The Lid is Lifted

By Paul D Kennedy

When Iraq invaded Kuwait on the 2nd of August 1990 I was living in the tallest apartment block in the downtown area. I had a grandstand view of the tanks and troops as they came swarming in. It was all kinda exciting. But, six hours later, after the city had fallen, I found I was caught in a trap.
The Lid is Lifted is my story of what happened in Kuwait when the country was invaded by Iraq on the 2nd August 1990. Written in a terse narrative non-fiction style, every word is true.
The invasion lifted the lid on all that is vile in human nature and the many civilians trapped in Kuwait became the prey of armed predators. I too was one of those victims.
Fear became the pervading emotion for most of us. My mind was almost destroyed when I was held at gunpoint while two girls were raped in my home. But I managed, somehow, to convert my fear into the righteous anger that enabled me to survive. My anger gave me the courage to face the facts, to plan, to act and to survive, and to carry a few others with me.
However The Lid is Lifted is much more than a litany of horrors. The story describes events which do not accord with the official accounts of the invasion. For example, there were Jordanian troops among the invading forces ... we found several empty wooden ammo boxes with marked ‘Royal Jordanian Army’ on the side lying on the streets in the area where I lived.
At the time of the invasion I was a consultant for one of the premier banks in the region and had a network of well-informed contacts at senior level on whom I could draw for information.
Did you know that a week before the invasion scores of Iraqi secret police had checked-in to the main hotels in the city and the Kuwaiti authorities did nothing? Or that Iraq had its own dock in the port area, guarded by its own soldiers, and it was these troops who guided the invading army into the city.
The invasion brought out the worst in human nature.
Because they know they would have to rely on America for their liberation, the Kuwaitis instructed their supermarkets to give food to Westerners but to refuse it to third-country nationals. After Saddam ordered ‘Westerners of aggressor nations’ to report to the hotels, some Arabs denounced their European and American neighbours to the Iraqi secret police. An American hotel manager refused shelter to two Thai girls who had been raped in order ‘to safeguard his hotel’. A British family stole a four-wheel drive vehicle belonging to an American family and deprived the Americans of their chance to escape across the desert to Saudi. And an idiotic junior official at the British embassy refused to replace a lost passport on the spot because it was ‘outside consular hours’, even when I pointed out that travelling around the city was becoming critically dangerous.
The looting was mind-boggling.

There was the ‘official’ or politically controlled looting that was overseen by the honchos of the Iraqi Ba’ath party, using the Iraqi army for muscle. There was also the dangerous free-for-all that developed as law-and-order collapsed.
Fear was probably the dominant emotion felt by everyone who was trapped in Kuwait, especially in the early days. I’ll never forget the chill I felt when, on the evening of the first day, Saddam threatened to turn Kuwait into a graveyard, or the shock when he announced that we would be used as human shields in key military and civil installations. Or the fear I felt as an angry Iraqi soldier slashed the air in front of my nose with a bowie knife, working himself up to kill me, after I had witnessed a double rape.
The Iraqi invasion was a time of learning ... on how to survive in conditions of urban strife. We discovered the necessity of binding ourselves into groups, rationing our food, controlling discord, and creating 'safe' rooms in case of gas attacks.

All of which makes The Lid is Lifted an exciting story you'll find hard to put down.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul D Kennedy
• Release date: Dec 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465765154

Paul D Kennedy

Paul D Kennedy was born in Ireland and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. As a business consultant and writer he has enjoyed a varied career in the UK and the Far East, and especially in the Arabian Peninsula where he was based in Kuwait for nearly 20 years. Indeed he was the liaison officer for the Irish community in that country during the Iraqi invasion and occupation in 1990. After the war he established a career in Kuwait as a radio presenter, business consultant, writer of books and articles, and a publisher of guide books and consumer magazines. He is currently living in County Dublin, Ireland, where he runs an international management consulting and editorial business.

Book preview

The Lid is Lifted

A true story of capture and evasion

Paul D Kennedy

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 & 2014 Paul D Kennedy

Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please go to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Read the author’s profile at Smashwords

You can contact the author through:

www.kuwait1990.com

Email: [e-mail]

Foreword

The efforts made by Paul D Kennedy, the writer of The Lid is Lifted, to alleviate the fears and tribulations of those trapped in Kuwait by the Iraqi occupation was recognised at a brief ceremony at the Embassy of the United States of America in London in May 1991.

