. From time to time, the rebels would break out of hiding and attack passing trains. When you got on and off the train, you could see the bullet marks on the carriages. You didn’t need any further reminder that the outlaws were lying in wait.
I finished the year at university in Basra and, despite the disruptions, achieved satisfactorily high marks—which was why I managed to get a place at a university much nearer Baghdad the next year, along with most of my friends from the Iraqi capital.
And so, after completing my first year at university, I moved back to Baghdad to live with my mother and father. By that time, my father was bedridden. He was in his late eighties, and the war had exhausted him. My mother was more than twenty years younger than him, but I could see the change in her, too. Her eyesight had deteriorated and she couldn’t drive a car anymore. So my life was changing dramatically at home as well.
For my second year at medical school, I went to university in Ramadi in Anbar Province, about 130 kilometres west of Baghdad. Anbar is Iraq’s biggest province geographically and covers much of the west of the country. Large tracts of the province are desert and the climate reflects that—hot during the day and cold at night.
Around 95 per cent of the population of the province is Sunni and Ramadi is unquestionably a Sunni city. Most people were Bedouins originally and you could sense a strong tribal Arab influence everywhere you went. Ramadi is located on a fertile plain on the banks of the Euphrates, but the overriding impression is heat, desert, dust and desolation. It’s not far from the infamous city of Fallujah, which suffered heavy civilian casualties during the initial Gulf War and also has a reputation for being a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalist insurgents.
The people of Ramadi were as rough and rugged as their surroundings. In the streets, the majority wore traditional Arab clothes. Certainly all the women who’d been born and brought up in Ramadi were covered. From my outsider’s position, I found the locals were hostile—they weren’t used to more worldly people from Baghdad or anyone wearing Western clothes.
The antagonism to Baghdad and the ways of the West was so obvious that we had to escort uncovered female students through the streets because they’d be subjected to all sorts of insults and unwanted suggestions from the local men. Even though they didn’t believe in the act of covering up, some of the university women were so intimidated by the locals they put a shawl over their heads just to avoid harassment.
Another feature that immediately stood out was the number of people who carried guns. Everyone appeared to be heavily armed. There seemed to be a Kalashnikov automatic rifle in every car and when you went into a house, the weapons would be left lying casually around the rooms. I have an inherent dislike and distrust of firearms and had never experienced anything like it before.
I have to be honest, I didn’t enjoy Ramadi one bit. I found the atmosphere in the city to be extremist Sunni, very hostile and insular. It’s a strongly conservative city and there were no pubs or nightclubs, which are important when you’re a student. There seemed to be little or no activity of interest—empty roads and the desert made the biggest impact on me.
It was a lifestyle I found completely foreign. For example, I remember being the guest of honour at a function held by one of the local tribal leaders. I was there simply because a friend had told them that I was descended from the Prophet Mohammed and royalty. Only men were allowed in the room, where we all sat on the floor because, by their custom, it was considered impolite to sit on furniture above the ground. With great fanfare, four men carried in a metal plate with a couple of roasted sheep, chicken, rice, almonds and sultanas. A remarkable feast.
Naïvely, I asked for a knife and fork—to the great horror of everyone else there! Apparently, it was an insult. I had no idea. In the end, like everyone else, I had to eat the whole meal with my left hand. Once the men had finished the vast meal, the remaining food was taken out to the women, who were in another room and were given the pickings of what the men didn’t want. I was appalled.
I also went to a wedding that summed up why I was uneasy with the traditions of the Anbar region. It was exactly what I’ve always detested—sexism, elitism and the random firing of guns!
As at the earlier feast, men and women were segregated. The bride and groom sat with the women, but that was the only sign of the genders being mixed. As I sat with the men, I didn’t see any of the women through the whole ceremony. Most of the men were wearing traditional clothes—a long white robe with a colourful, usually red, scarf on their heads. Some were clad in Western clothing—suits, collared shirts and ties.
Whether they were in traditional or Western clothing, many of the men had brought their guns with them. The bride’s arrival was greeted by a prolonged volley of automatic rifles and machine guns being fired into the air. Gunfire, believe it or not, is an integral part of an Iraqi wedding!
The tribes of Ramadi are very proud people and hugely protective of their women and children. They have no fear—you can sense they’re hard people who’ll fight to the last drop of their blood if they perceive that anyone has insulted them. While it’s a fundamental part of their traditions, to an outsider like me, there’s no rationale to their thinking.
The university in Ramadi was established in 1987. In the time since I studied there, it’s become known as the most dangerous university in Iraq—at times, US troops were based in the university grounds. Murders, beatings, kidnappings, ransom payments and general intimidation became common as law and order broke down.
For my year at the university, I lived in a small, simple, two-bedroom flat on the second floor of a newish building in the centre of Ramadi which I shared with Hazar, another student from Baghdad. He was very reserved, an extremely articulate and quiet man, whose father was a professor of literature in Baghdad. Hazar was a bit of a dreamer, but entirely pleasant company.
