Hamdani shook his head, perhaps at his own failures, perhaps at the echo of these failures, perhaps at his country’s descent, which seemed to last longer and plumb deeper than a patriot could bear. We returned to a discussion of the Iran-Iraq war, to the ironies of proud medal ceremonies and the battles that scraped Iraq raw. “Although the war was victorious in terms of the military,” said Hamdani, equivocating, as was his wont, and then delivering the final and devastating assessment: “it destroyed the Iraqi economy and Iraq. The psychological problems that rose through the Iraqi social life and the criminal age we have today came out of that war.”
IN 2003 HAMDANI was commander of the 2nd Corps of the Republican Guard in charge of the southern theater and the defense of Baghdad, the city the Americans promised to shock and awe. “Of course,” said Hamdani, “I knew from the beginning we would lose.” When the phone rang in his house he would pick it up and find a recorded message talking to him: “There is no way to oppose the United States!” “Stay in your home where you will be safe!” He hung up. The Mukhabarat, the intelligence service, were certainly listening, and in any case it was an obvious piece of psyops.
He planned to fight for as long as possible. He thought the Iraqi army might be able to hold out for two or three months at best.
The American F16s bombed his division to smithereens. After only a few days his troops were smashed and he found himself without a single vehicle—not a jeep, not even a commandeered taxi; everything had been destroyed—in a band of thirty-odd survivors. He split the men into groups and told them to disperse, traveling by foot on the dirt back-roads through the farmlands south of Baghdad. He made his way to the house of a cousin in Youssifiya. He liked this cousin, who had given up his government post as an engineer and taken a second wife and gone to live in the countryside. It was an odd sort of life for an educated man, but Hamdani respected his desire for independence. The cousin welcomed him and gave him the use of a shepherd’s hut on the edge of his land; it was safer than in the main house where he might be seen.
Hamdani felt himself grateful, empty and exhausted. His face and arms were scratched from the blasting bombs, he had a pebble of shrapnel in one calf, his limbs ached from walking. He took off his uniform and folded it carefully and hid it with his Kalashnikov in a duffel bag and put on a borrowed pair of trousers and a flannel shirt. One of the wives brought him food, one of the small sons brought him a pen and writing paper and he began to rewrite the diary that had been burned when his jeep had been hit. The small sons watched him write and shook their heads: “Is he studying for his exams or something?”
Baghdad fell on 9 April and the Americans toppled Saddam’s statue. Hamdani was sitting in his cousin’s guest room with a few of his cousin’s friends when he heard the news. There was no electricity and the kerosene lamps made small pools of yellow light. Hamdani described his mood as almost “dying from grief.” He could not eat. He thought about his cousin’s life, how he had teased him about his big family and the two wives—unusual for an educated man, and living so far out on a farm in some kind of oblivion; his cousin had laughed at his jibes and said he was happier: “I can start my own tribe!” Hamdani had chided him for favoring one of his sons above the other: “Be careful or they will end up like the story of Jacob!” Now he remembered his own sons, both of whom had been deployed with the Republican Guard and who were now, like most of the army, and himself, missing.
One of his cousin’s relatives was very happy Saddam was finished. “Thank God we got rid of Saddam and the Americans are here! Soon they will rebuild everything.”
Hamdani told him he thought this was a very naïve view. “We won’t have the power and authority that has ruled this country and there will be a vacuum and this will be very dangerous.”
“So if you know all this and you are so clever why didn’t you organize a coup against Saddam? You are a high commander!”
“This is another naïve view,” Hamdani replied quietly. “You don’t understand the complexities. If there is no power to equal the power that has just been removed then there is no one to take control and this could end in civil war.”
The happy optimistic man said, “Well, I am betting on the Americans, we’ll meet again in the future and you will see that I was right!”
