Ahmed’s father was a tank commander in the Medina Division of the Republican Guard who had fought in both the long war with Iran and against American troops in Kuwait. By the time the Americans and British invaded in 2003, Ahmed had celebrated his eighteenth birthday by joining his father in the Guard, attached to the Nebuchadnezzar Division and donning the same celebrated red beret of this elite corps just two days before the first US Tomahawk missiles landed on Baghdad.
Nebuchadnezzar was stationed just outside the capital, ready to meet the American spearhead, but already Ahmed knew there would be no fighting. Men had laughed when the Americans first dropped their leaflets telling Iraqi soldiers how to surrender, and they’d burned them in their braziers. But he could see that they were receptive, even if they knew that if Saddam survived, like he did after the Persian Gulf War of 1991, that they would probably be killed if they deserted.
But after the first air strikes, they openly discussed surrender, and when the Americans appeared on the horizon, most simply jumped down and abandoned their tanks. Omar pulled off his red beret and threw it into a thorn bush in disgust.
Meanwhile his father’s Medina Division was ordered south to the defence of Najaf, a strategic town on the main highway into Baghdad, hiding under palm trees to thwart the Americans’ drones and spy satellites. Amazingly this ancient tactic worked.
On the first night, as the Americans attacked in Apache helicopters, it looked like the defenders had got the better of them, sending many of the choppers back to where they had come from, either on fire or badly shot up. The following day the Americans changed tactics however, the helicopters not stopping to hover this time, but acting like attack aircraft. Ahmed’s father’s tank was destroyed where it stood on Highway 9, his body incinerated in the cockpit.
Ahmed only found this out months later. For now he made his way into Baghdad in time to witness Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square being pulled down by a US tank, as enthusiastic Iraqis waved sledgehammers for the cameras of the world’s press and cheered the Americans. It was all staged and, noticed Ahmed with surprise and alarm, many of them were actually cheering not for their foreign liberators, but for a slain Shia cleric, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr. The Shia, it seemed, hoped to inherit Iraq from Saddam and the Sunnis.
Ahmed made his way to an uncle’s apartment in Mansour, a well-to-do neighbourhood in Baghdad, passing discarded uniforms on every street, and the first drifts of looters, the sound of shattering shop front windows accompanying his lonely journey. He saw one cluster of American soldiers, looking huge under their weight of body armour, but for the most part it was just excited groups of Iraqis, desperate for the spoils of war, even if meant stealing from a neighbour.
His uncle, Farid, was something of an intellectual and therefore distrusted by Saddam, despite Farid’s loyalty to the Ba’ath party and to the army that he spent his youth fighting alongside. There were a group of senior Sunni military men gathered in his apartment when Ahmed showed up, the old soldiers greeting him warmly and shaking their heads in despair when Ahmed told them of the mass surrender that he had witnessed.
They already had a plan – to reach out to as many Sunni officers in the regime as possible and persuade them not to waste their time fighting for the lost cause of Saddam, but to stockpile weapons for the bigger war to come. It was about this time that Ahmed first heard someone suggest that they create an Islamic state led by an emir.
As the weeks passed and the looting got worse, a decision was made to send Ahmed and five other young men to visit the leaders of the gangs that were organising a lot of the plunder. Ahmed demanded half of all they had taken, ‘for the cause’. The gang leaders, little more than jumped-up street hoodlums, knew that Ahmed was serious, and they agreed.
But Ahmed was getting impatient for some real action, and decided to form a guerrilla group with the men with whom he’d approached the looting gangs. Their first idea was to detonate a roadside bomb near a newly built American base on Canal Street, and one of his new comrades brought along someone from al-Qaeda, a much older Egyptian guy recently arrived from Afghanistan, a veteran mujahid. Like an addict for holy war, he had travelled to Iraq for the jihad after the Americans invaded.
