7


THE JOURNEY BEGINS—ESCAPING IRAQ

Unless you’ve lived under a brutal dictatorship in a country whose economy has virtually collapsed, it would be hard to imagine what life was like in Iraq in the late 1990s. Without question, it was a terrible place to live in those years.

Saddam Hussein’s excesses were becoming even greater and every Iraqi knew that you didn’t challenge the regime—or even encourage the impression that you might question it. Blind obedience was required and the consequences of not following the Saddam line were awful. Many people were executed without trial for expressing alternative views or refusing to toe the line. It wasn’t safe to speak up.

At the same time, the economy was in an appalling state. Hunger and begging were real prospects for many people who had previously held responsible, well-paid jobs. The war with Iran, the First Gulf War, the United Nations-led trade embargo and the consequent slump in the nation’s oil revenue had all contributed.

The worst of the economic crisis started in about 1995 and continued for the next three years. As it went on, suicides became commonplace because families just couldn’t see any way out of their financial spiral.

Plenty of educated, hardworking people were finding it difficult, if not impossible, to make ends meet. Inflation was at its peak and people were starving—especially many who had traditionally been part of the middle classes, which had been crushed.

After qualifying with my medical degree, I worked for a few months in a variety of hospitals around Baghdad as part of my one-year internship. I also helped an uncle, my mother’s younger brother, who was based in Saudi Arabia with his humanitarian organisation, FARO—the First American Relief Organization—distributing food, clothes and money to families whose livelihoods had disappeared with the disintegrating economy. My uncle, Ahmed Al Turk, was an electronics engineer who’d been based in Saudi since 1982 after studying in Kansas City, Missouri.

Through FARO we helped people all over Baghdad, often Khurds and internal migrants from the south who had suffered particularly severely during the various conflicts of the previous two decades. Many of the people we helped were referred to us. I would ask friends and relatives if they knew any decent families who were doing it tough. My uncle would send me the money and I would distribute it.

It was dangerous work because Saddam wouldn’t have approved—it would have been regarded as antagonising the government, even though it was purely humanitarian with absolutely no political or religious motivation.

I was working with between five and ten families to help prevent them drifting into begging on the streets. These were public servants, teachers, people with a background in the health sector, engineers; there were also a couple of university lecturers and some retired people. They all had families—we didn’t support single people, not because they didn’t need it, but we believed families were in the greatest danger. The people I helped were mainly middle-aged, so they couldn’t follow the lead of many younger Iraqis and become labourers just to make a decent income.

These professionals were earning the equivalent of US$1 per month. Obviously, you can’t feed a family on that. As an intern, that was also my salary, but I was fortunate enough to have independent assets which kept me going.

To survive financially in Iraq at the time, you either had to take a second job—such as driving a taxi, labouring or opening a shop—or sell your assets. Many in the middle classes were forced to sell their furniture, jewellery and other belongings. All very short-term solutions. The money would run out pretty quickly and then they’d be forced to sell something else. Until everything was gone and they’d be left with no option but to resort to begging, stealing or taking bribes.

One of Areeg’s neighbours was a university lecturer who couldn’t get a second job and refused to resort to illicit means. When he’d sold the last piece of the family’s furniture, he bought a chicken for a family feast, poisoned it, then fed it to his wife and four children. The whole family died together.

Bribery and corruption had become very obvious, especially in the justice system. Police officers would take bribes for anything and everything—from letting people off traffic offences, to purposely losing evidence or allowing criminals out of jail. It started with corrupt police, but it spread a lot further than that. Engineers, accountants, lawyers—they were all taking bribes.

It tainted the education system, too. School teachers would take bribes to pass students who wouldn’t otherwise have achieved anything notable. The same happened at universities, although not so much in medicine as far as I was aware. We used to hear about students in Russia who got a degree for a bottle of vodka. The same level of bribery was happening in Iraq.

A lot of my friends came from families where their parents were prominent professionals. You could see they were all struggling financially. It was part of a massive social change in Iraq after the First Gulf War. That was the start of the rise of a new elite—people who quickly became very wealthy and influential but were generally lacking any education or legitimate basis for their wealth. They were carpetbaggers and profiteers. They made their money out of dangerous activities and crime.