The text of the plaque reads as follows:

In recognition of your courageous and fervent commitment from August 2, 1990 to December 20, 1990 to helping others survive and endure the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait despite the immediate and potential dangers this posed to yourself. These actions were vital to the safety and well-being of the American community, and of significant assistance to the besieged American Embassy. Your selflessness and compassion reflect the best of the human spirit and the historic bonds of friendship between the American and Irish peoples.

Signed

James Baker III

Secretary of State

May 1991

Back to Table of Contents

Preface

The way in which Iraq conquered and treated Kuwait was very bloody and ruthless. It was not designed to win the hearts and minds of the people. If the Iraqis had really wanted the people in Kuwait to support them, if they’d really wanted to integrate Kuwait into Iraq, then raping and stealing was not the way to go about it.

Yet I believe that the raping and looting were not really the soldiers’ fault. These people had been in a war with Iran for 10 years, away from their wives, away from their families, in the desert all the time. They were affected by this and so they were lower than animals. They were conditioned to do these dreadful things.

But still I cannot understand why they did these things. Their religion, Islam, prevents them, their human character prevents them. Everything precious to human beings, all their ideals, should prevent them from doing this. So why were they doing this? There are no answers. All I can say is that it seems that these were animals let loose in Kuwait and told that they were free to do whatever they wanted to do.

Was it a relief they were seeking for all the years of war that they had been through? I don't know. There is no word in the dictionary to describe what they did. A lot of Arab people, a lot of Muslim people, asked them: ‘why are you doing this?’ They had no answer! It's a terrible contradiction.

But don’t be surprised. It is 10 years of war that does these things to people. A man loses his human personality. His future is ruined. If he was a student then after 10 years of war it is too late to be educated and he’s lost all his hopes and dreams; they have become impossible. If he was married and away at a war for 10 years he doesn’t know if his wife is still waiting for him, or if she is with somebody else. He doesn’t know what has happened to his family.

But at the same time there are no excuses whatsoever for the things they did.

... Ammar Hazem - 12th November, 1991

Back to Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Prologue

Wednesday, 1st August 1990, Night-time

Chapter 1

Thursday, 2nd August 1990, Morning

Chapter 2

Thursday, 2nd August 1990, Noontime

Chapter 3

Thursday, 2nd August 1990, Evening

Chapter 4

Friday, 3rd August 1990, Morning

Chapter 5

Friday, 3rd August 1990, Noontime

Chapter 6

Friday, 3rd August 1990, Evening

Chapter 7

Saturday, 4th August 1990, Morning

Chapter 8

Saturday, 4th August 1990, Noontime

Chapter 9

Saturday, 4th August 1990, Evening

Chapter 10

Sunday, 5th August 1990, Daytime

Chapter 11

Sunday, 5th August 1990, Evening

Chapter 12

Sunday, 5th August 1990, Night-Time

Chapter 13

Monday, 6th August 1990

Chapter 14

Tuesday, 7th August 1990

Wednesday, 8th August 1990

Chapter 15

Thursday, 9th August 1990

Chapter 16

Friday, 10th August 1990

Chapter 17

Saturday, 11th August 1990

Chapter 18

Sunday, 12th August 1990

Chapter 19

Monday, 13th August 1990

Chapter 20

Tuesday, 14th August 1990

Chapter 21

Wednesday, 15th August 1990

Chapter 22

Thursday, 16th August 1990, Daytime

Chapter 23

Thursday, 16th August 1990, Night-Time

Friday, 17th August 1990

Chapter 24

Prologue

Wednesday, 1st August 1990, Night-time

I smacked the pencil back down onto the yellow pad. The niggle that had been disturbing the back of my mind ever since I’d watched the 8pm news on TV had grown too intrusive for work.

I left my office and went into my bedroom. From the floor-to-ceiling window, eleven storeys up, there was a clear view across the flat suburbs to the flat south-eastern horizon. Everything looked normal. I lit a cigarette and looked down.

Far below, a red Porsche gunned its way up the six-lane thoroughfare that flanked our building. The sound of the stressed engine down in Hilali Street was muted by the height and double-glazing of the window and, as it faded along with a twinge of envy, my eyes wandered across the road to the disused graveyard on the other side. It was several hundred metres wide, a sombre jumble of dark-brown sand and the grey-black shadows of tumbled gravestones. Everything seemed utterly normal in the dark.