One of Ahmed’s guerrilla group was an engineer in an artillery regiment and, in between long and rather boring anecdotes about Osama bin Laden, the Egyptian taught him how to take an old artillery shell and bore very slowly into the casing with a hand drill to reach the explosive material. Then, once you have a nice hole, you put in some C-4 plastic explosive and finally a blasting cap. The funny thing was that they built this bomb in a local mosque, everyone knowing what they were doing but saying nothing.
They carried the bomb to Canal Street and planted it on the edge of the road, running a wire from the road to their hiding place in the shrub. It was a busy highway and they didn’t need to wait long, detonating when a lone Humvee passed. The explosion flipped the vehicle on its side, a crowd quickly gathering around to gawp at what happened.
The little band of guerrillas didn’t run, but remained to watch as stretchers carried away the Humvee’s occupants. There was no fear among Ahmed’s group, only a sense of elation. A sense of liberation. It was to be the first of nine such roadside bombs, only one of them not detonating. But after the first three or four attacks, Ahmed’s band noticed that the Americans were starting to move around in armed convoys, sweeping the hinterland with mounted machine guns.
Ahmed was arrested in November of 2003, not for anything in particular, it just seemed that the Americans were sweeping up every young Iraqi male. And it was at Abu Ghraib that Ahmed became Omar.
The American guards called everyone Omar or Ali Baba, or ‘fucking ragheads’ as in ‘Come here you fucking raghead’. Ahmed decided that Omar would be his name when he got out of this hellhole and started killing the fucking Americans again.
He wasn’t subjected to the worst humiliations that Abu Ghraid had to offer. He didn’t have to masturbate in front of the female American soldiers – butch-looking dykes Omar thought – or pile up, naked except for a sack over his head, on top of other naked prisoners. He didn’t have electrodes clipped to his genitals or receive the cold-water treatment. He was threatened once with a snarling dog, but when he didn’t flinch, the guards got bored and moved on to someone more easily bullied. They had a lot to pick from.
Omar, as he now proudly called himself, was released from Abu Ghraib in May of 2004, to make room for fresh inmates for the guards to humiliate. He had made some useful contacts while inside, including a small group of freedom fighters who had been sent to Iran for training, receiving lessons in detonating charges, magnetic circuits and laser circuits. It’s bloody cold in Iran, they all agreed, but Omar was never going to that Shia-dominated country.
Instead he fell in with a group of Sunnis newly arrived from Fallujah in Anbar province, seventy miles to the west of Baghdad, and not far from Abu Ghraib. Apparently the Iraqi army had abandoned huge amounts of military equipment when they deserted their posts and this was now all in the hands of the insurgents.
These men had been arrested in the aftermath of the ambush of private military contractors from Blackwater, whose charred corpses were dragged through the streets of Fallujuah before being strung up on the bridge spanning the Euphrates. They said that the city was full of foreign fighters – Yemenis, Saudis, Moroccans, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese – who virtually ran the place.
These foreigners had weird religious practices, Omar’s new friends told him, like forbidding smoking. Anyone caught with a cigarette would have his fingers chopped off. And they wouldn’t allow vegetable sellers to display cucumbers and tomatoes next to each other because this was deemed too suggestive and erotic. Weird, agreed Omar.
What was good, however, was that most of these foreigners were Sunni. The Shi’ites were being pushed out of Fallujah, killed if they didn’t take the hint and leave of their own accord. It made life easier if you knew who to trust, wi
thout having to worry about Shi’ites spying for the Americans. And when Omar walked out of Abu Ghraib on a beautifully fresh late spring morning, he jumped on the first bus that was making the thirty-minute trip to Fallujah, feeling that his new life had finally begun.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
It was midnight in Verbier and Omar sat at the desk in his hotel room staring at the screen of his laptop, reflexively loading and unloading the magazine of his Browning Hi-Power. It was the very make of pistol that Saddam Hussein personally carried, knew Omar, and the mafia giving him this particular make, despite there being more up-to-date models available, seemed like a good omen.