For example, the government was offering large amounts of money to anyone prepared to collect the ordnance and metal remnants from the First Gulf War. And there was plenty of it—rockets, tanks, vehicles, other machinery that had been abandoned in the desert. People could earn heaps of fast dollars doing that and would form companies that specialised in recovering ordnance.

Then there was a class of farmers who were very disadvantaged before the war, but became extremely rich afterwards. The government would pay them swags of money to produce food because the embargo was limiting the amount of consumables that could be imported.

Food and petrol were rationed for most people. We were allowed a certain amount of wheat, flour, rice, cooking oil, sugar and, on occasions, legumes, such as kidney beans, chickpeas and the like. Sometimes we would be given chicken or eggs as a gift from Saddam. Doctors and paramedics were included in the rationing but, now and then, we would receive canned food in boxes as well.

Most people couldn’t afford to go to the clubs and bars as they had done in previous years. Traditionally, these venues had been the gathering places for families and educated people to discuss ideas. Now, they were the gathering places for thugs—the new rich. And instead of taking their families to socialise or enjoy a game of chess, the new patrons were taking their mistresses and prostitutes to gamble and wheel and deal.

The rules of life in Iraq had changed. The old society was breaking down.

The crime rate rose, though it was still regarded as one of the safest places in the region because Saddam maintained a regime that ruled with an iron fist. Officially, if a thief was caught and convicted, they could face capital punishment. But because of the rampant bribery, they would often escape prison before the case reached court.

Tribal laws had started to appear again—Saddam actively encouraged it, as he did a number of the old-fashioned ways that had disappeared from Iraqi society. I remember a friend was driving his car and accidently ran over a man in the street. He took the pedestrian to hospital because there were no ambulances in service by this stage. (Sure, there was an ambulance at the University Hospital—but it was sitting up on blocks and had no tyres! That was the last ambulance I saw before I left Iraq.)

After that, the settlement was worked out between the leaders of the pedestrian’s tribe and the leaders of my friend’s tribe. They discussed the amount of blood that had been shed and how much compensation should be paid in return. It was eventually agreed that my friend should pay for the pedestrian to be cared for in a private hospital and find him a job when the man had recovered from his injuries. If the pedestrian had died, my friend would have been forced to pay the victim’s family a very large sum of money as well as lavish gifts upon them.

At the end of the year, I finished the internship, after spells in orthopaedics, gynaecology, paediatrics, general surgery, emergency and intensive care in the Saddam Medical Centre at the University Hospital, the Al-Karkh Hospital and the Al Numaan Hospital. Then I was accepted into the surgical training program. It was a dream come true. I’d wanted to be a surgeon—especially an orthopaedic surgeon—since I was twelve or thirteen and saw the first Terminator movie. The idea of half man, half machine really captured my imagination and made me think that in future surgeons would be able to replace damaged or amputated limbs with mechanical devices. My enthusiasm to become a surgeon was boundless, but resources were hard to come by. For urgent use, we were reduced to keeping drip lines, saline solution and such things in our lockers in the on-call room, because the supplies just weren’t available.

There was always a lack of something. It was incredibly disorganised—and to some extent, I think it was deliberately disorganised. For months we would have none of the drugs we needed for anaesthetics. Then, all of a sudden, a truck would arrive full of drugs, all near their use-by date. Clearly, they had been stored somewhere nearby, but hadn’t been released until the last minute.

We had to re-use all the suture material, which was supposed to be disposable. We’d put it in Dettol, pure alcohol or any antiseptic solution to re-sterilise it and re-use it until we simply couldn’t eke any more life out of the thread.

We re-used the single-use sterile gloves. I think they were autoclaved between each outing. And we would re-use the plates and nails inserted in patients to help fractures heal. We’d take them out of one patient, autoclave them and put them back into another patient.

Many modifications had to be made to standard procedures. For example, the carbon fibre rods used to keep fractures firmly in place just weren’t available. So one prominent orthopaedic surgeon injected bone cement into oxygen mask tubes to make replacement rods.