Most of our time was spent in the flat studying, but when we did go out, it would be to coffee shops or restaurants in the city, where we would play chess or backgammon. There was so little to entertain us in Ramadi that we would drive back to Baghdad on many weekends.
Now and then we would also visit Habbiniyah, 20 or so kilometres from Ramadi. It had been a large British air base and played a key role in the overthrow of the 1941 pro-Nazi coup in Iraq. But what attracted us was the fact that it was a resort town on a large artificial lake. So it provided a distraction from the dull day-to-day existence of university.
While I was in Ramadi, I also met someone who was to play an extremely important role in my life—Nissan, an administrator at Anbar University. He was in his thirties and, over the course of the year, we formed a solid friendship.
Nissan came from tribal traditions and his father was a tribal leader, so they were very well connected. The family lived in a large, two-storey house on a property on the edge of Ramadi where they grew oranges, date palms and grapes. Their traditions were very different from mine. When we went to his house, we would sit on the floor. And when you looked around the room, there were Kalashnikovs leaning casually against the wall and the furniture.
I also met my first wife, Areeg Al Wahab, at university in Ramadi—she was from Baghdad and in the first year of studying medicine. Her father, Kadhum, had a PhD in agricultural engineering from the old Soviet Union, but he had retired by that stage. He had been a member of the Communist Party, even though he came from a very religious Shi’ite family from Karbala. He was politically active and vehemently opposed to Saddam’s regime. For his beliefs, he had spent a few years in jail and was tortured several times in the 1970s. Her mother, Farida, was a high school maths teacher, a formidable character who was slightly more religious than Areeg’s father. Areeg herself was Moslem, but not devout.
It was a common practice in Iraq for the government to give different areas to certain groups of people. For example, in Baghdad there was a teachers’ sector and a doctors’ suburb. The government would take farmland and give it to these groups so they could build houses. The land cost them nothing, but people had to pay for the homes they built. Areeg was the oldest of four daughters and her family lived in the Green Area, which had been given to Iraqis, like Areeg’s father, who had a PhD. It was on the outskirts of Baghdad in the north-west of the city, on the way to Fallujah.
After completing the second year of my university studies in Ramadi, I managed to win a place at Baghdad University’s medical school and moved back to my parents’ property.
The day I left Ramadi and returned to live in Baghdad has to be one of the best of my life. The relief at leaving Anbar was palpable. At last, my life was returning to some form of normality in familiar surroundings and I could resume a full university life—studying and socialising.
Baghdad University was a complete contrast after Anbar. Its medical faculty had been established in 1927 and the first dean was Sir Henry Sinderson, a physician to the British royal family. The surgeons training us were the elite of the elite. So the standard of teaching was as good as it got in Iraq.
It was a huge facility—491 students in my year alone, compared with about fifty in Anbar—with the 1200-bed Medical Centre built on the banks of the Tigris River. It included a ten-storey general hospital, children’s hospital, dental hospital, special services section and forensic medical unit. It was extremely well equipped, with extensive auditoriums for student lectures. Ironically, this advanced medical facility was located next to a large cemetery!
The legacy of the war had already started to have an impact at the university. Because of the UN embargo, the dress code had been eased and students no longer had to wear the blue jacket, white shirt and grey pants that had been the uniform for decades. And, gradually, other restrictions became more relaxed as well, although women still weren’t allowed to cover their faces or wear pants. Iraq was a secular country at the time and hardly any women in Baghdad wore the burqa. And the female students were expected to wear skirts because at that time pants were regarded as male attire.
Like most students, we spent plenty of our time socialising in the university gardens and coffee shops.
I was living in my own house, next door to my parents and in the same grounds as their home. They had a big block of land in the Al Mustansiria district, so we subdivided it and built two homes—one for them and one for me.
By this stage, my father was quite ill. He talked a lot slower, which was a shame because I couldn’t learn as much as I wanted to from him. He had been a great teacher for me—he was like an encyclopaedia. He spoke seven languages and had travelled extensively, and he could tell me stories from every country he’d been to. He was a man ahead of his time. For example, they talk today about music therapy to help relieve stress and induce a feeling of calm. Way before that was being widely spoken about, my father had used music therapy on my mother during difficult times in her pregnancy.
We were in Baghdad throughout the embargo and that made things pretty difficult financially. But, for all that, we were fortunate enough to have an independent income from some commercial property—and we were still regarded as wealthy. The financial situation eased once we’d refitted the shops and offices we owned. With the extra money we made from the new shops, I renovated my house. Essentially, I gutted it and completely rebuilt the interior.
I used tradesmen from the local area—which was a bit of an eye-opener. They were a mixed group racially. Except for one, they all had a university degree but they were working as labourers because it paid much better.
The chief builder was Karim, a teacher by profession with a Masters degree in education. He left that job because, after the rapid inflation that was brought on by the embargo, his monthly salary as a teacher was barely enough to pay for a meal. (By this stage, the Iraqi currency was worth very little—about 1500 dinar to the American dollar. When I graduated it was even worse; I think it had slipped to about 3200 dinar to the US dollar then. In 1980, before the war with Iran, one dinar had been worth US$3.39.) The labourers were all Iraqis and used to make fun of Karim because of his degree—they called him The Graduate.
