Flight from Saddam

By Qasim Albrisem

If there was to be one word in Arabic to describe Hell on earth, perhaps it would be Alradwania. For at the prison there, men turned into monsters. They unleashed terror and suffering on an unimaginable scale. Hell is a mythical concept in religion, but the pain and death endured by the captives at this Baghdad prison was very much of this earth.
Countless thousands of ordinary Iraqis were taken from their homes or picked up off the streets and thrown into Alradwania Prison in 1991. Most met a hideous death, the lucky ones were executed. A few survived, seemingly against all odds, but of the survivors only one was a university professor and writer. That man was Dr Qasim Albrisem.
He recorded the actual events that took place there by etching every incident, every detail into his memory. No pen or paper existed for the prisoners. There was only the concrete wall of the cell where detainees could engrave their memories, sufferings and dates by their fingernails.
Qasim Albrisem was for some time too terrified to write even a single line about his ordeal in prison because of the ‘Execution Declarations’ that he had signed in Iraq immediately after his release. These declarations were gagging orders enforced by threat of summary execution.
In Alradwania, he survived extreme physical and psychological punishment; hunger, isolation and profound despair. He suffered alongside hundreds of his comrades under torture and cried with them as their lives ebbed away. He recovered from numerous beatings, electric shock treatment, from being shackled in a basement cell with only a poisonous snake for company, and numerous privations that turned him into little more than a living skeleton. Then, he made a daring escape across the desert and ultimately to freedom in England where he was able to tell this gripping true story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Hetherington
• Release date: Mar 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301659401

Book preview

Flight from Saddam

By Qasim Albrisem

Co-writer David Hetherington

Published by Sketchnews at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Qasim Albrisem & David Hetherington

To

Helen Daly

Without her endless encouragement and support,

this book would never have been written.

Table of Contents

Prelude - The Skeletons

Chapter 1 - Saddam: A Brief History

Chapter 2 - Melting Point

Chapter 3 - The Dead-Alive Man

Chapter 4 - Zaynab

Chapter 5 - Mass Executions

Chapter 6 - Electricity, Petrol, Injections

Chapter 7 - Death Coach

Chapter 8 - Cutting Ears Day

Chapter 9 – Cutting Out Tongues

Chapter 10 - Alien World

Chapter 11 - 1, 2, 3 – Dead!

Chapter 12 - Living Dead

Chapter 13 - Cement Shoes

Chapter 14 - Cobra cellmate

Chapter 15 - Solitary Confinement

Chapter 16 – Mice, Lice and Cockroaches

Chapter 17 - One Thousand Nights and One

Chapter 18 - Chasm of Darkness

Chapter 19 - Crazy in Alradwania

Chapter 20 – Free!

Chapter 21 - Home in Basra

Chapter 22 - Across the Desert

Author’s message

Introduction

If there was to be one word in Arabic to describe Hell on earth, perhaps it would be Alradwania. For at the prison there, men turned into monsters. They unleashed terror and suffering on an unimaginable scale. Hell is a mythical concept in religion, but the pain and death endured by the captives at this Baghdad prison was very much of this earth.

Countless thousands of ordinary Iraqis were taken from their homes or picked up off the streets and thrown into Alradwania Prison in 1991. Most met a hideous death, the lucky ones were executed. A few survived, seemingly against all odds, but of the survivors only one was a university professor and writer. That man was Dr Qasim Albrisem.

He recorded the actual events that took place there by etching every incident, every detail into his memory. No pen or paper existed for the prisoners. There was only the concrete wall of the cell where detainees could engrave their memories, sufferings and dates by their fingernails.

Qasim Albrisem was for some time too terrified to write even a single line about his ordeal in prison because of the ‘Execution Declarations’ that he had signed in Iraq immediately after his release. These declarations were gagging orders enforced by threat of summary execution.

In Alradwania, he survived extreme physical and psychological punishment; hunger, isolation and profound despair. He suffered alongside hundreds of his comrades under torture and cried with them as their lives ebbed away. He recovered from numerous beatings, electric shock treatment, from being shackled in a basement cell with only a poisonous snake for company, and numerous privations that turned him into little more than a living skeleton. Then, he made a daring escape across the desert and ultimately to freedom in England where he was able to tell this gripping true story.