All our work was trauma. We didn’t do much elective surgery because there were no prostheses. But there were plenty of traffic accidents and a lot of gunshot wounds, which were increasing at that stage—usually, they spiked when Iraq was playing a World Cup soccer match! When the national soccer team beat China, more than 1000 people were admitted to hospitals across Iraq in one day. And quite a few of them died. A neighbour of mine was shot in the chest that day—mind you, he was shooting as well. Most of the wounds were to the head—people were shooting in the air to celebrate the victory. But when a bullet goes up, it has to come down . . . and that’s how a lot of the injuries happened.

Even though there were significant compromises, such as the shortage of equipment and drugs, as far as I know none of the patients suffered any serious problems as a result. The standard of my medical training was still good, too, because the professors were highly skilled and qualified.

In mid-1999, the events that forced me to escape from Iraq started to unfold.

Military service was compulsory in Iraq, and Saddam issued an order that army deserters should be punished by disfigurement. Among other things, he ordered they should have the top half of their ears surgically removed. On 22 April 1999, the Iraqi newspaper Al-Iraq, the official newspaper of the government, published a call-up notice for army reservists who were born in 1972. The notice stated that on 1 May all reservists would be obliged to report for thirty days’ training, at the end of which they would be released. The notice said that the relevant legal provisions would be enforced against those who failed to report. According to a decree issued in September 1994, the Revolutionary Command Council ordered the amputation and branding of draft evaders and deserters, particularly the amputation of the ear (decree 115/1994). In November 1999 Tark Al-Sha’b, an Iraqi opposition newspaper, reported that Iraqi government agents were arresting Iraqi army deserters.

At the time, we didn’t think it would have any impact on us—we assumed that only doctors in military hospitals would be required to carry out the operations. Little did we know . . .

One autumn morning, the surgeons and registrars met as usual to discuss the admissions from the day before. I started the ward rounds about seven o’clock, checking the patients who were recovering from surgery, before going to the operating theatres to start the day’s list.

There were about ten operating theatres in the 1200-bed general hospital, which was the main area of the Saddam Hussein Medical Centre on the banks of the Tigris River in Central Baghdad. Before the trade embargo, it had been one of the best hospitals and medical systems in a developing nation.

Things had changed. The theatres were still in good condition, with the latest equipment available in Iraq at the time. But, along with a lack of basic supplies such as surgical materials and drugs, much of the support equipment was broken and couldn’t be repaired because of the trade embargo. The CT scanner was broken, and so was the MRI scanner. This meant the waiting list for surgery was extensive.

The hygiene wasn’t great, either, because there was a general feeling that many medical professionals had given up the fight and didn’t really care anymore. Often, there would be a pool of blood on the floor of the operating theatre because no one had got around to cleaning it up. In the wards, there were no sheets on the beds, just bare mattresses. And the patients were never alone; cats roamed through the corridors and wards.

Around 8.30 a.m., before we could start operating, someone from the hospital administration came in and told us to abandon all the planned surgery. Three buses full of soldiers had arrived under control of the Military Intelligence Service officers and military police.

It was a complete shock to us, but a usual tactic for Saddam and his henchmen, who regularly relied on the element of surprise to force through their most extreme actions. Straightaway, the word spread that these were army deserters—and we were being ordered to disfigure them by surgically removing the tops of their ears, using either a general or local anaesthetic.

The situation was particularly terrifying for me because my mind flashed back to 1986 in Al Mustansiria, when one morning Ba’ath Party thugs had dragged our next-door neighbour, clad only in his underwear, out of his house. He was accused of desertion from the army, bundled into a 4WD vehicle and taken to the Ba’ath Party headquarters, where he was interrogated. Later that week he was executed by firing squad. His two brothers were forced to watch the horror of his execution. The family had to officially disown the victim, and even had to pay for the bullets that slaughtered him.

I could see the heavily armed soldiers from the elite Military Police bringing the deserters into the holding bays and ordering them to get on trolleys, ready to be wheeled into the operating theatres. The deserters were a ragged bunch—some were in uniform, some had no shoes, some were in civilian clothes, some in their pyjamas. I guessed that many of them were picked up on the road, while others may have been taken from their beds.

Perhaps surprisingly, they all seemed remarkably calm. Maybe they had just surrendered to their fate. Maybe they knew they weren’t going to die—unless they protested or put up resistance. From their point of view, having their ears disfigured might not have been so terrible under the circumstances.