The car hadn’t moved, parked along a cul-de-sac at the far end of town. He made a note of the coordinates, clicked the magazine back into the pistol, and went over to lie on the bed.
He never trusted the Saudi woman. What was a woman doing involved in a job like this anyway?
The Saudi woman had the money, of course, but a job like this didn’t need money, just careful planning, thinks Omar. He had argued for an anonymous flat in the immigrant areas of Rome – Piazza Vittorio had been suggested – but the commander said that he had to go to the safe house organised by the woman. The commander was getting greedy, but Omar could see why; the Saudi woman had recently handed him 100,000 euros in used 100-euro notes, to do with as he saw fit. It was a nice touch, but he wasn’t moved. As for the commander, Omar would deal with the commander when he got back to Syria.
No, he never trusted the girl, or her Libyan so-called husband either. Omar made sure she remained veiled within the compound, but outside she flaunted herself in tight jeans and tops, visiting that cafe where they’d sit all day drinking coffee and behaving like young lovers. That was part of the plan, showing themselves as the occupiers of the compound, the young married couple opening an Internet furnishing business, but they seemed to enjoy the role too much for Omar’s liking.
He followed them one day and just watched. One reason why they went to the cafe was to talk openly, he suspected, and sure enough they did a lot of talking – her especially. She pretended to be modest and submissive in the house, but here he could tell she was anything but.
Anyway there will be no more talking after tonight. Omar has decided that he can’t wait until morning; his guess is that they will take off first thing, so he’s going up to the house to have a look around. He knows it’s the right one because an Internet search shows it belongs to a British subject called Mr Simon Fellowes. Mr Simon Fellowes would seem to be some sort of forex trader – very rich obviously.
The receptionist looks up and smiles impersonally as Omar trudges across the lobby. He’s not carrying a suitcase or any other bag with him, the Browning nestling out of sight underneath his jacket. It’s snowing very gently in the car park out front.
The Audi swings out on to the main road through Verbier, heading towards the outskirts. In five minutes he slows down and passes the end of the cul-de-sac, deciding he will park here, hidden by a long hedge. He gives it ten minutes then quietly opens and closes the car door and trudges softly up the lane towards the house. It’s a quarter to one.
The driveway has an electronic gate but no CCTV camera that Omar can see. There’s a pedestrian side gate that has a simple latch on it, which Omar opens, slowly swinging the gate towards him. He stops dead. There’s someone standing the other side of a bush, about three metres from where Omar is now poised stock-still.
Whoever it is, he is pissing into the hedge. Omar tries to get a fix on him and sees quite a large man standing profile on, letting out a long stream of piss, a cigarette or a spliff or something in his mouth. The man gives a loud belch, zips up his flies and lets out a long stream of smoke. Omar can smell it now; it’s hashish.
The man turns, a fatuous smile on his face dropping like a brick as he spots Omar standing in front of him. “What the…” says the man before Omar peppers his heart with silenced automatic pistol shots. The man manages to stagger to his car where he drops, sitting upright but stone dead against the driver’s door. Omar lets out a sigh of relief that he didn’t set off the car alarm.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Tariq has no idea what time it is. It’s dark as far as he can tell through the strip blinds of the hospital window, the faint sounds of the Roman night – car horns, sirens, the constant traffic – muffled by the double-glazing. The light is on in the corridor, enough to softly illuminate his room, where a man sits staring into space. As he watches, the man yawns, and leans down to pick up a pink newspaper from the floor: La Gazzetta dello Sport.
The immediate past seems so important but Tariq simply can’t grasp it. A slightly painful orange mush is how he described these memories to the doctor yesterday, or today. The doctor suggested that he wind back his thoughts as far back as he can remember and then to start telling himself the story of his life, like he was the subject of a novel. “And like a good novelist,” the doctor had smiled, “leave out the boring bits.”
Well, he remembered the rushed arrival in Britain in 2001, when he was eleven. His father had been released from prison four months earlier after another short stretch inside on the orders of Muammar Gaddafi. The dawn flight to Tunis and then from Tunis to London, on a plane full of British tourists, sunburnt and tucking into the duty-free booze at such an early hour.