Prelude

The Skeletons

It was March l99l and the Iraqi people had risen up against Saddam Hussein immediately after the ‘Desert Storm’ war. The residents of Basra, Iraq’s second largest city had rushed to government offices and security installations. There was urgency, an instinctive direction to the movement of the crowd as they destroyed one building after another belonging to the defeated government and the Baath Party. Hundreds of people held prisoner inside these buildings were liberated and the crowd grew bigger and more animated. Summary justice was meted out to any of the old guard forces caught up in the revolt.

The crowd I was part of had surged towards a huge five-storey building, still only half-built. It had been in that state for the past twenty years and I had walked past it regularly without noticing anything except the single fire engine and one or two nondescript-looking fire officers. Shouts went up about sinister goings-on in the basement and a handful of people stormed the building. Only then had the people of Basra realized that beneath it was lying hidden a massive underground prison. Five minutes later, a long line of skeletons emerged into the daylight.

Like ghosts dragging themselves weakly, hundreds of them rose as if from underground caskets, faces pale, their beards long, hair filthy and matted. Some of them, dazed at the sight of the excited crowd raised their arms weakly into the air and called out political slogans - ‘Long live Ahmad Hassan Al Bakir!’. A cold shudder of incomprehension passed through me as I watched that sad scene. I rushed up to one of them who was barely alive, and with tears streaming down my face.

How long have you been in that building? Ahmad Hassan Al Bakir is long gone. Saddam Hussein is the president now, I informed him.

He sighed tearfully, I’ve been in that dark cell for twenty years. I don’t know what’s going on in Iraq now.

The crowd hesitated here, filled with bitterness and awe at the sight of these desperate creatures. Some people burst into tears, others threw themselves at the skeletons, kissing and hugging them and hoisting them onto their shoulders. The skeletons made their way through the astonished spectators, eventually melting into the crowd shouting slogans against a long-dead president. As we called for our freedom in the dawn of that day, we could not know that our new found liberation would be short-lived. Little did I know that I was destined to meet these skeletal figures again and to share their fate in another underground cell where I too would become a skeleton.

For within days government forces had recaptured the city and we were all arrested, including those miserable wretches who had just been freed from decades of incarceration. Saddam was the monster who would not die!

Chapter 1

Saddam: A Brief History

Saddam Hussein came to power in 1979. In l980, counting on the weakness of the new Islamic revolution, he breached the agreement on the Shatt-al-Arab waterway, which he had signed with the Shah of Iran in l975.

On September 22 he ordered the invasion of Iran. Hussein had expected that he would achieve total victory within days and overthrow the Islamic revolution. But his expectations were not realised; the Iranian forces had reorganized and began to counterattack.

In eight years of fighting Iraq lost over a million dead. Ignominiously Saddam returned to the same treaty. Iraq had gained nothing.

The invasion of Kuwait was his second massive miscalculation. While Iraqi soldiers were being massacred on the main road (Basrah – Kuwait) Saddam declared his surrender to the Americans. Tens of thousands of soldiers had headed up the road to Basrah under Apache helicopter fire. It was mass slaughter and John Simpson described the debacle as a ‘turkey shoot’.

Soldiers retreating from the hell of ‘Desert Storm’ had contributed indirectly to the uprising through the chaos they infused into Basrah, jamming the streets with their vehicles, faces etched grim with defeat and catastrophe.

Chapter 2

Melting Point

The aura of bitterness the thousands of returning army personnel brought with them into the confusion of Basra was mirrored in the deep despair of the people living there. Like chemicals poured into a school laboratory test tube; the two streams of people swirled in and around and through each other as they exchanged glances, grimaces and words of defiance. There was a discordant feeling of sedition in the air and it was looking for a catalyst.