Then I noticed that there were much more lights than usual on in the Ministry of Information building, a tall square block etched starkly against the dark sky on the far-left edge of the old cemetery. It housed the TV and radio stations. Those extra lights suggested that something serious was up and that niggle, the non-news I hadn’t been able to interpret, grew even more persistent.

But the whole of the City – Soor Street on the other side of the graveyard, the First Ring Road, and the residential areas beyond – was bathed in the soft orange-tinged yellow glow of the street lighting. My eyes traced suburb after suburb over the flat desert into the far light-twinkled distance. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the clear night. I inhaled and exhaled my smoke slowly but that niggle wouldn’t quieten.

I stubbed the butt and went into the long L-shaped living room and said good-night to Tuk who was on her way to bed, and caught the tail-end of the 11pm late news on KTV2, the local English language channel.

It was no more informative than earlier, just footage of the Sheikh Sa’ad, the prime minister, on his way back from the conference in Jeddah, going down the line at Kuwait airport, pausing now and then to be shoulder-kissed in obeisance. There was no commentary, just syrupy classical music playing in the background.

There was no need for a voice-over. The big black fellow’s strained look and the glum faces on the tarmac said it all. That niggle was becoming a rumble. I flicked off the TV, went back to my office and called Adnan, a close Palestinian friend. I had no qualms about calling late at night as, like most Arabs, he took a siesta in the afternoon and never went to bed until late.

‘Did you see the news tonight?’ I asked him as soon as we had dispensed with the long drawn out Arab-style greetings. I told him what had been on KTV2. ‘At first I thought they had a problem with the sound.’

‘No. It was the same on Arabic TV, habibi,’ Adnan answered, using the colloquial Arabic for friend. ‘No voice-over. Nothing.’

‘Sounds ominous.’

‘Not really. It’s just the ministry,’ he said, meaning the Ministry of Information, ‘can’t decide what slant to put on the news.’

‘That means it was very bad. There must have been a major row at the conference with Iraq.’

‘I think so,’ he answered slowly. I waited. The conference had been called to sort out the quarrel over the money Iraq was demanding from Kuwait, which we all knew was just an old-fashioned shake-down. ‘Sheikh Sa’ad insulted the Iraqis, I’ve heard.’

How do you know? I almost said. Adnan had excellent connections but I knew better than to ask. ‘What did he say?’

‘He told them that if they needed money so badly they should put their wives and daughters on the streets.’

‘That’s absolutely insulting.’

‘It’s worse than insulting. That’s about the worst thing one Arab can say to another.’

‘It means war, then,’ I stated.

‘No, Paul, no Arab country will ever invade another,’ Adnan said firmly. ‘As I’ve said a thousand times before, it just won’t happen.’

Indeed we had been arguing the topic gently for weeks. I had been convinced for some time that Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, was going to invade Kuwait – for reasons I’ll tell you about shortly. However I had been pretty sure he would wait until the end of August, when the fighting would be easier as the desert cooled down and the Kuwaiti elite, who always escaped overseas during summer, would be back in town so he could neutralize them. Now I had doubts about my sense of timing.

‘It just makes Sheikh Sa’ad sound ultra-tough,’ Adnan continued. ‘In a few days he will apologize and give the Iraqis their money. It’s just a game. It gives Kuwait a way to pay without losing face.’

‘Are you sure?’ I asked.

‘Yes. I’m Arab. I know how we do things,’ Adnan said as he rang off. ‘Sleep easy.’

Adnan had to be right. He was one of the most politically astute persons I had ever met and he knew more about the ins-and-outs and subtle nuances of Arabic politics than I could ever hope to learn. I couldn’t even speak the language.

But I was still convinced that overall I had got it right. I had booked my annual leave for the 16th of August and would be out before Saddam made his move. After all, I was a smart consultant, working for the premier regional bank, and fancied myself as an adept analyst. And my reading of the situation was proved right by events.

The only thing I got wrong was the timing – a mistake that almost cost me my life several times over the following months.