He remembered how cold Britain was – even in June, when they arrived and took a house in Muswell Hill with the help of other Libyan exiles. It was a big house but they were a big family and Tariq shared a room with his brother Hisham, four years older than him. He also had three younger sisters and a younger brother. How they used to huddle round the central heating in those first days.
And he remembered 9/11, watching the attacks on the Twin Towers on television, the whole family absorbed by the unfolding events. His parents were horrified, but he remembers Hisham looking at him and giving him the thumbs-up signal.
He’d like to forget all about school, especially the early days before rich relatives intervened and paid for him to go private. The classes were huge and anarchy and bad behaviour ruled. The teachers seemed so ineffective. There was some name calling, especially in the two years after the September attacks and in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. A bunch of white kids decided that Tariq was Iraqi and started bullying him a bit. Hisham and some of his big mates intervened and sorted that one out.
He managed good grades at A-level and got into university in London to study engineering and maths, which is when his life truly started. And it really began towards the end of the first year when he met Aafia.
It was through friends, mostly white liberals with a good sense of humour, the types he seemed to gravitate towards. All his girlfriends until then had been English girls – he was attracted to the blonde, blue-eyed ones, the stereotypical northern Europeans – and it was mostly about the sex. He wasn’t sure he was that interested in them as people, and vice versa, although one girl declared her undying love for him. But she was very needy and Tariq couldn’t cope with the histrionics.
With Aafia it was different. It was quiet, it was unspoken, and it was both physical and intellectual. When did they first meet? It must have been through friends. That’s right, she was studying philosophy, politics and economics with Holly, a good friend of Tariq’s and one of his flatmates.
Neither of them pushed it, although they both knew. To be honest, it was a new experience for him – love. It was an unnervingly powerful force, and Tariq wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it.
The guard noisily leafs through the pages of his newspaper, snorting loudly, like a pig, as he does so. He then sniffs hard twice, like he is trying to unblock his nose, and he glances over at Tariq, whose eyes are half closed. Remembering.
Tariq wasn’t at all religious. Growing up he and his brother listened to rap and house music, smoked spliffs and drank alcohol, although Hisham suddenly gave up drink and drugs and started reading the Quran one day, and the brothers started drifting
apart.
At university, Tariq had been shocked by the hard-line Muslim students, with their talk of ‘dirty kuffars’ and establishing Sharia law. Some of the worst were the women – still girls really – willingly submitting to this nonsense. Tariq was so glad that Aafia was angrily opposed to these so-called radicals, and was lobbying the Students’ Union to ban the hate preachers they were inviting to speak.
All she got back was a bland statement about ‘freedom of speech’ and going on about equality and diversity guidelines. Freedom of speech, equality and diversity – fat chance of that in these bastards’ utopias. Aafia and Tariq decided to start an underground group to oppose the fanatics.
Luckily she was well off, to put it mildly. With a generous allowance from her father they were able to open a small office off-campus, the same office that they would use during the Libyan uprising of 2011 to disseminate reports from Tripoli, Benghazi, Darnah and other cities. They’d speak to contacts on the ground in Libya, men and women that Tariq’s father had put them in touch with, and pass these reports onto media outlets in Britain and America.
Tariq had wanted to go to Libya himself as soon as it looked like Gaddafi was going to be toppled, but his father persuaded him that it would be too dangerous and that he’d be more usefully employed telling the western media what was actually happening in the country. Foreign journalists were no longer being granted visas at the time, and Gaddafi had had all the Libyan journalists arrested at the start of the uprising.
He finally returned to the country of his birth and early childhood when the elections for a new General National Congress were announced for the summer of 2012. Despite arguments about how to run the election, and some violence, Tripoli was full of optimism as Tariq campaigned for a candidate for the liberal National Force Alliance under Mahmoud Jibril.
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