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20

My life in Iraq? I’ll share an important moment with you. The moment I was introduced to the war. During my childhood years, there had been so much talk of the war in the north and the soldiers who went there, but for me, that wasn’t a war; those were just stories. One afternoon, I met the real war. The conflict with Iran had already begun in 1980, far away, on the border. In our town, oil and gasoline became scarce, and there were long lines at the gas stations. So one afternoon I was standing in line with my father, and I noticed soldiers patrolling the scene to keep order. They carried machine guns and cables, which in Iraq were used not only for electricity but also for the soldiers to vent their anger.

At a certain point, one man complained loudly about having to wait for so long for just a few liters of gas, whereupon the soldiers pulled him out of line. In a flash, they circled him and began whipping him with their cables. A terrible silence descended over the onlookers. It lasted for maybe a few minutes, this circle of soldiers around that man. When they stepped back from him, he was all red. He did not move. The soldiers left him lying there and returned to watching the line from a short distance, as though nothing had happened. My father held my hand firmly. I remember that his hand started to tremble, and when he felt this, he let go of mine and began gently stroking my head. He took me to the other side of the line so I didn’t have to see that bloodied man on the ground.

“Is he dead?” I asked my father. He bent over to my ear, perhaps more to let me know I needed to be quiet than to answer me.

“Not dead,” he whispered. “They didn’t shoot him.”

I stole a glance at the man. “He’s not moving,” I said softly.

My father bent back to my ear and gave me an answer I will never forget.

“Because he hasn’t had breakfast.”

I looked at my father. His face was pale and he was sweating. This was the first time in my life I had ever seen my father afraid, and I became afraid too.

When it was our turn, we bought gas in a jerrycan, and my father and I walked back to the car. He seemed more relieved to get away from the pump than pleased to have bought gasoline. I saw that the man was still lying on the ground, and that flies crawled over his blood.

“The gas station attendant said they’ve called an ambulance, and that it’s on the way to take him to the hospital,” my father said on the way home.

I lost my innocence that afternoon, learning that in the blink of an eye, war can change everything: the earth, the sky, man, the birds, the insects, the walls, the trees, the gas pumps, and my father.

Not long after that, the sirens began to wail for weeks, for months on end. They filled the air in Baghdad, where we lived, with their screaming. Of course, our dog had never been allowed in the house, but when the sirens began to wail, and Iranian missiles fell on the city and the ground shuddered and glass shattered from its frames, he ran inside, terrified. My mother had more trouble with the dog being indoors than with the missiles or the sirens. She would wash all the carpets and cushions with water every time he came in, everything that she suspected the dog might have touched. As the dog fled into the house more and more, my mother changed the rules. She decided that every time the dog came inside, she would wash just one sheet or blanket. And after that, when she got tired of the missiles and the dog running in and out, she would ask us—having seen him indoors with her own eyes—whether the dog had been in. We would answer “No, Mother” as one.

The war has its own little family jokes. I remember once when the dog lay in the corner quivering because a missile had just hit. My youngest brother called out to my mother, “Didn’t come inside!” to which my mother replied, “The missile or the dog?”

I’ll stop talking about Iraq now, because otherwise it will be too much for me. To be honest, it’s painful to talk about it. But I’ll tell you why I fled Iraq, because that has to do with my stay in the Netherlands.

When I fled, Iraq had a population of eighteen million. So I had eighteen million reasons to flee, because every Iraqi was a reason—myself included.

Another reason is that after I finished my degree in civil engineering at the university in Erbil I was supposed to go into the army, and I didn’t want to. I did not want to go to war and have to shoot in the air or in the dark, and always be afraid that I had killed someone on the other side. That responsibility was too much for me. That was the reason I did not join the army, and ended up in an ASC seven years later.

I still remember my flight from Iraq. Everything was dangerous, even your name. I did not have a passport. In Saddam Hussein’s day, you only got a passport in Iraq if you could show several documents. One document from the army saying you had fulfilled your military service, one with a stamp of approval from the secret service, one from your neighborhood saying you were a decent citizen, and one from the Ba’ath Party testifying that you were a reliable member. Getting each of these documents was a major hassle. For instance, I was never a member of the Ba’ath Party. Obtaining a document stating that I was a reliable member, without actually being one, was certainly possible, but very expensive. The forged document I bought had a fake name, so I would be untraceable and not endanger my family should I get arrested.