===

I went into the kitchen, made my last coffee of the day and, mug in hand, wandered about the living room. The sala, as this room was called locally, had three windows in its long northeast-facing wall. Like my bedroom window, they ran from floor to ceiling, giving a panoramic view of the downtown business area. I sipped and smoked.

Though Adnan and my own reasoning had convinced me that the invasion was not imminent, I had been pretty sure for at least a month that it was inevitable – ever since Saddam had begun accusing Kuwait and the UAE of deliberately exceeding their OPEC production quotas to depress the price of oil in order to bankrupt Iraq. He had also accused Kuwait of stealing Iraqi oil by drilling horizontally under the Kuwait-Iraq border. This didn’t make a lot of sense as horizontal drilling was difficult and either country could take as much oil as they wished from the vast field under the frontier by drilling straight down in the normal way. It was obviously just a false claim invented for the sake of contention.

I had only been living in Kuwait for about eight months and, being a newcomer, my reasoning was not stifled by local preconceptions about ‘Arab Unity’. The rantings of Saddam during the months prior to the invasion suggested he was looking for an excuse to take Kuwait. Nobody believed me and Adnan was no exception. Yet, from the little I knew of Arab history, the mantra I was constantly hearing – ‘No Arab state would attack another Arab state’ – seemed nothing but a fond delusion.

The more I read the news in the local newspapers, the more I understood the back-ground, the more it seemed to me that Saddam had no choice but to invade Kuwait. After his war with Iran his economy was in tatters, his debts were overwhelming and he had no funds to rebuild Iraq, while his neighbours in the Arabian Gulf were refusing to help. But Kuwait was awash with oil money and it looked like an easy snatch. Grabbing it seemed the easiest solution to Saddam’s problems.

In addition, he had nearly a million men in uniform hanging around – unpaid – with nothing to do and he had to send those troops somewhere, just to keep them busy. Attacking Israel, as he was forever threatening, was never a serious option unless he wanted to commit suicide through nuclear retaliation. It had to be Kuwait.

As I sipped, smoked and pondered, staring out over the tops of the five-storey buildings on the other side of the side-street below, I could see Arabian Gulf Road on the waterfront and the Seif Palace. Centred in the distance were the thin vertical needles of Kuwait Towers.

It was a fine night. The air was crystal clear, no sand floating about, and the multi-coloured lights of the large blue balls that girdled the Towers about half-way up were sparkling through the quiet orangie-yellow gleaming of the street lights. In less than eight hours that well-known symbol of Kuwait would be clouded-out by the smoke of a burning city.

My apartment was in Al-Muthanna Complex, a massive urban block, in west Kuwait City. The complex was convenience living at its most bountiful, much to the delight of the looters during the frenzy of plundering that broke out within twenty-four hours of the invasion.

Al-Muthanna was shaped like an irregular horseshoe made up of seven sections conjoined by six lift shafts. It had eighteen storeys, three underground. Between the ends of the horseshoe was a separate twenty-one storey column, the four-star Plaza Hotel. Both buildings shared the same base at ground level and below the base there were three levels of parking with space for more than 750 cars. Above the car parks, there was a three-level shopping mall with more than four hundred shops selling shoes, clothing, toys, jewelry, spectacles, furniture, electronic goods, and kitchen equipment, virtually everything you could conceivably need. It took five days of strenuous looting to strip it bare while we watched from our apartments above.

Over the mall there were five hundred or so apartments in thirteen floors. Besides the six lift-shafts, the building had eight stairwells, one opposite each lift and one at each end of the horseshoe. You could walk the entire length of the huge edifice along the public corridors and also move easily from floor to floor by the stairwells. This honeycomb design was a gift. It allowed us to move about quickly within the building when the mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police, came looking for us after Saddam sent out his round-up-the-Westerners order in mid-August. Of the twelve of us who hid in Al-Muthanna for the best part of four months, only two of us were ever caught.

My flat was on an outside corner of the horseshoe, next to the lift-shaft known as block six, and as it was five or six floors higher than most of the surrounding buildings, it gave me uninterrupted views of the north, east and south of Kuwait City. As you will read about shortly, I had a seat in the grand-stand during the invasion.

But Al-Muthanna was, when things turned really nasty, a trap – a trap that held me for three months before I managed to sneak out.

