Read Online Escape from Saddam by Lewis Alsamari - Free Book Online Page B

that had been nagging at me ever since we had met: “Where’s your father?”
    Kamall was silent for a moment. “I don’t know,” he told me, looking intently down the street at nothing in particular. For a moment he didn’t elaborate, and I sensed that it would not be tactful to press him; but gradually he opened up. “He was a pilot.”
    “In the air force?” I asked quietly, thinking that perhaps he had been one of the many casualties of the war.
    Kamall shook his head. “No,” he replied. “For the state airline.”
Al-Khutoot Aljawiyaa Al-Irakia
—Iraqi Airways.
    It transpired that he and another pilot had spoken out against part of the airline’s safety policy and were arrested. The other pilot agreed to retract his objection, but Kamall’s father wouldn’t. Only a few days later, the authorities came for him. Kamall remembered two white security vehicles pulling up outside the house. There was a knock on the door; Kamall’s father opened it to see three or four men in civilian clothing brandishing handguns. They did not need to say anything. They just looked at Kamall’s father and then at Kamall himself, who was no older than ten, and gestured that they should follow them to one of the security vans. Kamall’s father held up his hands. “Okay,” he said. “Take me. I’ll come with you now without any struggle. But please, leave my family alone.”
    “Our instructions are to take you and your son,” one of the intelligence officers replied.
    A horrible silence ensued. “Please,” Kamall’s father begged quietly, “he’s only a little boy.”
    Suddenly, Kamall’s mother started to scream. “Don’t take my little one!” she shouted. “Please, don’t take my little one!” She held her son tight to her body.
    The intelligence officers looked around nervously. They had no wish to be recognized by other members of the general public for what they were, and the screams of Kamall’s mother were bound to attract attention. “All right then,” one of them said to his father, “just you. But move quickly.”
    Kamall’s father nodded. He held his wife for a few brief moments, then bent down to hug his son, but no words were spoken. And then he walked out of the door with the guards. He was never seen again.
    At home that evening, I told Uncle Saad the story as we sat playing chess. “Yes,” he said. “I knew Kamall’s father. He was at school with me.”
    I wanted to know more about what I had heard. “Would they really have taken Kamall?”
    “Who knows, Sarmed. I suspect not. More likely, I think, that they were saying that to make his father come quietly. The officers would not have wanted a fuss. They wouldn’t have wanted neighbors to see their faces—much better for them to keep their identities under wraps as much as possible.”
    “What do you think happened to his father?”
    Saad shrugged. “A bullet in the head, if he was lucky. Something more inventive if he wasn’t.”
    “Inventive like what?”
    Saad slowly moved one of his chess pieces. “You don’t want to know, Sarmed.”
    “Maybe they just put him in prison. Maybe he’s still there.”
    “Maybe,” replied Saad with an indulgent smile. “But there aren’t enough cells in Abu Ghraib to house everyone who has disappeared in the last ten years. Not by a mile. And besides, who’s to say that a bullet in the head isn’t preferable to what goes on there?”
    “Like what?”
    “I don’t know, Sarmed. It’s just rumors. Forget about it.” He obviously didn’t want to talk about it anymore, so the fate of Kamall’s father was left to my imagination, as it had been to Kamall’s these past few years.
    In a horrible, warped kind of way, Kamall had been lucky; I had no reason to assume that my family would be so fortunate.
    “What if I say no?” I asked Taha.
    He was evidently surprised—he thought he was offering me a tempting promotion, perhaps by way of recompense for my agreeing to introduce him to