In those days, under Saddam Hussein, things were terribly chaotic. You could get arrested and sent to prison, and be stuck there for years without anyone asking why you were there. Later, lots of people gave a made-up reason for their imprisonment. For instance that they couldn’t show an identity card when they were picked up, while in actual fact they had been caught trying to flee the country, which was seen as treason, and was punished severely.

After obtaining the document with the false name, I went in search of money. But I had no idea how to go about it. My family could scrape together one thousand dollars for me. That thousand dollars is another story. In those days it was the equivalent of one hundred thousand euros for a Dutch postman today. Many families had put aside a bit of gold, in case one of their children wanted to marry, or to dip into in difficult times. My mother sold her dowry gold, as well as the dowry gold she had inherited from her mother.

When I accepted those ten American sheets of paper and held them in my hands, I saw them as my ticket to freedom, to the wide world, which I had read and heard so much about. Even now, the word dollar has a special, magical ring to it for me. Because that word came to my rescue in many situations in Thailand, in Vietnam, in Hong Kong, and in Laos. Every day, I took those ten little sheets of paper out of a drawer. I counted them and looked at them. Then I imagined using one to get myself smuggled to Turkey, the next one to get to Greece, yet another to stow away on a ship to Italy, and from there, one more bill which would take me to Berlin or Paris. That’s what I thought. What I didn’t know was that in fact I would end up disheveled and penniless on some nondescript street in Jordan, because human smuggling is a world unto itself, and I was still a novice.

After my many failed attempts to get to Turkey, a friend of mine fixed me up with a smuggler who could get me to Jordan. This smuggler wanted to know how much money I had. The friend had told him I had two hundred fifty dollars; I would pay the smuggler two hundred, so I still had fifty dollars to survive during my first few days in Jordan. But this smuggler was clever. He didn’t believe that I had only two hundred fifty dollars. I traveled to his city near the border and met up with him. We agreed that he would smuggle me over the border that very night, but he left me waiting in his house with his mother and family for a few days, until he came back and said it would cost me not two hundred dollars, but five hundred. I would pay him fifty up front and the rest when we got to Jordan. But since I only had hundred-dollar bills, this was impossible. This way he figured out I didn’t have any fifty-dollar bills, and that I therefore couldn’t have just two hundred fifty. He left me waiting for another couple of days. Once he came by to say someone from the Ba’ath Party knew I was hiding out at his place and wanted one hundred dollars to keep quiet. I paid. Then he said the police knew where I was, and they too wanted one hundred dollars. I paid. His mother, his younger brother, or his father assured me each time with a poker face that it was true. Fear, naiveté, and stupidity kept me from wondering why everyone, from policemen to members of the Ba’ath Party, demanded exactly the same price to keep quiet: one hundred dollars. Nobody asked for fifty, or one hundred and fifty. This kept me in that house for longer and longer. One day he came and asked me for one hundred dollars, this time to keep the neighbors quiet, but I told him I was flat broke. An hour later he came back all wound up, and said that the police were sure to come looking for me tomorrow. So come nightfall, I said goodbye to his old mother and younger brother, who were home alone, and left the house. I asked around for advice on where to go, until I arrived at a deserted bus station, hoping to find a truck, bus, or car that could take me back to Baghdad. Hardly two hours after I left his house, the smuggler found me at the bus station.

“What are you doing here?” he asked anxiously. “Are you crazy? They’ll see you!”

“But everyone knows about me anyway, don’t they?” I said. “The police, the Ba’ath Party, the army, the secret service, and—”

“Come with me,” he hissed. It was clear he had no time to argue, so we ducked into the shadows and slipped back to his house. His fate, apparently, was tied to mine: if he hadn’t been afraid that my getting nabbed would also get him arrested for trafficking, he wouldn’t have tracked me down even after my last dollars were gone.