In fact, the only labourer who didn’t have a degree was Ahmed. He just had a high school education. Ahmed was Khurdish and lived next door to my uncle in a higher middle-class area. He was the funniest—he used to heckle everyone and give them nicknames. My uncle took him to Qatar in about 2000 as a handyman to help him with his sculptures. Ahmed lives in Europe now.
Adel came from a Shi’ite background. He was a classical Samarian—big nose, long, slim face. He came from the south, had a degree in English literature and was qualified to be an interpreter for diplomats. I met him in Amman in Jordan some years later. He now lives in the US with his family and I keep in touch with him through emails. He was the lazy one—he was always taking breaks and rests. Quite often, he’d sneak out for a coffee while everyone else was working and we’d eventually find him watching TV!
Asad was a mechanical engineer. He was a more serious guy, but a very hard worker. He came with his brother Nabil, who was an electrical engineer.
They were all working as labourers because they made about 3000 dinar a day. I paid the chief builder 5000 dinar per day. So in one day they were earning more than the government would pay them in a month!
The engineer who did the designs and looked after the project was Abolia. He had a Masters degree in civil engineering from what was then Czechoslovakia. When we started the contract, I paid him a lump sum. But because of the rampant inflation, by the time we were halfway through, he’d lost all his money. He came from a very good family. His brother, Ebthag, was a famous colonel in the Iraqi police force who ran a regular weekly TV show called Public Safety, which went to the scenes of horrific car accidents and explored everything about them—how and why the accident had happened and how it could have been avoided. It was the forerunner of some of the shows we see on TV today and was way ahead of its time.
I spent a lot of time with these builders because I got deeply involved in the whole renovation process. Along the way, we became good friends. We’d socialise quite often as well. The guys would bring clean clothes at the start of the day and change into them after work. We’d spend the evening together, watching a movie or playing chess.
In my spare time, I would go and work as a labourer. I enjoyed knocking down walls and hammering in nails—much to the amusement of the professional builders, who would laugh at me! They would say I was weak and I didn’t have rough hands like them—every time I hammered in a nail, I’d get a blister!
They got to know Areeg as well because she’d come over while I was working on the house with them. When she was around, they’d always say things like: ‘The Big Boss has arrived!’ So that sort of humour is just the same in Iraq as it is in Australia.
The renovations took about eight months and after the house was finished, I kept in touch with the guys.
But my closest friends were at university and we spent most of our spare time together. They were, indeed, a mixed bunch.
Mohammed Faiz was born in Syria and came to Iraq when he was a baby. His father was a leader of the Ba’ath Party in Syria, but he came to Iraq after the party split. They were very well treated by the Ba’athists in Iraq and lived in a high-rise block on the banks of the Tigris River. Mohammed was the rough boy of the group—built like a rugby player and very blokey. He’s now a general surgeon in Saudi Arabia.
Oras Al Rawi was a Sunni from Anbar Province. His father was dean at Anbar University, and his mother was my Arabic teacher at high school. His uncle was the dean of Baghdad College, where I had studied. During my time at the college, the dean was well known for being strict and old-fashioned; unfortunately for us, he also believed in corporal punishment. But he was a very good teacher. Saddam’s sons Udai and Qusay didn’t think so, though, and eventually organised his sacking; he’d also been beaten up by the bodyguards of Saddam’s nephews during his tenure.
Masoun Al Kubasie was another Sunni from Anbar. Her family were very wealthy merchants. Because of her background in Anbar, she was very conservative and was the only covered person in our group. She was living in the Green Area very close to Areeg and today is still in Iraq.
Broadening the racial and political spectrum, Media Bahaa was the daughter of the chief of the Khurdish pro-government group which was in charge of the northern area of Iraq. She’s gone back to live in that region and is now a radiologist.
Lubna Biden was a Shi’ite. Her father had been the head of the Workers Union and was one of the Ba’ath Party officials whose name was called out by Saddam Hussein during a famous televised party meeting in 1979, which led to the execution of a number of leading political figures. Saddam was in tears as he called the names of those who’d been chosen for the ultimate sanction. None of Lubna’s family ever saw her father again. It was more than a decade later when I knew her—she never talked about her father or what had happened to him. I don’t know where she ended up.
Another Shi’ite was Sabah, who lived about a kilometre from me. He came from a very rich family of tradesmen who also owned shops and other businesses.
My close group of university friends also included Christians. Dina Adeeb’s mother was French and her father was an Iraqi doctor. Dina now lives in the UK. Nadia Hekari was the granddaughter of the first Iraqi doctor to qualify as an obstetrician. Her father was also an obstetrician and her mother was an English nurse. Nadia followed in the family footsteps and became an obstetrician. She lives in the UK, too.
And then, of course, with her strong Shi’ite background and ex-Communist father, there was Areeg, whom I became engaged to in my third year of university.