Escape from Saddam Read Online Free PDF Page A

decided to sell them off. Iraqi men were offered 10,000 Iraqi dinars—at the time about $33,000—to marry a war widow and thus shoulder the economic burden that the women presented to the government.
    Word of this tempting offer reached my father’s ears in England via his brother. Unbeknownst to me, a widow was found for my father, and he traveled back to Iraq to meet her, with me in tow. Ostensibly the trip was for a holiday; I had no idea at the time that I was returning to Baghdad for good. But my father’s plans with his new wife back in England did not include me, and without warning I was left with my mother and her family in the middle of Baghdad. I was twelve years old, and the culture shock was massive.
    My young friends in the West were cajoled into good behavior by threats of an imaginary bogeyman. In Iraq, there was no need for invented horrors.
    I was not yet a teenager and had been back in Iraq only a couple of months when, one day in 1988, I saw a cavalcade of black Mercedes with blacked-out windows sweep up the length of Al-Mansour Street. They had no license plates. Iraqis from all walks of life turned to stare, but not too hard: none of the spectators wanted to draw attention to themselves, especially not knowing whom these official cars were carrying. My friend Hakim and I, perhaps emboldened by our youth, stared more intently than the other pedestrians as the sleek, expensive vehicles pulled up, not outside one of the fashionable shops lining this desirable road in Baghdad, but in front of a fast-food restaurant. The restaurant’s sign—a familiar golden M—gave an impression of the West, even if it was not McDonald’s.
    After school that day, Hakim and I had met at the beginning of 14th Ramadan Street, by Souk Al-Ghazi. Shopkeepers stood guard as passersby examined their goods: watermelons, baklava, fabric for
dishdash
—the same wares that could be found at any number of similar places across the Middle East, and items that were of no interest to my thirteen-year-old mind. The few coins in the pocket of my prized black jeans would be spent on something far more precious: Coca-Cola.
    Chatting happily, we turned onto 14th Ramadan Street and entered a run-down kebab shop. Its rusting, corrugated-iron roof protected the owner from the fierce rays of the afternoon sun, but the large shop windows—plastered in garish Arabic letters—along with the grills that burned all day long and the chatter of people constantly congregated there meant that it was at least as hot inside as out. I caught the eye of the shopkeeper and he smiled. “Sarmed, my young friend,” he called. “Falafel?”
    “And a bottle of Coca-Cola,” I nodded. “Put it on my tab,” I added nonchalantly.
    The owner raised his hand dramatically as we continued our little play, which we performed several times every week. “Are you trying to put me out of business?” he shouted in mock indignation. “The falafel I’ll put on your tab. But you pay me next week—otherwise I shall be having words with my friends at Abu Ghraib.” He winked at me. “The Coca-Cola, you pay for now.”
    I handed him a coin and watched him fill a piece of flat bread with a generous helping of falafel and the fiery sauce of which I was fond. Then he turned to the fridge behind the counter and removed an icy bottle with the famous logo written in red Arabic letters along its length. He turned to Hakim. “And for you, sir?”
    Carrying our treats, we started to walk the length of 14th Ramadan Street, holding our bottles like status symbols, smiling at any girls who passed, and talking animatedly. As we walked, the shops became gradually more sophisticated, catering to the expensive tastes of the rich families who lived in the vicinity of nearby Princess Street. Computer shops, clothes shops, antiques shops: it would be another couple of years until the sanctions against Iraq made these small but expensive luxuries a thing of the past and the Coca-Cola