After ten minutes of fast and furious Arabic – it sounded like they were having an argument – Sammy translated, and I was astounded that the Iraqi gossip machine had already got word of our escape from Baghdad. The Sons of Iraq knew the police had been pursuing three cars and you didn’t have to be a genius to work out that the people they wanted to ‘question’ were going to turn out to be Sunnis.
‘We are famous, Mister James,’ added Sammy.
‘Not too famous, I hope. We’ve still got a long way to go.’
The commander roared and rocked backwards and forwards, his eyes shifting constantly from Sammy to each of the four of us. He kept nodding, scratching his beard.
‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Top notch.’
I glanced at my watch, wondering when might be a polite moment to leave, when my senses took a full-on assault from an aromatic blend of exotic spices. My nose twitched. I heard the juices bubble up in my stomach. Action hollows you out. I was starving. A gaggle of women in hijabs appeared with trays of naan bread, hummus, meatballs, falafel, sticky white rice, fresh dates, jugs of cold water.
The chief threw out his two hands. ‘You eat,’ he said.
That was the order and we obeyed, dipping the naan into the communal bowls, swigging down glasses of mint tea to follow. Dai handed out fags. It was all very jolly, and forty-five minutes passed before I mentioned that we still had a long way to go.
The commander nodded, came to his feet and slipped into leather shoes with the backs pushed down. We shuffled back to the square and he insisted on shaking our hands.
‘You are very welcome,’ he said. I imagined him summoning up the words from his course. ‘A very rum business,’ he added bizarrely.
He continued in Arabic and Sammy translated. He had taken the names of the Shia policemen who had killed Sammy’s cousin and presumably Aunt Zahrah. That’s what they had been discussing. Not a price for crossing their territory. I’d got it all wrong. The raised voices were their anger over the Shia domination of Iraqi security forces, the eternal ethnic struggle that would eventually rip Iraq to pieces – three at least. The commander would do what he could to ensure the ‘murderous Shia dogs’, as he put it, were ‘judged by Allah’. He had become grim again, and looking at that pitiless, pockmarked face, I realized that I would not want to be in the shoes of those Shi’ite policemen.
We saddled up. There was some further discussion with Sammy before the commander swung into the passenger seat of an open Toyota and led the way back through town. We gassed up, courtesy of the Sons of Iraq, and three vehicles escorted us to some point in the desert that must have marked the border of their territory.
They peeled away, honking their goodbyes, and we motored on at a steady 120K through the empty moonscape of the Western Desert.
A convoy of oil tankers appeared in their own private dust storm on the horizon. I was about to tell Sammy to swerve off the highway, but they charged on with a release on their air brakes and a deep-throated tooting of horns. Iraqis are a noisy lot.
I had made this same journey in reverse from Amman to Baghdad with Les when we first came to Iraq with Spartan in 2003. Three and a half years had gone by and it felt as if we had never left, not fully, that when we were chased out by our own guards there was unfinished business, an inevitability that we would return.
I could see for miles across the desert. It was like seeing into the future. The next time I glanced at my watch, we were two hours beyond Fallujah, two hours to the border with Jordan. We overtook a few laden vehicles making the same journey, and it didn’t occur to me at the time that the families in the cars coming from the opposite direction were Iraqis who had been turned back, a possibility I couldn’t even begin to consider.
Mostly, though, the road was clear: no bad guys, no American patrols, a few local jundhis sticking to their own districts, and I wondered if the pockmarked tribal chief had called other cells in the Awakened Movement to ask for our safe passage. Whatever Sammy had told him, it had worked.
I thought back over our flight from Baghdad. It was a miracle that we had got out unscathed. It was a miracle that we had come through the shoot-out first thing that morning with nothing more than me getting a scratch on my tummy. Even the three vehicles were running smoothly, the kilometres cracking away behind us, the journey taking on its own silent momentum. Sammy was full of beans, even breaking into the occasional song, he was so happy. He told me that he had a contact in Amman, a Jordanian, and even knew other Iraqis living there. He was looking forward to joining the diaspora and told me of his plans for the future as we hummed along the highway.