The following day Hamdani hid near a brush fence and watched two American armored Bradlee vehicles position themselves at the village crossroads. He had fought the Americans in two wars, but this was the first time he had been able to observe their soldiers up close. He saw how young they were and this surprised him for some reason. He also noticed the standard of their professionalism, their discipline, the way they always held their guns in the ready position with their index finger horizontal, flat above the trigger guard. He saw that not one of them took off their armor or their helmets, despite the heat. During the day he crept around in irrigation ditches to see more. At another intersection he found tanks. He saw that on each tank the razor wire was looped neatly and hung on a hook, that the jerrycans were stored in their own brackets, and that everything was kept neatly in its proper place. Two months earlier he had stopped two officers of the Republican Guard driving toward him on the barracks road, both had been bare-headed and he had berated them for leaving their berets off. “We have talked about this before and I gave you a photograph of an American soldier and an Iraqi soldier, the American was clean and tidy and the Iraqi was disheveled and holding his gun awry and I know you were both there when I showed these pictures and I asked you all then, which looks the more impressive soldier and most of you replied, the American.”
After a few days a warrant officer brought him news that his family was safe at a relative’s house in Diala and that his son Osama was with them, but that his other son, Ahmed, was missing and there were rumors that he had been killed or wounded in the battle for the airport road. Hamdani put on a dishdasha and borrowed the ID card of a man who looked roughly like him and went to look in Baghdad.
He hardly knew where to begin, everything was broken and in chaos. He searched in different areas. “Where can you look? But you are a father so you must look.” He walked the airport highway through the burnt tanks and Humvees and he wondered why the Americans had not imposed more control, why there was not even a curfew? The roads from the South were lined with makeshift graves, heaped earth or white sheets, each marked with a stake. The weather was hot and dusty and there were streams of poor people walking home. An American private, wilting and exhausted from the sun beating, held up a stretcher he had made into a sign painted with the word “Dead” so that the people walking would not step on the fresh graves. Hamdani saw every pathetic mound as his dead son, the American private holding up the sign in the heat and the dust, asking the herding people to go around, struck him as some surreal polite detail in all the mess.
Finally after several days and relayed messages from the family in Diala, Hamdani got word that one of his relatives had found a note in the admissions book of a hospital in the Adhamiya district of Baghdad: “Ahmed: 2nd Lt. Rep. Gd.”
Ahmed had taken three bullets on the airport road, two through his upper thigh and one through his bicep. He lay bleeding, unable to walk, next to a corporal who was slowly dying, when an American medic came up the road and crouched down to examine them. The dying corporal reached up a little and whispered for help, “I am a Christian like you!” and he fingered the gold cross around his neck. The American medic told him his name was David and said a few prayers as the corporal died. The medic said he would try to stay with Ahmed too, “Because you wear glasses and I wear glasses just like yours,” but soon his unit was moved forward and he went away. Then a Republican Guard officer came out of a hiding place and dragged Ahmed, hitching car to car, until they reached the hospital in Adhamiya. There a doctor cleaned his wounds but they had no bed for him, so the Republican Guard officer took Ahmed to his own house, which was nearby. A relative tracked him down and by the time Hamdani got back to his family in
Diala, Ahmed was already there, splayed and pale, tended by a local nurse (they did not dare entrust him to a hospital) being fed with antibiotics and broth.
After another week or so passed, Hamdani went to Baghdad to see if there was any remnant of the high command to which he should report. He found his former colleagues and friends too scared to sleep in their own houses. There were Americans looking for the deck of playing cards, Chalabi’s militia in their American uniforms, Kurdish Peshmerga in baggy pantaloons requisitioning ministerial houses, the Badr Brigade guarding bridges. Thousands of Shia were on the roads walking to the shrine of Kerbala for the anniversary of the death of the martyr Hussein, performing a pilgrimage so long forbidden. They walked past burned government buildings still picked over by looters and the wreckage of his tank units on the south highway and Hamdani could see very clearly that everything was going to be different now.
Hamdani stayed for a few days at his mother’s house and found an army medic he knew to go to Diala and take care of Ahmed because they were worried about gangrene. He was afraid at first to return to his own house and kept moving every few nights in case he was recognized, but after a few weeks Hamdani was tired of hiding and so with the help of some neighbors he managed to evict a family of squatters who had taken over his house and moved back in.