Decades of violent, grinding repression was pent up inside the hardened steel volumes of recent Iraqi history. Now the molecules of the fissile material inside were hot and ready for combustion. The Basra locals joined the chorus, cursing and denouncing Saddam and his regime for what had befallen them. Cynical jokes about Saddam’s military ‘genius’ reverberated around the coffee bars, restaurants and homes of Basrah. There was an almost tangible feeling of expectation in the air.

Before that day, talk of any sort against Saddam’s regime had been self-proscribed even with wives and one’s own children, so complete was the terror. The determination and solid will that the Iraqi people were well known to possess had been tamed by a multitude of methods; on the one hand through killing and execution, and on the other hand through temptation and seduction. All the easier to just surrender to the ‘concrete regime’ as Saddam himself used to boastfully describe his government to the Iraqi people and the world at large. Iraqis were in dire need of revolt against their own sick minds and souls embedded with myriad alien swords of fear.

Now, with an Excalibur flourish, they reached for their own swords and drew them joyously out of Saddam’s crumbling concrete regime. The legendary Sinbad the Sailor's adventures were launched from the shores of Basra and now the locals were on a new campaign that could make them all famous too. This feeling of sudden release moved the Iraqis like fire in desert tinder and girded up even the hesitant and frightened. It really was an instant, a new sensation, the unmistakable whiff of cordite was in the spring air. So, the uprising that had started with words as the Iraqis moved from covert opposition to an openly declared one, now moved to action. Ordinary people felt they were back in control of their own destiny, could hold the rifle firmly without hesitation and fear, and took to the streets, destroying Saddam’s portraits and statues.

Come a fight, the people had the means, for each Iraqi had at least one weapon in his house. Hundreds of thousands of rifles had been sold by the soldiers to the civilians in Basrah, many for as little as 50p. Added to that, all soldiers brought their weapons with them during the withdrawal from the theatre of war. They handed over their weapons to the people as revenge against the egregious Saddam leadership.

In addition, the Baath Party distributed millions of rifles to their supporters either to those who had a strong allegiance, or to those that had no loyalty except by name to the Baath Party. Even students down to secondary level and intermediate were given weapons. The intended purpose of that was to enable a civilian militia in case of an airdrop by American forces. Was this another fatal error by the great leader?

The twilight of Basrah on March 1 was poisoned by smoke from burning oilfields rendering a surreal gloom to everything. A single rifle shot punctured the acrid atmosphere of the Basrah Street. Then within seconds, another rang out and soon it was a cacophony of angry explosions.

Into this atmosphere I carried my grief and pain and waited like thousands of others in Basra for that moment of liberation. I drove my car around to gauge the situation, talking to some people and encouraging them to revolt. It was 10 in the evening when I heard continuous shooting in Aljamhuria district, not far away. Accidentally I encountered a friend, who was a Baathist and had worked with me at the university and asked him about the shooting. There was some sort of revolt by many people, he informed.

On arrival there I found the situation to be agitated. Hundreds of Baathists and security forces were surrounding the area. There were intermittent gunfights between the people of Aljamhuria and government forces. After midnight the pressure of armed people increased. The streets and alleyways had become shooting ranges and many residents were firing from the roofs of their houses. As the shooting intensified against Saddam’s forces, the officials began to retreat gradually.

I returned home late knowing that I had witnessed the beginning of a revolt. Something would happen, but what? Everything was a dark cloud of uncertainty. I slept fitfully as nightmares brushed past each other in the nether world of my sub-conscious. I snapped completely awake at 4 am as the silks of dawn appeared on the horizon. The news was that the Alhayania area had also erupted, declaring the first day of liberation from Saddam’s regime.

It was the time to take action. I grabbed my rifle and joined the liberators. By 10 am the whole of Basrah had fallen to the revolutionaries. Many government offices had been completely destroyed as the revolt spread quickly from Basrah to other provinces - Nasiriya, Amara, Diwaniya, Samarra, Najaf, Karbala and Hilla.