Fucking hell, I thought, we’re going to make it.
CHAPTER 24
AS THE SUN weakly heated the day to its warmest point, clouds began to form in narrow ribbons low in the sky. The road must have dropped fractionally into some geological defile and, as we crested the dip, I saw hundreds of cars gathered around the border checkpoints in what seemed to be a vast scrapyard and thought for a moment it was a trick of the light.
There was no time to take this in. We had to get off the road. We could not exit Iraq or enter Jordan with our arsenal of weapons. I signalled to Sammy and he drove cautiously into the desert, keeping a close watch for potential IEDs, not that I expected to find any out here in the middle of nowhere. We stopped at a pile of rocks that rose a little higher than all the other piles of rocks and turned off the motor. About 50m away stood a low patch of scrub. I studied this scene, this speck of life in the dead landscape, and committed it to memory. Just in case. And also nailed it as a waypoint into the memory of my GPS.
Everyone stepped out of the vehicles, stretching and scratching.
‘Toilet break,’ I called out, and Sammy echoed it in Arabic. We had parked the vehicles all in a line to give us a little privacy. The women and children all walked around the other side. Qusay stayed with us.
‘We bury our weapons here,’ I said to the others.
‘Shit,’ cursed Les. ‘Oh well, knew it was coming. I’ll get the shovels.’
We had taken a couple of folding entrenching tools from our pile of gifts from the SF specifically for this purpose. When the families all came back from their loo break, the four of us Brits went around the back to start digging. The Iraqis all settled on to blankets as if for a picnic.
Despite the hard ground, in short order we had a long shallow grave. We wrapped our weapons in black rubber bodybags, also placed in the gift pile as a macabre joke, I assumed, zipped them up and laid them out. All of them had a round chambered and the safety catch on.
Dai looked unhappily at his empty hands.
‘This is like going out stark bollock naked,’ he said. He turned and glanced across the wasteland. ‘If you could find all the guns out here, you could start your own bloody war.’
Sammy handed me a pair of old AKs and finally his gold-plated Tariq.
‘You’re going to miss this,’ I said.
‘No, no, no. It belongs here in Iraq. We bury the past, Mister James. Then we live again.’
‘You should be a philosopher, mate,’ said Seamus.
‘This will be my new job in Amman.’
‘You’ll probably have to work as a waiter, my son,’ said Dai, always right on the money.
Sammy’s weapons went into another bag and were laid down on top.
We looked down at the pit as if in those body bags were old friends we were leaving behind. Colonel Ibrahim would have known by now where we were heading. It was unlikely that he had agents waiting for us at the border, but we couldn’t be sure, and we were now, to quote Dai, stark bollock naked. More likely in the desert, we could fall into the hands of bandits, freelancers unaligned to any ideological group. Four unarmed Brits would make a very nice kidnap prize to sell on to the highest bidder.
We piled dirt back into the pit and kicked the excess spoil around to flatten the place out, before beating our trousers and coats to get rid of the Iraqi dust. I took another reading
with my GPS, standing directly on top of the weapons.
It was time for another change around. I wanted to hide my team among the Iraqis. Sammy’s family spread out in the cars, Qusay running to grab the wheel of the Peugeot like he was grabbing the best ride at the fairground. I stayed in the SUV with a shemagh on, body armour off. Les, Dai and Seamus got into the minivan, hidden behind the kids, also with shemaghs. From now on, this short last hop to the border, we would be protected by them.
Ayesha jumped in the back of the SUV with her children, the abaya covering her head. Her eyes met mine and she smiled. I had been worried that she might have been the hysterical type, but she had come away from the brutal scenes at the checkpoint without a murmur. I had a tendency to underestimate people and was trying to overcome it. I had done the same on occasions when an untried young soldier came into the platoon and, often as not, he turned out to be one of the best I had. In those last few days, the mask of the obedient Muslim wife had slipped and I had begun to see in Ayesha the firm features of a quietly determined woman. While the men get fat and talk too much, Iraqi women are the force that keeps the country going, like Fara, like the girls I’d seen carrying 10kg gas canisters on their heads and working in the fields in 40°C of heat.