That same evening, I was sitting in the back of a truck in the company of some forty sheep, on a Jordan-bound highway full of checkpoints. This was the last thing I expected. I was sure the smuggler would take back roads, not a busy highway. Now, I can assure you that sheep have a keen sense of fear, because when I tried to hide among them, they kept shifting to the far side of the cargo hold. I crept over to them, to disappear into all that wool, and again they all shuffled away from me. When the truck stopped, my heart was in my throat: surely this was a checkpoint. I wished I were a sheep. I kneeled in a corner at the very back of the hold, expecting the soldiers to appear any second. They would spot me at once. In one horrible moment that I will never forget, a flashlight shone in my face. I froze with fear, but heard the voice of the smuggler calling out to me above the drone of the engine.

“Why don’t you hide between the sheep?”

“Don’t ask me, ask the sheep! Or do I have to pay them a hundred dollars too?” I’m not sure if I really did say that, or if I made it up later to jazz up the story, but I do recall what the smuggler answered. It made my flight easier, not only there in the truck, but also in the seven years that followed, until that cold February day when I landed at Schiphol.

“Don’t let the sheep know you’re afraid!” I don’t know why he stopped the truck and came to have a look, but he was right, because from that moment on I lay on my back on the floor of the cargo hold and tried to breathe calmly. With each deep breath I trembled less. I slid myself slowly toward the sheep, until I could touch them, and wriggled further among them until I reached a corner. I stayed put, and tried to wedge my body, my thoughts, and my fear into that corner. I stopped thinking about why I was there, how I had gotten there, and where I was going, because if I did I’d start trembling from fear, and frighten the sheep all over again. To this day, whenever I’m in a difficult situation, I shut my eyes and go back to that truck. Me in one corner, the sheep in the other. And then I repeat what the smuggler told me at the side of that highway: “Don’t let the sheep know you’re afraid!” It eases my nerves.

Each time the truck slowed down, my fear increased and the sheep ran away from me. Then I’d put aside my fear, and hide among the sheep again. I’ve crossed many a border since then, but none was like that first border between Iraq and Jordan. When the only way a person can cross the border of his own country is hidden between nervous sheep, then that country is definitely a cage.

And then I was released from that cage. Smelling like sheep. The first thing I noticed was that there weren’t photos of King Hussein of Jordan everywhere. It wasn’t necessary to check the license plates or traffic signs to know you were in Jordan. The absence of Saddam Hussein’s photos made it clear. After that long, awful journey I stood at the side of the highway to Amman with empty pockets. Once fear stopped gnawing at me, hunger took over—but hunger is far easier to tolerate than fear. I ambled here, sat there, walked a bit further, hid here, reappeared there, and ended up at a vegetable market. I started slipping overripe fruit and vegetables into my pockets. An old woman with a small vegetable stall saw what I was doing and called me over. She gave me a bag of produce and a piece of bread. I ate all the fruit and vegetables out of the bag as I left the market. Coming upon a cemetery, I lay down and fell into a deep sleep. I stayed there among the graves until sundown, then returned to the old woman’s stall and helped her pack up her wares. She handed me another bag and asked where I was planning to sleep.

“In the cemetery,” I said, and walked off. She called me back in and gave me a bottle of water. Back in the cemetery, I sat down between the graves and ate. At that time I only had one problem: my life. Because I didn’t know what to do. Where to go. I did not know anyone in Jordan except the king, but unfortunately not personally.

Sleeping among the deceased relaxed me. To be honest, lying there on my back, I felt the earth and it was hard, and my body was so exhausted that on my first night outside of Iraq all I wanted was for the graves to open up and swallow me whole, the earth would close above me and I would vanish from this world. That’s how desperate and defenseless I felt. I slept long and soundly, for in the smuggler’s house I slept poorly out of fear and because of the family’s pale faces. I awoke to the call to morning prayer and walked toward the mosque. I washed my face there, and sat. After prayer, someone came over, spoke to me briefly, and slipped something into the pocket of my trousers. So now I had enough money to travel further. By two in the afternoon I was on Al Hashemite Square in Amman.