On the street he saw the faces of thieves and murderers and so he shut himself indoors and lapsed into depression. By the beginning of June, the American net was closing, his name was on the blacklist of the 200 most wanted. Helicopters seemed to hover exactly over his house, Humvee patrols seemed more frequent. His wife begged him to turn himself in, but he was reluctant. Eventually he was put in touch with a Mukhabarat officer exile, who said he had been under his command in 1983 together with Qusay and Uday (Hamdani couldn’t remember him) and that he was now working with the Americans and could arrange for him to turn himself in safely.
So he surrendered himself to the Americans and agreed to co-operate. He was treated well and allowed to go home every night and sleep in his own bed. Once his house was stormed by American troops at night, he and his wife and daughters were bundled into the garden illuminated by the bright helicopter light above and handcuffed before he could explain that there had obviously been a mix-up and that he had already turned himself in. For several months, he went every day to be debriefed. He told them he would answer every question and that he would answer them truthfully. In his interrogations he was interviewed by different officers, historians, analysts and intelligence. Some focused on WMD and their whereabouts, others wanted him to explain the structure of the Iraqi army, others had more strategic questions about the relationship between Saddam Hussein and the Republican Guard and how decisions were made. The Americans, he acknowledged, treated him well and with courtesy. Hamdani could not resist a self-serving comment on the increasingly cordial atmosphere of these discussions. “Even in custody I told the Americans that they would lose. They hated me at first for saying this but now the new staff is coming to Amman to talk to me.”
IN MANY WAYS Hamdani conformed to the way most generals and senior commanders reflected on the past twenty-five years of their combat careers. Iran was an enemy that deserved to be attacked. Gas was (regrettably) used for reasons of expediency, the Anfal campaigns were more of the order of counter-insurgency measures than genocide, the invasion of Kuwait was a monumental blunder of Saddam’s hubris, the uprising that followed was Iranian backed, the nineties were years of corruption and stagnation and they had come to hate Saddam and his destruction of the army and the country in its wake. Yes, but.
Culpability. Moral Responsibility.
After several days of conversation, after the whole history had been laid out on his desk and illustrated with lines of blue ballpoint and flashes of gesticulation, I asked Hamdani directly about his own sense of guilt and morality and how he justified to himself having served a terror regime.
At first he reiterated how terrible Saddam had been. “Yes,” I concurred, “but you were his general.”
Then he understood what I was asking and he leaned across his desk to look at me directly, intensely, eye to eye. I met his gaze and we stared at each other for a minute or so. I looked as carefully as I could into his eyes but could discern no tremulous depth. Perhaps there was something sealed, farther back, behind—but I began to be uncomfortable and I looked away so that he had won the staring match and was able to ramble his final, concluding thoughts. I wrote them down just as he spoke them; I cannot vouch for their sincerity or veracity.
“You feel very sad, the high command was gone, it was the stupidity of our own decisions combined with the stupidity of American decisions. You feel very sad about what Iran will gain, the destruction of the country and a civil war I told my debriefers I hoped I would not live to see—
“…The idea of participating—it’s much bigger than what you are capable of understanding. I graduated from military college, a new regime came…It’s not easy. The mistakes were not only Saddam Hussein’s mistakes. It was the mistake of a whole society, it was a mountain that grew, stacked up. How much could you change it? At the time it was a very bad system, a bad regime, but there were red lines, if you didn’t cross the red lines you were OK. But now? Now it’s nothing: why am I out of Iraq now? I never would have left Iraq, but it has become worse, I had to…It kept piling up, there were more and more restraints. As a good commander, as a good person, what can you do? I tried to lessen the evil in the regime. I worked to correctly bring up good honorable soldiers to perform for their country, not for the regime. You carry out an order, but in a good way to obliterate the evil in it. I was never a tool in killing. I never killed another Iraqi, I never killed an Iranian prisoner of war, I never attacked a Kurdish village when I was part of the forces in the North. This was as much as I could do. A human being is held accountable according to the amount of freedom he gets. Who would dare to object to his plans? Or say he would lose this war? I set ninety percent of the deserters in my units free. I did not even have a jail at my division headquarters. I did not have bodyguards, it was just me and my driver. Qusay and Saddam Hussein were always criticizing me for this. And I would always answer them by asking if there was any problem in the fighting capability of my division, or their training or preparations. I had no jail but I had the best battalions in fighting skills and power.” Here his pride expanded and he quoted von Manstein’s Soldiers’ Memoir, “The greatest status you reach in the military and its highest rank is to be an excellent soldier. I wished to end my career being an excellent soldier.”