‘Last leg,’ I said to the group in the bus, as we prepared to drive off.
‘Merci, James, thank you,’ Fara called.
I bowed extravagantly as if I were French and she smiled. It was the first time a smile had come to her lips in days, and I noticed the look of relief on her features. Fara had never believed we could make it out of Baghdad, that after losing her aunt she could save her children. Finally, there was a glimmer of hope.
Sammy fired up the SUV, turned and drove the same way we had come to get back on the road. Almost immediately I could make out the flags above the dust cloud hanging over the border, the Iraqi flags in a line, the Jordanian flags way off in the distance across an area of no man’s land.
What I had thought was a mirage when we crested the dip a mile or so back on the highway turned out to be the end of the road in every sense. As we slowed to join the line of vehicles waiting to cross the border, we had to drive between a gypsy camp of family cars, minivans, old trucks, even horse carts that belonged to people turned back by Iraqi immigration.
Those people, like Sammy, had burned their bridges. They had nowhere to go and sat in total shock in their cars. Others wandered blindly along the highway. Women with children clung to piles of bags, weeping, staring into space. One pathetic group sat around a fire, cooking God knows what.
The families without automobiles would have reached the border by taxi and then been turned away for the want of papers, or connections, or funds for baksheesh. Nothing ever works in the way you expect, even giving bribes is complicated, essential in one instance, a grave insult in another, the difference so subtle you have to be an Arab to understand it all.
As we edged towards the border I watched grim Iraqi soldiers searching vehicles, pulling open bags, scattering possessions in the dust. One in every three or four cars was turned away. You could hear even from the distance stunned and horrified people shouting and crying and pleading. I could see the guards pushing them back to their cars with rifles readied.
Some of those people joined the shanty town of gridlocked vehicles and would remain at the border until . . . until what? There was peace, an amnesty, they starved to death? Others drove straight off to take their chances with the terrain and the bandits. They would try to cross illegally into Jordan in the dark, a desperate task without 4x4 vehicles and good navigation gear. The border guards ignored them. If we had to, we could do it. The arms dump and the place to turn off the highway to reach it were engraved in my memory.
A woman wailing and carrying on was working her way down the line of cars, crying out verses from the Koran. She reached the SUV, slapped the side window then held her fingers to her mouth. Sammy gave her our last bottle of water. There was no food. There was nothing we could do. Another woman came and I understood from my limited Arabic that she had no money and no petrol for her car to return to Baghdad. Like Sammy, I gritted my teeth and turned my face away from her. I wasn’t a robot and the depth of emotion in her face brought tears of shame to my eyes. There were only so many people I could save. I needed to focus on my people.
It took another two hours to pass through that pitiful line of refugees before we got to the border. The customs men rifled through our luggage. Immigration pored over our papers and a tall, handsome man, a dead ringer for Elvis but with a huge broom of a moustache, stamped our passports.
That was it. It was almost a letdown. I was so tense I thought something inside was about to snap. It was like I’d swum the Channel. I was elated and exhausted. The razor-wired fence in the distance was my white cliffs of Dover. I had expected at least raised eyebrows when they came across eleven Iraqis and four Brits travelling in a group. But it was late afternoon, night would soon be falling, and the officials were coming to the end of their shift. We were in. We’d made it.
Sammy accelerated and led the three wagons across the area of no man’s land to Jordan. He stopped at immigration, left the engine running, and gave the officer his best wide-toothed grin as he handed over the eleven passports for his family. I passed Les’s and my own through the window. Seamus and Dai stepped out of the following vehicles and did the same.
The official vanished into his hut for what seemed like an hour and then came out with all fifteen passports, which he gave to Sammy. I didn’t quite catch what he said, but Sammy and the official were both soon raising their voices and a couple of armed guards emerged from the hut to join in.
