Ahmed's Story
An Iraqi exile volunteers to help liberate his homeland. He wants to see his family again and help save American lives.
Stephen F. Hayes
March 24, 2003 9:25 AM
Near the Iraqi Border
AHMED moves forward today. Like so many other Iraqis, he says his mission began in 1991. Twelve years ago last week, on March 18, 1991, he put on a business suit and sunglasses and walked the road between Basra and Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq, to surrender to the U.S. Army. "The best way to hide," he says now, of Saddam's agents, "is to hide among them."
For weeks he had hidden in a more traditional way--at his sister's house. Saddam's regime was looking for him. A local Baath party leader had seen Ahmed agitate against the regime and notified Iraqi intelligence. They had his name.
When the authorities came to Ahmed's house, they asked his father where he was hiding. His father pleaded ignorance. Being less concerned with punishing the actual revolutionary than with simply inflicting punishment on someone, they took Ahmed's brother, Ali. He was tortured for a week--hung from the ceiling with his arms tied behind his back. One of his arms was broken. Days later, he was led to the front of a local government building which functioned as a site for public executions. As he was led to the tall, wooden post where he would be tied, he stared at the horrific reminders of his ill-fated predecessors: Directly behind the support pole, the wall was painted with several coats of dried blood and clumps of human hair.
As his captors were tying his hands behind his back and around the post, he made a strange request. "Please shoot me in the back," he pleaded. The six gunmen, three were standing and three lying on the ground, howled with laughter. Their commander, also amused, asked him what crime he had committed. "I did nothing," Ali told them. "They took me because of my brother."
"You did not participate in the uprising?" the commander asked. "You are innocent?"
"Yes."
With that, the commander motioned for his assistants to untie Ali, and told him, "Go home."
Ahmed, Ali's brother, calls this the "miracle." "He did not do this because he is a nice man," he says of the commander. When Ali returned home, Ahmed left. He turned himself in to the U.S. forces in southern Iraq, setting in motion a process that would see him bounce from nation to nation, and from one refugee camp to another, for the next two years. It was a rotten choice. If he stayed, he would almost certainly have been caught and killed by Saddam's regime. When he left, he didn't know if he would ever see his family again.
AFTER LIVING and working for 10 years in Portland, Oregon, that moment is at hand, perhaps within days. It will not be a perfect reunion. His father passed away in 1999. "My father made me a cassette and he's singing to me and crying and he says he knows he won't see me again. He says that he's not worried about me, though. He says he's proud of me."
Ahmed pauses and quietly issues a warning. "I am an emotional person," he says, admitting to a new friend that he struggled mightily coping with his father's passing. "I had no one to talk to. I got so sick. I started talking to myself."
After his father died, he planned a trip to Syria to see his mother, two brothers, and sister, and to meet for the first time several nephews and nieces. They stayed for five weeks, trading stories and remembering their times together in Iraq. Ahmed learned then that his family deliberately spread rumors about his fate when he fled in 1993. They told everyone who asked and many others who didn't that he was killed in action--not wanting to risk further retribution from the local Baath party and Saddam's henchmen.
Ahmed is grateful today that he saw his mother in 1999. Shortly before he left for training in mid-January, he received word from his sister that his mother has cancer. "Lung cancer," he explains. "The bad kind, not the good kind. How you say it?" Malignant? "Yes, malignant."
He has had plenty of opportunities to check on his mother, but he's not sure he wants to hear how she is doing until he returns home. He has relatives in Umm Qasr, the town likely to be the first official stop on his mission in Iraq. "When I get to Umm Qasr, maybe I call from my aunt's or my cousin's. If I'm there, I'm doing big thing. I could die too and could be killed in action. I don't know how I'm going to act. It's going to be the happiest day of my life if I call and they say 'Here, talk to your mom.'"