“You chose to be a part of it,” I told him. “You could have resigned, you could have gone to live in the country like your cousin.”
“One of my American debriefers asked me the same question. He asked me why I continued to fight against the Americans. I told him it had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein. It’s hard for you to understand, but it was a matter of military honor, being part of a country and within that comes your loyalty to your high command. I asked the American debriefer, ‘Why are you in my country asking me this question?’ He replied, ‘I am under orders.’ I told him, ‘I was also under orders.’ I asked him, ‘Do you like President Bush?’ He admitted he did not. ‘So,’ I asked him, ‘Why did you carry out his orders?’”
AFTER EIGHT YEARS, the war against Iran finally came to an end in 1988. Zaid, Kamel Sachet’s youngest son, put another video in the machine for me to watch.
General Kamel Sachet, wearing his neatly pressed olive green uniform and the dark maroon beret of the Special Forces, is standing in front of a military map and points with a pointing stick at various circles, ovals and arrows of deployment. He is presenting a televised lecture, as a special broadcast, describing the last battle of the war, Tawakalna Ala Allah IV (We Put Our Faith Upon God IV; also translatable as “God Help Us IV”), in which he was overall commander of operations.
The lighting is dark and brown, the camera watches like a bored student, Kamel Sachet
’s dignity and charisma and his upright carriage look stiff and uncommunicative on television. The map behind him is flat and devoid of any geography, no town or river or mountain contour, as if the troops moved about in blank spaces. Every few minutes his briefing is intercut with a scene of battlefield footage. Infantry advance in strung lines through scrub desert toward a rocky outcrop. The quality of the picture is bad and shaking, the landscape dun and it is hard to make the soldiers out, small figures, lost against the landscape, flecks of moving camouflage.
Kamel Sachet’s voice is calm and dull, as if he were reading under duress.
“Due to the orders of our President Saddam Hussein to liberate our national lands from the enemy and to destroy as many of the enemy as possible in the battle of Tawakalna Ala Allah, Saad is safe and we have taken Sanoba from the enemy. In the area between the Shoshren Valley in the south and Chihaman in the north…”
Chapter 6
HIS THIRD AND MOST RELIGIOUS SON
AHMED, KAMEL SACHET AND UM OMAR’S MIDDLE son, had delicate bones and a beautiful face. His dark eyes were limpid like unfathomable pools of poetry, his long glossy lashes blinked like Bambi, but he held himself carefully; he wore clean well-pressed dishdashas buttoned at his throat or a neat pair of jeans and a black sweater. No gesture was superfluous or excited, his hands kept still. His rosebud mouth delineated calm certitude.
An explosion boomed the window glass.
Ahmed smiled a pretty line of perfect white teeth: “Like music to us.”
Ahmed had been five when the war against Iran ended; it was one of his earliest memories. His father had put him in the car and they had driven up Abu Nawas Street, along the banks of the river, by the strip of park and open air fish restaurants. He remembered fireworks, great red and green starbursts like sparkling magical chrysanthemums. Shopkeepers were distributing sweets to passers-by, rich men hired musicians to play in front gardens; there were parties and all over town kids would douse those who walked past with buckets of water, hauling honking motorists out of their cars to drench them in the great Baghdad water fight. Gunfire cracked in celebration for days—Saddam had to go on television and ask people to calm their exuberance because too many people were getting injured by stray bullets. Ahmed remembered his father, touched by the excitement, firing his pistol in the air out of the car window. Ahmed never saw him do anything as spontaneous or as delighted as that again. Eight years! And the war was over.
The Weight of a Mustard Seed Page 8