Sammy broke off to explain that the official thought the visas in the Iraqi passports were forged. I waved away the notion like it was a bothersome fly but didn’t doubt for a moment that the immigration man was right. I thought if I ever got my hands on Sammy’s contact at the Jordanian Embassy I’d wring his neck like a chicken.
I stepped out of the car. The family gathered around, Ayesha crying, the children crying. Even my mates looked dumbstruck. We’d been through hell in the last forty-eight hours. We were worn out, knackered, unarmed, I had a hole in my stomach, and this little man clutching our passports had the power to turn us back. Our safety was just yards away over the wire fence and, I must admit, it did go insanely through my mind to mount up and try and burst our way through.
Common sense prevailed. I shut Sammy up, asked him to translate, and told the official that I had been personally with both General Mashooen and his son, Wing Commander Mashooen, to the Jordanian Embassy and had seen with my own eyes the visas being applied. What’s more, as a British subject going about my lawful business, I was appalled by this needless bureaucracy.
The officials went into a huddle, then said that, yes, we Brits were free to enter the country. But not the Iraqis.
I had thought, as Sunnis, the Jordanian officials would be impressed by having such distinguished immigrants entering the country. I had been wrong and tried another tack. I asked to see the officer in charge of immigration.
Again they went into another debate before the officer went off with all fifteen passports to make my request known. After a deliberately long wait, and with the sun now low on the horizon and the evening chill coming back, I was led through the complex to an office. I came to attention and introduced myself as Captain James Ashcroft. I would have to do some pretty fancy dancing between the raindrops, no two ways about it, and give the performance of my life.
The man in charge was also a captain and spoke reasonable English. I looked him in the eye as we shook hands. He asked me to sit and I faced him across a narrow desk on which our passports stood to one side in a neat stack. Over the predictable glasses of hot sweet tea brought by an orderly, I learned that he had three sons and a daughter and had spent a year studying in England.
‘I wish my Arabic was as good,’ I said. ‘Your English is perfect.’
‘N
o, no, no,’ he said modestly.
He looked duly saddened on my behalf that I merely had two daughters – ‘but was trying for a son’. I took a photograph from my wallet, showing Krista with the girls.
‘Very beautiful,’ he remarked, and I touched my hand to my heart.
He placed his glass back in the saucer. Now he got serious. Was I not a military contractor escorting criminals whom the Iraqi authorities must have deemed enemies of the state? He glanced down at my clothes. I was wearing my fleece, combat pants and desert boots. Not much of a giveaway.
On the contrary, I said, I was a British officer and had come to Iraq on a mission of mercy when my old friend Wing Commander Assam Mashooen found himself unjustly placed on a Shia death list.
‘It is a civil war in Iraq,’ I added. I knew the captain must be a Sunni and egged the pudding. ‘The Shia are killing every important and educated Sunni they can lay their hands on.’
He didn’t budge. ‘But is it not their war, an affair for Iraqis?’
‘You are completely right, Captain, but at Sandhurst I learned to always go back for my friends.’
‘Ah, Sandhurst. Very good. The Royal Academy, yes? I like very much the Sandhurst.’ His eyes lit up and I didn’t bother correcting him. I had my trump card and it was time to play it.
‘And I like Jordan very much. Actually,’ I continued, ‘His Royal Highness Prince Ali was in my year.’
‘Prince Ali?’ He looked at me puzzled. Then sat bolt upright. ‘The Jordan Prince Ali?’ He looked at me in disbelief.
‘When you train together you are as brothers,’ I said. And I reached into the pass-holder around my neck.
I usually carried several things in there; a CAC card, weapons passes, $500, a lock of Krista’s hair, my passport when it wasn’t sat on some bastard’s desk, a Scots library card with which I hoped to confuse potential captors as to my nationality with its blue and white Saltire, and my trump card for if I got into trouble in Jordan: an old photograph, dug out of my shoebox of Sandhurst photos for just these trips in the Middle East.
Escape from Baghdad Page 28