===

I stubbed out my umpteenth cigarette of the evening and decided to go for a stroll. I liked to walk a bit everyday, my only exercise outside of the bed, but in the high heat of Kuwait’s summer, when it can hit 50 degrees centigrade before midday, ambling around outside was extremely uncomfortable until late at night. I took a lift down in block six, next to my apartment.

Out on the street, the air hit my skin, hot and fluffy, as if it had fallen out of an oven door. I turned right and walked along the side-street to the corner with Hilali Street, directly below my apartment.

Two dozy cops were sprawled in chairs outside the Saudi Travel Agency across the road. I smiled a greeting and they replied with Salaam, Ahkhooee, ‘Peace, brother’ in the Kuwaiti dialect. An ironic greeting, considering what was going to happen to them in a few hours time.

I turned right and trucked on down Hilali Street, passing the Meridien Hotel which bulked tall on the opposite side of the street. As I neared the traffic lights where Hilali crossed Fahd Al-Salem Street, I heard a car back-firing. It sounded far away. I thought nothing of it and, instead of walking around the front façade of Al-Muthanna which faced onto Fahd Al-Salem, I crossed over the six-lane dual carriageway to do some window shopping in Gharabally’s big old-fashioned shoe-shop.

While I was peering through the darkened window trying to decipher Arabic price tags, I heard the car back-firing again several times, down towards the Jahra Gate. I looked down the street but it was empty except for some of Kuwait’s finest and several civilians in front of the police-station two long blocks down on the left side. They seemed to be having an argument of sorts, but it was quickly resolved and the policemen went into the station followed closely by the civilians.

It never struck me at the time that this was strange – usually civilians precede cops into a police station. I found out the next day from one of Tuk’s friends that the civilians were Iraqi agents who were taking over the police stations along the route that the Iraqi army, which was just then crossing into northern Kuwait, was to take into the City.

If I’d checked it out, I could have driven south to the Saudi border in less than three hours, well ahead of the invading forces, though more likely, when I think about it, I would have ended up in a cell with the policemen.

I recrossed the street towards the citadel-like front of Al-Muthanna and went down the side street that branched off Fahd Al-Salem and ran around the complex to join the small street behind block six where I had started my walk. As I went by the Plaza Hotel the doorman, resplendent in a crumpled red, green, black and gold monkey-suit gave me soft ‘Salaam, Mr Paul’. Peace again.

I waved a reply and walked on past the parades of small shops that ran along the far sides of the streets behind Al-Muthanna: a barbershop, a few mataams or small restaurants, a cobbler’s den, an electrical repair shop and several bakalas, the combined newsagents, tobacconists and food-shops common in every area of Kuwait. Above these shops, all shuttered and quiet, were small business offices and the flats of service workers who toiled locally.

I knew almost no Westerners in Al-Muthanna and had never found this much of a loss as I was on smile-swopping and how-are-ye terms with expatriate Arabs, Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Thais, Filipinos and a host of others. Indeed more than seventy percent of the population of Kuwait in 1990 were non-Kuwaitis and about half of the expatriates were non-Arabs.

This ethnic mix was reflected in my local neighbourhood, where a fabulous melange of nationalities, languages and cultures created a great place to indulge a yen for the exotic and foreign without having to forego modern comforts. But the pleasantly vibrant multi-racial village through which I was walking, smack bang in the middle of a major city, was enjoying its last night of peace before its population would be abused, beaten and scattered.

My entire walk was about a kilometre long. By the time I reached the lift at block six again I was sweaty, relaxed and happy. That niggle was gone. Adnan and the exercise had seen to that.

Before going to bed I looked at myself in the mirror and flattered myself that I still looked under forty. In fact I was grossly overweight and had a large paunch, which I was destined to lose rapidly when food in the trap became extremely scarce. I fell asleep and had an angry dream.

Kuwait before the war was a very considerate society and late night noise pollution from the neighbours, the bane of city life in Europe, was unheard of. But I was dreaming I was back in southeast London. Deep thumping sounds from my neighbour’s hi-fi were percolating up through the floorboards. It was the first time my sleep had been disturbed in Kuwait by this sort of annoyance, one of the reasons why, along with a lengthy commuting run in an over-packed flu-laden train every day, I’d left London.

I felt a stir of righteous anger. But I soon drifted back into a deep dreamless sleep.

