He is in his late twenties, recently married, and wears thick sideburns and hair spiked with heavy gel. Both his pinky nails are grown long. Altogether he would look at home in one of the new Iraqi nightclubs beginning to open in 2009.
I WAS LIVING with my mother, father, and my two younger brothers in Malaysia at the time of the invasion. My father was working in the Iraqi embassy there. He was a career intelligence man under Saddam Hussein. He had held a number of senior posts over the years in the Department of General Intelligence, the Mukhabarat. He was well known to Saddam and around Baghdad in general, partly because of his posts and also because of his nickname, Abdul Majid Axe. He had picked up the nickname in high school. The story as I heard it many times was that there was fight at his school one day among some of the students. My father grabbed an axe that was supposed to be used as a prop in a school play and went at some of the other kids. No one was hurt, so I was told. Later when the headmaster was gathering up all the kids involved, he called for my father but did not know his name. He just asked for the Axe, and everybody knew who that was. The name stuck with him his whole life.
Of course he was fired from his embassy post as the regime collapsed. We stayed in Malaysia until August of 2003 so I could finish up high school, and then we returned to Baghdad. Iraq was not the country we knew when we came home. Our house was badly damaged during the bombing, so we had to settle in a rental in another part of town. Our situation was not good. We were running out of money. There was no work. The city was lawless. Violence was rising, and my father had a lot of enemies. We were always hearing rumors about various people looking for him. We were very afraid to go out, all of us. My father grew his beard long as a kind of disguise and only occasionally left the house. On top of all this one of my younger brothers looks a lot like one of Saddam’s sons, Uday. That caused him and us a lot of trouble after the collapse. It became a habit for us to murmur a prayer before walking out the door.
One afternoon my father went out. When he came back he told us he had made contact with Saddam Hussein, who was still at large then. Apparently the meeting was by chance. Saddam was of course then sleeping in a different place every night to avoid capture by the Americans. My father said Saddam told him he might come to our house for a stay soon.
We immediately began making preparations. We got a room ready. We chose an unused room in the back of the house, where the window faced the yard, not the street. We put a television in the room and hooked it up to a satellite dish. We knew he probably had not had a chance to follow the news because he was traveling a lot. We installed an air conditioner for him in the room. We had not bothered to put one in that room before. We bought him a change of clothes in case he might need them. My father knew his measurements. We called some of our cousins whom we could trust and asked them to be ready to come over and serve as lookouts and guards. We even drew up a shift schedule so that we could keep guards posted all day and all night. In case he needed to escape, we stacked a few bricks as steps at the foot of the wall separating our yard from the neighbor’s. We did all of this very secretly to avoid being noticed by anyone.
Was there any discussion among the family about how this might be a bad idea?
No. We were excited that he might pick our house for a visit. He was our president. And to our family he was much more than that. To tell you the truth, most of my family used to work in the intelligence or the Ba’ath party. As far as we were concerned, all those accusations about him torturing people were all fake. And even if they were true, that happens all over the world. Why should Saddam take so much blame for it?
Saddam had given us our whole life. In the old Iraq there was a saying: Life was about money and power. We always had plenty of both. We had cars, we had drivers, bodyguards. We traveled to Egypt, to Malaysia, to Jordan. Sure, there were some who were richer than us, but we never wanted for anything.
Of course it was risky to bring Saddam into our home. We could have all been killed or captured if the Americans found him and raided the house. We didn’t care. We wanted to help him. As long as he was alive, we still held hope for getting our old lives back. Look, overnight the Americans were in Baghdad when many thought they would never come that far. Maybe if Saddam were still free, things could change back just as fast. That’s how we thought then. My father even planned to join him if possible. He pulled me aside one day as we were making preparations and said that if Saddam was willing, he would join the group traveling with him. He only told me this because I was the oldest son and would be responsible for taking care of the family if he wound up leaving.
For about a week we stayed ready, thinking he might arrive at any moment. Then after that we started to doubt whether he would come. The weeks turned into months, and he did not show. We figured he had found some safer places than ours. He had a lot of places to hide. We left everything in place nonetheless but began to assume he would not visit and went about our daily lives. We were sad, actually, that he never came.
Ali Abdul Majid and his family fled to Damascus, Syria, in October of 2004. As of May 2009, Ali was in Baghdad looking for work without luck. The rest of his family remained in Damascus with no plans to return. U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein in December of 2003.