But in the operating theatre we were not so calm. Tension was rising rapidly and there was massive stress among the doctors, anaesthetists and surgical staff.

Then I saw three burly officers striding along the corridor towards the operating theatre. They were menacingly huge, heavily armed and dressed in full camouflage uniform with combat boots—the most finely honed instruments of Saddam’s brutality. As they approached they were giving orders to staff to immediately begin the surgery. The most senior doctor in the operating theatre refused their instructions. He told the officers he had taken a solemn medical oath to do no harm to his patients. Straight away he was marched to the hospital car park, briefly interrogated and then shot in front of a number of medical staff. The military thugs then came back to the operating theatre and bluntly told us: ‘If anyone shares his view, step forward. Otherwise carry on.’

I was confronted by the greatest dilemma of my life.

There were three options: carry out the operations as instructed, refuse to perform the operations and face the consequence—almost certain death—or hide. But, as happens in moments of crisis, there was no time for considered thought. This decision had to be made there and then without any careful assessment of the consequences.

I only seriously considered the last two options. I knew there was no way I was going to perform these operations—I just would not be able to live with the guilt I would have felt for the rest of my life.

But I also rapidly realised that I wasn’t going to confront the might of the military.

The surgical staff didn’t have a chance to discuss an overall strategy. We had been thrust into the middle of this crisis without notice or preparation. As I quickly glanced at the senior staff in the operating theatre—the consultant surgeon, the anaesthetists, the two senior theatre nurses—I could see the sheer terror on their faces. If they had looked in my direction, my trembling fear would have been obvious.

There wasn’t a moment to waste. I only had one option—I had to escape. But how?

I couldn’t run past the guards. And there was no other way out of the theatre complex. Quickly, I made the decision to sneak out, pretending to go to the toilet. Then I would have to find somewhere to hide.

No one saw me go—not even the surgeons.

Instead of heading into the men’s toilets, though, I went straight to the women’s change room, which was attached to the operating theatre. I was in luck. There were no women in the change room so I ducked in unnoticed, went straight into a cubicle, locked the door behind me and sat on the toilet.

I was terrified, breathless, my heart was pounding. This was it. There was no contingency plan. I would either escape . . . or face execution. Discovery was almost certain death. If the soldiers caught me, I would have been taken away for interrogation and quite likely tortured, probably culminating in a death sentence. As far as they were concerned, there was no justification for refusing to carry out Saddam’s orders.

It was agonising to know that at any moment a ruthless brute could come into the change room, force his way into the cubicle and discover me. As I sat there, I listened attentively for every move and footstep that would indicate someone coming into the change room. I waited, for minutes, then hours. Three or four people did come in—every time sending my heart racing even faster. Luckily, they were all women. And no one twigged that one of the cubicles was permanently occupied.

The wait was interminable. The tension terrifying.

Five hours later, around two o’clock in the afternoon, a larger group of women came in and I could tell they were washing their hands and getting changed at the end of the day’s sinister work. The frantic activity in the operating theatres had calmed down. Surgery normally finished around 2 p.m. in Iraq, so they’d kept very much to that schedule.

After the women left, I stayed in the cubicle for another fifteen minutes or so to make sure the coast was clear. When there was no further sign of movement, I cautiously opened the cubicle door, checked that the change room was empty, crept to the main door and, with my heart in my mouth, slowly opened it to see whether anyone was still in the theatre area.

I changed from my surgical outfit into my standard clothes and walked quickly through the corridors from the operating theatre area on the second floor of the hospital, making sure I didn’t look agitated or in an undue rush. The last thing I wanted was to be conspicuous and attract attention, which might betray me to the Military Police or other government operatives.

Down the fire stairs and through the lobby at the back of the building, which served as the main reception area. Dozens of patients and their relatives were milling around in reception, so I could slip through without being noticed.

Out of the main entrance. I could have headed straight into the car park and attempted to drive away, but decided against it. The car park was almost deserted by that stage and I didn’t know whether anyone would be monitoring my vehicle. I knew if I was to survive, I couldn’t take even the slightest risk. Instead, I turned right into the slip road in the hospital complex, then left onto the highway leading to the nearby bus terminal.