===

Sure I had predicted the invasion. But I had not been smart enough to foresee was what would happen afterwards – the breakdown of law and order, an army running amok, rapes and theft on a grand scale. The very bedroom in which I was sleeping peacefully was to be befouled.

At the time of the invasion my wife was on holidays in her native Thailand and I was living alone except for Tuk, her friend and compatriot, who was staying in our spare bedroom. Tuk was a small-time businesswoman who had several shops in a nearby mall.

My life was centred on my work and most of my colleagues lived in the suburbs. Indeed since I had arrived eight months before I had been totally immersed in building up our consultancy practice in NBK, the National Bank of Kuwait, and had hardly had time to get to know the country. However, thanks to Iraqi friends from my student days in Dublin, I knew a bit about their country, the Iraqi people and the violent regime that ruled them. Though I’d never been there, I had friends in Baghdad who would later turn out to be very loyal and helpful indeed.

The invasion introduced me to a motley group of expatriates who also lived in Al-Muthanna. The threats from rampaging soldiers and the attentions of the Iraqi mukhabarat forced us to bind together as closely as possible. But the formation of this tight-knit group, so necessary for our survival, released a host of personal fears and interpersonal problems. We survived by turning what was a trap into a fortress, both physical and psychological.

Here’s the story. The first part describes how Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait lifted the lid on all that is base in human nature. And I’m not talking about Iraqis only – half the population seemed to join in the depredations that followed once the forces of law and order had been removed.

But the story is really about fear, fear so intense as to be almost overwhelming, and what happens when that fear turns into anger.

I had always thought anger, to which I was personally prone, was a destructive emotion, and so it is in most circumstances. But it can turn natural cowardliness into bravery and give you the guts to do things you could not otherwise do.

First, however, you have to learn the knack of focusing your anger.

Back to Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Thursday, 2nd August 1990, Morning

I was fonged awake by a sudden massive thump. I lay flat-backed on the bed, groggy and irritated, as low floor-shaking thumps percolated up through the mattress. I turned over and squinted at the bedside clock. The digital read-out clicked – 5:04am exactly.

The thumping persisted. I clawed for my spectacles, strung them across my face and struggled out of bed to investigate. The noise stopped. I leaned drowsily against the edge of the window of my bedroom, peering down, trying to focus.

Hilali Street was deserted. The old graveyard across the street was just an expanse of bleached sand and small tumbled headstones that were throwing shortening shadows. The tall block of the Ministry of Information was back-lit by the rising sun. I scrutinized the whole area, all the way to the flat horizon. Everything looked normal.

I found my slippers, shuffled into my office, looked across downtown Kuwait City. Nothing seemed out of place, except for some balls of smoke, round black puffs, drifting high across the sky. As they dispersed I wondered what they were.

Back in my bedroom, I looked down again. The two policemen with whom I had exchanged a pleasantry the night before were lounging on their chairs, smoking. One had his feet up on a little square wooden table. I climbed wearily back into bed and tried to get back to sleep.

I had almost made it when the noise started again.

This time it was different. Sharp grating bursts of metallic sound came in harsh rasping waves. There were brief troughs of ringing emptiness between the hammering waves. The clock read 5:20am, and I cursed the gobber who had sent out a road crew to dig up the street at dawn. I scrambled back to the window, and looked down.

The cops were lying back in their chairs, puffing away, while the metallic jack-hammering continued. I swore out loud at the road crew around the corner. Their noise stopped. Then, somewhere in the background, the more distant heavy thumping began again.

===

Again I went into my office to find out what was going on. The large round black puffs of smoke had reappeared, drifting high above.

Some Arab labourers had been sleeping on the roof of the five-storey building opposite. They were standing on their mattresses, looking up at the sky, staring at the black balls that were expanding slowly as they drifted by. I opened the window and waved down at them. One of them saw me, put his hands up in the air and shrugged.

The black puffs drifted away, swelling and breaking up as they floated towards the sea. I went back into my bedroom and stood leaning against the window edge, staring across the suburbs, wondering what was going on. The noises died away again. The possibility that this was the invasion I had predicted never entered my early-morning mind at all.

Nothing happened.

After a few minutes I felt the usual morning call. While I was relieving myself in the ensuite bathroom, I felt the building shake gently once or twice but when I got back to the window I could see nothing. Kuwait’s finest were still seated down below, leisurely dragging away. The sight triggered the urge and I cracked the ash.

