Escape from Saddam by Lewis Alsamari Read Free Book Online

of two months between the end of high school and starting at university. During that time, if the proper applications were made, the government allowed students to spend a brief time traveling outside Iraq. My dream had always been to return to England, but that would not be allowed. However, I reasoned, if I could at least make it to Jordan, where border control was less strict, I could apply for a student visa and make my way to the UK. My plans were hazy but bolstered by an inexorable desire to leave. Secretly I made contact with a college in England, and I was accepted for a basic medical course. My mother’s brother, Faisal, was a doctor in England, and I was sure that my uncle would help me study to become a doctor myself. But first I had to get there.
    In order to make my application for a visitor’s visa, certain papers needed to be compiled. During my final few weeks at school, I applied for a certificate of nationality. When that came through, I had the most difficult hurdle to cross. I approached my father with a certain amount of trepidation. As part of the application, I needed his written permission, and I had no reason to believe that he would give it willingly. I fully expected to have to beg, cajole, and finally argue furiously with him.
    My relationship with my father was an unhappy one. When I was a child, he had taken me from my mother in Baghdad and forced me to live in a place I hated, in the north: the compound of the College of Forestry and Agriculture, which was next to a village called Hamam Al-Aleel, near Mosul. Hamam Al-Aleel was something of a Sunni stronghold, a bastion of Saddam’s supporters. The village was populated by people who were loyal to the regime, and a significant proportion of the Special Republican Guard was recruited from that area. The college itself was part of a massive compound that included not only living quarters for the lecturers and the students but also a vast expanse of forest. Surrounding it all was a high, concrete wall that made it resemble a prison. But the fortifications were not to keep students in; they were to keep the vicious inhabitants of Hamam Al-Aleel out.
    In places, the wall had crumbled and toppled, so the compound itself was never completely secure. Sometimes, groups of young men entered the college and attacked anyone they saw wearing good clothes—not because they needed or wanted clothing but simply because they could. Nobody was going to argue with these fearsome animals brandishing Kalashnikovs. On other occasions these marauding groups wandered around looking for girls—there were a good number of female students at the college—and broke into the female residence halls. Sometimes at night I lay in bed and heard the yelling. The police and other authorities, many related to the villagers, typically turned a blind eye. These people were loyal to Saddam, and an unspoken law gave them carte blanche to act more or less as they wished.
    I occasionally spoke on the telephone to my family in Baghdad, but fear of my father kept me rooted in Mosul. Nevertheless, all the years I spent in that place were filled with a desire to leave. So it was that I carefully waited until he was in what passed for a good mood before I brought the matter up with him. “If I am to make an application for students’ leave, I will need your permission,” I told him.
    “Indeed?” he replied with an uncharacteristic note of joviality. “Well then,” he stretched his arms out in front of him, “you have my permission!”
    I was so astonished I barely knew what to say. I looked hard at my father and could sense that beneath the veil of helpfulness something was not right. Over the past few years he had gone to all sorts of lengths to keep me close to him, ranging from bribery to abduction to physical and mental violence. Why was he now surrendering me without a fight?
    “I need your permission in writing,” I told him.
    “Certainly,” he said and accompanied me to