A few hundred metres of brisk walking, head down trying to avoid eye contact, all the time my heart pumping with terror.

Before I reached the bus station, I stopped a cab and asked to go to the upmarket suburb of Harthia. It’s to the west of the river—in the opposite direction to my house. Ali, a close friend of mine who had been a fellow student at Baghdad College, lived in Harthia. He was also a doctor and a couple of years older than me. His family had been long-standing friends of my parents. Because I trusted him and he understood the medical world, Ali immediately sprang to mind as someone who could offer the assistance I needed.

In the whirlwind of the morning and early afternoon, I had thrashed around various escape plans and routes. Eventually, I had decided to go to Ramadi, where I’d studied at Anbar University. Ramadi seemed ideal. I knew the city and plenty of people there and it was remote from Baghdad, culturally as well as geographically. The people of Ramadi lived life by different standards and protected their own. Much as I disagreed with their traditions, their culture would work in my favour at this traumatic time. It was a place where I could virtually disappear in the short term and know that my friends would not disclose my presence.

The only other options I had considered were Sawayrah, where I had stayed with my family during the First Gulf War, and Basra. I didn’t know anyone who could help me in Sawayrah, while Basra was more than 500 kilometres away and I couldn’t escape through the nearest border, with Kuwait—not surprisingly, after recent events, Iraqis were not welcomed into Kuwait at the time.

Ramadi was my only chance.

The cab drove over the Bab Al Muadam Bridge and about twenty-five minutes further to Ali’s house. All the time, I was obsessed with how I could possibly get out of Baghdad—and eventually Iraq.

It was mid-afternoon when the cab came to a halt outside Ali’s house. I paid off the driver and rushed to the front door. I banged on the door and, to my relief, Ali answered. He was dressed very casually in a tracksuit.

‘Get changed. I need you to help me,’ I barked at him.

He realised something major was wrong. Quickly he put on a jacket and pants.

‘Let’s get something to eat and I’ll tell you all about it,’ I instructed.

Ali drove us to the nearby Chilli House takeaway, which was familiar territory, in his dark-coloured Mercedes. During the short drive, I told him: ‘Something horrible has happened and I need to get out of Baghdad.’

We bought sandwiches and ate them leaning against the car as I told him my plan.

‘I need to go to Ramadi straight away. And I need you to drive me there,’ I told him.

Ali agreed without hesitation and we set off. As we began our dramatic drive, I explained the horrors which had engulfed me that day. He wasn’t surprised, but he was appalled. Ali’s family were practising Shi’ite Moslems. His mother was covered, even at a time when many women wore Western clothes. The family had always strongly opposed Saddam.

I explained the scant details of my escape plan and that my friend Nissan, the administrator at Anbar University and my main contact in Ramadi, was the person I had decided to trust my life to.

It took around ninety minutes to drive there. We had to go through two major checkpoints at Al-Khdraa about 20 kilometres away from the hospital at the start of the highway and then at Abu Ghraib, another 15 kilometres away. The checkpoints were staffed by military police and militia. Mainly, they were checking for army deserters, but you never felt safe going through these roadblocks because the men on duty were fundamentally ignorant and you simply couldn’t take anything for granted.

At these checkpoints we had to show a range of documents—my university identification, my medical papers and my army papers, which indicated that I had been exempted from military service because I was training as a doctor. The officials would always question me because of a technical discrepancy with my papers. On my military documents, my name was on the front, which was straightforward. But on my university papers, my name was on the back; printed on the front was the name of the dean of the college, which I always had to explain. This time, though, the questioning over my papers felt much more menacing and tense.

We sat in the car while they checked my documents and my blood pressure rose. In my favour was the fact that they hadn’t installed computers at these checkpoints. So the chances of the officials being alerted to look out for me so quickly weren’t great. Still, I couldn’t be certain.

It was a huge relief when they let me through the first checkpoint, but not surprisingly the same problem with my papers happened at the second checkpoint. Which meant a few more terrifying minutes of explaining before they also let me through.

From there, we drove straight to Ramadi as fast as we could without breaking speed limits or bringing ourselves to the notice of the authorities. Fortunately, I knew the area well.