As I dragged deeply on my first cigarette of the day, a continuous heavy thumping, louder and closer than before, began. The whole building quivered in response. The sounds were coming from my right, from Shuwaikh, the port area, outside my line of vision. I looked at my watch, 5:45am.

Suddenly there was a gigantic flash from the top of the Ministry of Information. A flat sheet of flame spread out horizontally in all directions, hung in the air for several seconds, and then retreated slowly back into the top of the building. The wide flame was followed by spurting clouds of dust that arched out from the top of the building and then floated down. A massive industrial accident, I thought.

As the dust drifted away, big black puffs of smoke again came streaming across the graveyard from the west. I stood watching and wondering, while down on the corner the two cops still sat, unfazed, hanging loose in their chairs. The sounds ceased once again and the big black puffs of smoke drifted away. I looked around for an ashtray.

When I turned back to the window the Ministry of Information was being buffeted badly. Puffs of dust were spurting out from about two-thirds of the way up. I thought I could see army tanks in Soor Street but I was not sure. Then the sandy earth of the graveyard began to explode into bursts of dirt that flew upwards, curved over and fell back. Small semi-spherical depressions were appearing on the surface.

I realized that the TV and radio stations were being shelled from the far side, from Sour Street or the First Ring Road, and that some of the shells were missing their target and coming towards Al-Muthanna.

One shell landed in a clump of bushes close to the wall dividing the graveyard from Hilali Street. I didn’t see it coming. I just saw the sand and dirt spewing up into the air in a sudden burst. Some of the debris flew over the wall, landed on the footpath and trickled onto the roadway. Another few metres and the shell would have bounced off the road in front of the cops.

Still they didn’t budge. One of them had a hand-held radio lying on the little table in front of him but he did not use it. Their relaxed attitude had me totally flummoxed. I guessed it must be a coup, something they were expecting, otherwise they would have been on their feet and running.

The shelling ceased.

===

Shortly after 6:00am a few cars, forerunners of the morning rush hour, began trickling down Hilali Street. The drivers seemed as unconcerned as the seated policemen.

Two soldiers in camouflage uniforms, assault rifles cradled loosely in their arms, came strolling up the street. They sauntered over to the two cops and greeted them in a friendly manner. I watched as the four of them chatted amiably for a minute or so.

Suddenly the two soldiers stepped back and pointed their rifles straight at the two policemen. Shocked, the two cops scrambled to their feet, their arms up in the air, pleading looks on their faces. They struggled to untie their gun-belts with one hand, while keeping their other hands high in the air. When the belts fell to the ground the soldiers gestured the cops back. They moved frantically. One of them almost tripped over the chair behind him.

The smaller of the two soldiers moved forward and kicked the gun belts out of the way, while the other picked up the radio, looked at it briefly, and stuffed it into a back pocket in his pants.

The two soldiers moved apart and gestured the two cops forward and got behind them and shoved them across the street to the wide pavement area beneath my window, jabbing them from behind with their assault rifles, and made them lie face down on the ground.

The smaller soldier stood covering the two cops on the ground while the other soldier went back and picked up the discarded gun-belts. He took the gun from one holster, stuffed it into a side-pocket and threw the belt across to where the cops were lying on the ground. Then he came back across the road and, holding the holster and gun of the other belt like a strap handle, began beating the cops on their backs.

The two policemen lay face down, cringing, on the ground. The big soldier became very worked up, mouthing off, as he bounced the buckle hard off their backs.

When the soldier stopped beating the cops I went quickly to Tuk’s room, which was opposite my office, and banged on her door. Though Thais have an amazing tolerance for noise, I was surprised that she had not yet appeared. I banged insistently but got no reaction. I opened the door and stuck my head around the jamb.

Tuk looked up from her mattress on the floor, a quizzical look on her round face. When I asked if she had heard the noise she said she thought it was road works.

Mai chai, I yelled, ‘not so.’ Thai was the language of my household. Ma doosee, ‘come and see.’

I went back to my bedroom window and looked down. The small soldier was now covering the two cops spread-eagled on the pavement, while the big soldier was out in the main road pointing his assault rifle at the cars coming down the street. Most stopped, the drivers stunned-looking. A few managed to keep going in the outer lane.

