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The Story of an Extraordinary Life

Ahmad examines wreckage in the aftermath of the friendly fire attack that killed 18. (Photo: M. Goldfarb)

Click Here to View Photos from the war on Iraq by Photojournalists Christopher Morris and Ron Haviv, featured on The Connection (5/15/03)

With Special Forces and the Peshmerga picking up the offensive, our routine changed. Daytime was for watching battle, the evenings were for watching the news on TV at Ahmad's house.

Watching the regime fall, Ahmad started talking in detail about his life. His story is a paradigm of what happened to many who were born into Iraq's middle class, the best educated middle class in the Arab world.

Ahmad precisely dates his birth as a political activist: 1968. Ahmad was a student at the University of Mosul. It was not just in the West that 1968 was the great year of student political activity. In Iraq as well it was a time when students thought they could reshape, if not the whole world, at least their own country. In Iraq, it was also the year the Ba'ath Party seized power in a military coup.

Ahmad was not a Ba'athist. He was a Nasserite, a follower of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser's vision of all Arabs coming together in a single, socialist nation had a powerful resonance for the first generation of Arabs born after the end of European colonial rule. Ahmad was a precocious activist in Mosul's Nasserian movement. But he soon discovered a flaw in the organization, an authoritarian strain quite at odds with its democratic principals. Elected to serve on the local leadership committee, he was not allowed to take his seat because he was an ethnic Kurd.

Ahmad watching war coverage at Mishko's Tea House - a hangout for Erbil's literary set at the foot of Erbil's Citadel. (Photo: M. Goldfarb)

When he said he was leaving the movement, his Nasserite colleagues denounced him to the Ba'ath regime and he was arrested. He renounced active politics and became a biology lecturer at the University of Mosul's prestigious medical faculty. In his free time, he lived the life of an old fashioned man of letters, writing fiction and criticism and giving lectures on literature, although even here politics intrude.

In the end it wasn't the political nature of his literary lectures that brought Ahmad to a long period in prison. It was money. In the early '80s with Saddam bankrupting Iraq to pursue his war with Iran, the regime demanded that Iraqis give over their gold to help finance the conflict. Ahmad, who was serving in the army, refused. He was sent to a military prison and tortured for six months -- then released.

But the story wasn't over. A few years later he received a letter informing him that because of his previous political activities and his refusal to join the Ba'ath party he was being "retired," at the age of 35, from his lectureship at the university. "I felt very sad then," he told me. "My relationship with my students was very intimate. When they retired me, I lost the dearest relationships in my life." Ahmad became bitter. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood, the ultra-Islamist political sect. He grew a beard and prayed five times a day -- for a while. "But alas I found out they were worse than the Ba'ath party. They were fascists."

For a while Ahmad dropped out of all intellectual activity. With eight children to feed, he had to work. A skilled carpenter, he started a furniture making business that did very well. He invested some of his profits in a billiard hall in Mosul's old town. He became wealthy. But the Gulf War reawakened his political side. He began to write again. In 1997 he published a book of short stories, magic realist in tone, but there was no mistaking the wicked caliph in the tale, called Mr. Key. It was Saddam himself. So off to prison he went again. There was more physical torture -- but also psychological torture, as well. Ahmad had had the short stories privately printed. The volumes were being sold at a stall in Mosul's Bazaar. The authorities dragged him there and forced him to burn all the copies of his book.

Mahmour is liberated, and Saddam's image is defiled. (Photo: M. Goldfarb)

He wasn't killed for a simple reason. As much as the Saddam regime loved death, it loved money more. His family ransomed him for 6 million dinars, around 40,000 dollars at the time. The family fled to the Kurdish autonomous region. For a more sensible man that should have been the end of the story, but Ahmad continued to write, and last year decided to try and get to the West. A cousin was driving to Jordan from Mosul and despite the danger Ahmad hitched a lift with him. At a checkpoint four kilometers from the Jordanian border and safety, the truck was stopped. Ahmad searched, and a little essay of his calling for Saddam to step down and save the Iraqi people was found in his pocket. That was that. He was taken to Baghdad by the police who detained him.

That arrest should have been his death sentence. But as the international pressure built on Saddam last autumn, the dictator gave a general amnesty to all political prisoners. Ahmad was incredulous. "I found myself in the street thinking, 'What's going on?' I didn't believe it. Believe me, I don't expect to see the sun again," he laughs at the memory. Then he grew quiet. "Sometimes I think maybe there ... maybe there is a God."

A few days later, Baghdad fell. That night we drove out to the Khazer Bridge again to see if the Iraqi army had fallen back further. But in fact, they were still defending their side. In a village on the way back, we stopped in a sweet shop where about 60 Peshmerga were watching the news. Every time Saddam's statue fell they cheered.

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