We arrived about six o’clock in the evening, just as it was getting dark. Straightaway we drove to Nissan’s house and told him I needed to stay for a few days. He invited me in immediately, but didn’t ask what was going on.

Once he was sure I was safe at Nissan’s house, Ali headed back to Baghdad with instructions to contact my mother and explain what had happened.

Because of their tribal traditions, each member of the family was quite segregated within the house. I stayed in the guest area in Nissan’s part of the house, which had a bedroom and its own bathroom. He just told his family he had a guest staying but he didn’t say who it was and I didn’t have to see any other members of the family while I was there. Which was exactly the way I wanted it—I didn’t want too many people knowing where I was in case the word spread and I was discovered by Saddam’s spies.

I rested for a while and then we had dinner. The normal Iraqi way is that you don’t talk about anything substantial when you’re eating. Nissan just asked how I was and we made small talk.

Then, around eight, we sat down, drank tea and started to talk. Now the meal was over, Nissan was quite blunt with his questions. Immediately he asked, ‘What’s going on?’

I told him what had happened at the hospital and he was very supportive. ‘I think you’ve done the right thing,’ he reassured me.

I was grateful for his support. But the problem was not so much what I’d already done—it was what I was going to do next. I didn’t know how I could keep one step ahead of the Iraqi authorities, but I did know that if they caught me, I would face intense—and potentially brutal—interrogation before the ultimate sanction of death.

‘What should I do now?’ I asked Nissan.

He confirmed that obviously I couldn’t go back to Baghdad. Nissan announced that he would go straight to Baghdad the next morning and check on my mother. But he said the most urgent thing was to start arranging to smuggle me out of Iraq. It simply wasn’t safe for me to stay in the country one moment longer than I had to.

I guess I knew that was coming. What other option did I really have? It was impossible for me to stay in Iraq, or leave by conventional means—but never before in my life had I imagined that I would become a fugitive.

‘Don’t worry, you get some sleep,’ Nissan said. ‘We’ll think of something tomorrow.’

In theory getting a good night’s rest was easy. But, of course, I didn’t sleep a wink that night.

The next morning, Nissan left for Baghdad. I had to stay indoors so I didn’t raise anyone’s suspicions. When he got to the capital, Nissan went straight to see my mother. She was terrified and frantically worried about me.

By that time, three officials—one a security operative, one from the Ba’ath Party and one a local councillor—had been to my mother’s house to question her, wanting to know where I was. At that stage, she could quite truthfully say she had no idea and hadn’t seen me since the morning.

It was awful not to be able to speak to my mother but it just wasn’t possible. There were no mobile phones or internet in those days and it was too dangerous to call her on the landline phone. I was lucky I had Nissan to relay the news; so many others would never know the fate of their loved ones who suddenly and suspiciously disappeared. At least my mother knew I was safe. For the time being, anyway.

Of course, the situation was enormously dangerous. If Nissan had been seen visiting my mother, he may well have been followed and the authorities could have discovered where I was hiding.

He drove back to Ramadi the next day and arrived early in the evening. My mother had given Nissan about US$12,000 in cash to help get me out of the country.

The next evening, after dark, we went to a coffee shop in Ramadi and met two men. They were very scary looking—extremely tall and powerfully built, with huge moustaches. One was wearing a police uniform, the other was wearing civilian clothes. I learned later they were both senior Passport Office police who were based in Baghdad and had come out to Ramadi to do a deal.

They were completely clinical about the transaction: ‘We need photos and we need money.’

I gave them the US$5000 they demanded as a first instalment and agreed to pay another $5000 on delivery of the false passport.

That’s where my cousin Bassam, the army intelligence officer who was and still is living in Baghdad, took control. I told Nissan that Bassam would be the best contact in Baghdad. Nissan acted as the intermediary, issuing and receiving the instructions and updates on developments. I never knew the precise details of what went on, but I believe Bassam got some photos from my mother and gave them to the Passport Office police in Baghdad who were preparing the fake documents.

While the passport was being prepared, I made two surreptitious and hurried trips to Baghdad to see my mother and grab some clothes. Naturally, she was thrilled to see me and assured me nothing bad had happened to her. The authorities hadn’t been menacing her. She gave me another US$10,000 in cash. I have no idea where she got the money, because we weren’t allowed to keep US dollars in bank accounts. Maybe some relatives had stashed it away. She never told me how she came by it.