As each car halted the soldier made abrupt motions with his gun. He yelled. Though his words were not audible up on the eleventh floor, I could see he was shouting his head off.

The drivers scurried out of their cars to the footpath and lay face down on the ground beside the two policemen. The cars, door open, engines still running, were left blocking the road. Anyone on the ground who moved was beaten by the second soldier who had retrieved the other discarded gun belt.

Tuk joined me by the window, her lithe four-foot-nothing swathed in a silk gown. She stood motionless, staring, her round face rigidly masked like any true Thai confronted with a novelty.

Padiwat, she said after a moment, ‘a coup.’

‘Maybe,’ I replied.

The two soldiers were wearing the bog-standard camouflage uniform of armies the world over and looked no different than the few soldiers I had seen very occasionally during my short time in Kuwait. There was nothing to suggest they were from another country. Also, the two cops had been calm and relaxed, despite the noise and the shelling, until the two soldiers got the drop on them. In addition, the TV and radio stations had taken the first hits, and I knew that gaining control over the flow of information was always a priority for coup-makers. There had been a few, rather tame, demonstrations in the cause of parliamentary democracy earlier in the year. So it looked like it was a coup.

But if it’s a coup, I was thinking, why arrest civilians? On the other hand I was sure that the invasion wasn’t due for another four weeks.

As we stood watching the big soldier stopping the cars and forcing the occupants out onto the pavement, I became conscious of a continuous background noise. It was different than the individual booms and bangs of earlier on. At first it reminded me of the hiss from a powerful stereo with the ‘surround sound’ mode turned on without any music being played. As the volume gradually increased, the hiss developed into a sort of arrhythmic jumble of high-pitched metallic popping sounds. As my ears adjusted, I realized that these were the noises of assault rifles being fired continuously.

The incessant dissonant snappings echoed through the surrounding streets and laneways and I could not figure out where this shooting was coming from. But further away I could hear the heavy rattle of large machine guns. The low crump of more distant shelling made our building quiver every few minutes.

The harsh surround-sound was nearing, gradually getting louder and louder.

===

About 30 men were lying on the ground directly below us when four unarmed guardsmen came running down Hilali Street, waving their hands high over their heads in gestures of surrender. I recognized their dark uniforms and the yellow piping running down the outside seams of their trousers and guessed they were from the guard post in front of the municipality building a bit further up the street.

They skidded to a halt in front of the men on the ground, almost toppling over as they tried to keep their balance with their arms up in the air. The big soldier in the main road immediately came back and, thumping them roughly from behind, made them lie face down with the others, arms behind their necks, legs spread.

One of the guardsmen turned his head and said something. The big soldier picked up the gun-belt he had dropped earlier and began to beat him, hard. The guardsman lifted his head and said something again. I saw the soldier take out his revolver and, screaming and mouthing, he pointed it into the back of the Kuwaiti’s head.

Tuk stiffened beside me. I almost stopped breathing.

The guardsman froze, dropped his face back to the ground and said nothing more. The big soldier hit him hard several times. The guardsman said nothing. He just lay on the ground taking the blows. The big soldier suddenly calmed down.

Tuk and I let our breaths out in one swoosh.

Leaving the other soldier to guard the prisoners on the ground, the big soldier went back to stopping the cars coming down Hilali Street.

Two of the drivers were women. Unlike the men, the soldier shooed them away. He seemed to be telling them to go home. I almost smiled at his chivalry. In the Arabic mind-set it would have been wholly improper for a woman to have been put among a group of men to whom she was not related.

One of the women wandered uncertainly back up the road while the other, a well dressed Arab lady, sat defiantly in her car, staring out the window. The soldier ignored her.

Soon the street was completely blocked with cars and there were about 60 men lying face down on the footpath, covered by the guns of the two soldiers. Except for the two cops and the four guardsmen, all of them were expatriate Arabs or Indians.

The two soldiers made the expatriates sit in the lotus position, with their legs crossed underneath and their hands clasped behind their heads, while the Kuwaiti policemen and guardsmen remained spread-eagled on the ground at the feet of the expatriates.

The tension in my bedroom evaporated as both Tuk and I giggled out loud. Wittingly or not, the soldiers had reversed the usual pecking order in Kuwait.

A short time later another half a dozen soldiers came up Hilali Street. They stopped and