The liberators held sway in Basrah for more than ten exultant days. There was insecurity, but a sense of hope had pervaded the desolation. Then the Republican Guard and Regular Army turned up out of the desert with tanks and helicopter gunships. The force resembled a looming black cloud of storm and rage. This force had been ignominiously routed by superior American weaponry. Now like an injured and blood-crazed bull, it was going to expiate its anger on its own citizenry. Under the perverse agreement with the invaders, the defeated country was allowed the use of some of its equipment such as helicopters and tanks, and these were soon pressed into service -

Hundreds of revolutionaries and civilians died as they fought to defend their homes and neighbourhoods. The bodies of the unlucky mutineers, those who had lost the lottery of the shootout with government forces, littered the streets for days. Ali Hassan Al Majid (nickname ‘Chemical Ali’) was in town and had given orders not to move the dead. The display would frighten the fighters, destroy their morale, and punish the people of Basrah for the impertinence of what they had attempted against the concrete regime.

Chapter 3

The Dead-Alive Man

At first government forces had retreated into hiding, frightened by the insurrection. A good many had suffered violent death at the hands of the townspeople. But they regrouped and went looking for the rebels. The Baathists who had escaped from their centres, returned and most of the deserted military officers and soldiers re-joined their units. The strength of Saddam’s Regime was gradually recovering.

‘Chemical Ali’ was in charge of purging the uprising in Basrah. He could fairly be described as a killing machine, a man who relished his work. The nick-name was acquired by his use of poisonous gas on at least 5,000 children, women and elderly people in Northern Iraq.

He set up military bases and centres in the areas that were out of the control of the revolutionaries. He sought to control Saad Square and external motorways that led to the centre of Basrah. Almajid used Basrah University, and humanitarian colleges as main military centres for his leadership and for his military and Baath party leaders. These bases were out of the control of the revolutionaries and were protected by massive military force. Three Republican Guards divisions were allowed to pass through American checkpoints without being harmed.

Almajid strutted into the Alhayania district of Basrah on March 10, l99l. The uprising had been sparked here and Chemical Ali wanted to send his own particular message to the people of that area. The government’s men were instructed to kill anybody who moved in the streets. The troops advanced under heavy artillery and tank fire. The offensive opened rivers of blood in the area. Soldiers were given a simple enough mission - kill anyone who moved.

Countless women and children were shot as punishment for supporting the uprising. He executed hundreds of young people as an act of random publicity. Their corpses were scattered for wild dogs to maul and he ordered his forces to prevent bodies being collected by their families. In addition, hundreds of young revolutionaries were captured, and secured into Basrah prison to face execution later.

Before Ali Hassan Almajid embarked on his big push into Basrah, he would test resistance forces through the executions of revolutionaries near their checkpoints. On March 7 two tanks, an armoured truck and a land cruiser, were advancing along the main street that connects Saad Square with Basrah centre. We had a checkpoint on this street, one mile from Saad Square where Ali Hassan Almajid’s headquarters were situated. When we saw the tanks advancing towards us we were alerted. Half way down the street the tanks stopped opposite a building.

Six of us ran through alleyways and concealed ourselves close-by to observe the arrival of tanks and a land cruiser. Soldiers then began pushing blindfolded people out of the troop carrier. We counted eleven men. They were shouting, ‘We are innocent!’ and begging not to be shot. A minute later, Ali Hassan Almajid got out of his land cruiser, we recognized him immediately. The guards lined the blindfolded men up against the wall of the building. Ali Hassan Almajid gave orders to the three soldiers to shoot them. They crumpled and fell against each other as they collapsed into a bloody pile. Not one from our group had fired against Almajid because we were afraid that the tanks would shoot against us randomly and kill women and children.

A few minutes later, Almajid left the scene with his two tanks towards Saad Square, his headquarters. The two tanks were stationed half a mile from this scene in a safe place away from the revolutionaries. Their purpose was to prevent people from approaching the bodies of the executed men in order to bury them.

One of the men stood up covered in blood, and then he collapsed. Another one started creeping around calling for help.

He is alive, who is going to carry him? somebody in the crowd nearby shouted.

It was a grave task. I was distraught, so I decided to approach him. Zigzagging my way forward in order to avoid the tank fire, one bullet hissed past my ear. I was very lucky to escape from death in that moment. My heart pounding,