I returned to Ramadi and, within a couple of days, we were visited by Bassam and the two burly figures from the Passport Office. They had the passport, but gruffly demanded: ‘Give us the rest of the money and you’ll get the passport.’ I handed over the final $5000 payment.

The new passport was virtually the same as the old one. But crucially, they’d changed my occupation—from doctor to handyman. Doctors weren’t allowed out of the country—so, regardless of the incident at the Saddam Medical Centre, under normal circumstances I still wouldn’t have been able to leave Iraq.

There were just two finishing touches to add. I had to sign the passport and add my thumb print. The two officers had brought the ink pad with them, so we completed the process and then they put the official seal on it.

That was the easy part.

The hard part was taking my name off the computer list of people who were forbidden from leaving the country. The officers couldn’t completely wipe my name off the list, but had managed to remove it from the data at one particular border crossing into Jordan for a couple of hours. I was instructed to go back to Baghdad the next morning and get on a bus to Jordan. They told me I had to be at the crossing at Trebil in mid-afternoon, when my name would temporarily disappear from the list. There was no leeway, they said, no room for error.

Returning to Baghdad was a serious concern. I didn’t want to be there any longer than I could possibly help.

Nissan drove me back to the capital with me sitting nervously in the passenger seat. He took me straight to the Al-Alawi bus station and dropped me there. We arrived some time after six o’clock in the morning and I was met by my cousin Bassam and my mother.

Waiting for the bus was excruciating. Armed security guards swarmed around the bus station and, at any moment, could have demanded my papers. If they’d checked my identity, they’d have found out I was a doctor, on a list of wanted people and certainly not allowed to get on a bus to Jordan. I was terrified. My mother was in tears most of the thirty minutes or so that we stood in the bus station and there was little genuine conversation.

I was lucky, though. The bus station was a chaotic series of sheds with thousands of people milling around. Despite my fears, I didn’t stand out in the crowd.

The minutes dragged by as the 7 a.m. departure time approached. But finally, with a massive sense of relief that I hadn’t been stopped by the security guards, I climbed on the bus. Saying goodbye to my mother and not knowing whether I would ever see her again was difficult. But I had to make sure we controlled our emotions, because I didn’t want to attract attention. I’d cleared one hurdle—although now I was on my own. The bus was pleasantly comfortable, new and air-conditioned. It was quite full and a young woman in her early thirties sat next to me. She was dressed in Western clothes and wasn’t wearing a head scarf. She was taking her two children and her father to Jordan to meet up with her husband. Then the family was migrating to the UK.

We got talking and at one stage, she said, half-joking, ‘You’re a doctor, aren’t you?’

I nearly panicked, but managed to maintain a calm demeanour and told her: ‘No, I’m just a handyman going to Jordan for some fun.’

She didn’t believe me. ‘You don’t look like a handyman.’

I was almost at my wit’s end anyway, but her comments made me feel there was a very real chance my assumed identity and occupation weren’t fooling anyone. If that was the case, I’d quickly be discovered by the Iraqi authorities.

Then there was the narrow window of opportunity. The road from Baghdad to the border is a five-lane highway each way, so it was a reasonably straightforward drive and the normal bus schedule would have me at the border at the right time. But a traffic accident, a mechanical breakdown or even a puncture could throw things completely out of kilter.

Psychologically, I was going through an intense ordeal. In the more anxious moments, I resorted to some of the medical techniques I’d learned to remain calm. I was pulling my ear lobes, taking deep breaths and holding my nose to stimulate the vagus nerve which supplies the heart. If you stimulate the nerve, it gives a signal to the heart to slow down and eventually lowers your blood pressure.

I was running through these techniques to try to induce an element of calm when we got to the border crossing at Trebil. I felt I needed everything to go in my favour to get out of this situation alive. It was crucial now that the immigration officials did not see any nervous or suspicious behaviour. I didn’t rate my chances of pulling it off very highly. But this was my one and only chance. So I had to take it.

As we reached the border, I kept glancing at my watch—and we were on the correct schedule. Now, I was only a short distance from the relative safety of Jordan. Providing, of course, the Passport Office police had carried out their part of the bargain.

But as we walked into the immigration building, I had an unexpected and terrible realisation—I recognised one of the passport officers. He was a patient I had treated six weeks earlier when he had come to the Baghdad Medical Centre’s accident and emergency department late one night with a badly slashed wrist after a bar-room fight. He was incredibly drunk, but I managed to stitch his wrist and stop the flow of blood. His life hadn’t exactly been in my hands. But now mine certainly was in his.

The passport officers were sitting in a row at a counter behind security glass, like bank tellers. Just as you do in an immigration queue at an airport, we were lined up, and when we reached the front of the queue, we were allocated to individual passport officers.

At that moment, I knew my life was at a cross-road. I consciously thought: ‘Shall I keep going and risk my life? Or shall I turn back?’

I made a snap decision that I would go through with this. The main hope was that I would be ushered off to be dealt with by one of the other passport officers.

Fate is a harsh mistress, though. Lo and behold, I got to the front of the line and there was one vacant passport officer. My former patient!

It was one of those moments in your life when you realise you have absolutely no control over what is about to happen. I was completely detached from reality. As I walked up to the counter, I was in a different world. All I could think was: ‘I’m going to be caught and I’m going to die.’ And there was a strange sense of acceptance of my fate.

I stood in front of my former patient and handed over my passport. He briefly looked at me—and to my eternal gratitude, there was not even a flicker of recognition in his eyes. He must have been so drunk that night six weeks earlier that he had absolutely no idea what the treating doctor looked like. As far as he knew, I was a complete stranger.

As he glanced at me, he asked, ‘What do you do?’

‘I’m a handyman.’

‘And what are you doing in Jordan?’

‘We have air-conditioning people in Jordan and I’m going to get some parts for an air-conditioner.’

It was an explanation I had prepared when I was trying to rehearse all the possible events that could unfold at the border crossing.

‘How long are you planning to stay in Jordan?’

‘Maybe a month.’

‘How much money do you have with you?’

‘One thousand US.’

‘That’s a lot of money to be carrying with you if you’re only staying one month,’ he said.

Once he asked that, I felt relieved, because it indicated that he was comfortable with my identity as a handyman and the fact that I was going to Jordan to collect some parts for an air-conditioner.

‘Maybe I’ll stay longer,’ I responded.

‘And what jewellery do you have?’

I was wearing a gold chain around my neck. I pointed to it and said, ‘Just this.’

He paused, unmoved. Then came the wonderful moment when he stamped my passport and dispassionately said: ‘Have a nice trip.’

But the ordeal wasn’t quite over. I had to go through the luggage check and then the body search. I had my money strapped to my stomach, but no one found it or raised any more questions about the amount of money I was taking into Jordan.

We spent about an hour at the border crossing, while the bus was thoroughly searched and put on a ramp so the authorities could check underneath it. Meanwhile, I had to stay quiet and unobtrusive. After my close call at the passport desk, I realised that all it would take would be for someone to say: ‘Hello, doctor,’ and I’d be arrested immediately. My main distraction was watching people selling whisky and cigarettes because alcohol and tobacco were much more expensive in Jordan.

At long last, we were allowed back onto the bus. It took another three or four hours to cross No Man’s Land from Iraq and get through the border into Jordan. It seemed to me the Jordanian officials were being deliberately obstructive and delaying things as much as possible. But maybe that was more about my circumstances and frustrations than the reality. Still, as we officially left Iraq and entered Jordan, I couldn’t remember ever feeling so relieved.

Once we were through the border, the journey became much more tedious. While the road from Baghdad to the border was a brand, spanking-new highway, when we crossed into Jordan, it deteriorated to one lane each way. And the track through the desert was full of pot holes. To make matters worse, we had to share it with massive oil trucks. In Iraq, the oil trucks travelled on a parallel highway.

After another four or five hours, we arrived in Amman. The Jordanian capital was gloomy and miserable. There were no trees and the houses looked very poor. There were plenty of satellite dishes, but not much else to indicate that this was a thriving city.

We arrived just as the sun was rising on a new day. It was symbolic, because, at the same time, the sun was rising on a completely new phase of my life.