Read Escape from Saddam for Free Online

slowly. “And is he there thanks to the government?”
    “Yes,” I nodded.
    “Good.” Suddenly Uday looked over my shoulder. I turned and saw that he was staring at a passerby who had dared to take an interest in our conversation. Knowing what was good for him, the passerby hurried on under the threatening heat of Uday’s glare. Then he turned his attention back to me. “How old are you?” he asked.
    “Nearly thirteen.”
    “Right.” For the first time he smiled, but there was no warmth in that smile. He exuded the confidence of a cat playing with a mouse. Leaving his cigar in his mouth, he leaned forward, took my chin between his thumb and forefinger, and lifted my head. “So we can have you married soon.”
    I didn’t know what he meant, but as Uday surveyed my face through a cloud of smoke, he must have seen the fear in my eyes and it amused him. He chuckled to himself, and as he did so he resembled his father so closely that I was momentarily taken aback. I stood there awkwardly, not knowing what to say. Uday turned his attention to Hakim. “What about you? What is your name?”
    Hakim opened his mouth to speak, but the tenseness of the situation accentuated his stutter. He attempted to say his name but found himself unable to spit it out. Uday had no time for this. “Shut up,” he spat waspishly. “Go away.” Hakim looked nervously to me, unsure what to do. Uday raised his voice and touched his Colt with his cigar hand. “I said go away!”
    Hakim scurried away, leaving me there. Uday said nothing; he just sat looking at me with his dead eyes, taking deep drags on his cigar. I shifted my weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other. Finally he spoke. “You may go,” he told me. For a few brief moments I stood there, somehow not comprehending that I had been dismissed. Then I became aware of two of the guards moving toward me, their hands firmly gripping their weapons. I turned and hurried away.
    As the cars drove away—all other vehicles in the street having been diverted to allow their passage—Hakim and I were left with our sense of fear. As that fear subsided, our encounter with Uday turned into a great adventure, and our exploits were recounted to our contemporaries with increasing elaboration. But as I grew older and became more aware of the reality of life around me, such events took on a more sinister meaning—less a cause for bravado, more a cause for despair. Many Iraqis were unwilling to go into detail about the horrors they experienced, but plenty of rumors reached my ears. That was how the regime worked. There would have been no point to the continuing brutality if ordinary Iraqis did not get to hear of it: how else would Saddam maintain his grip of fear?
    Rumors were spread by word of mouth. Some of them were exaggerated in the telling, no doubt, but even the most grisly were not, I am sure, so very far from the truth. AIDS, we were told, was a Western disease, an epidemic confined to the relative promiscuity of the non-Arab world. I was walking down 14th Ramadan Street with Hakim one day, however, when we noticed a poster in a shop window. The names of four women were printed in large letters, and text below the names urged anyone who knew these women to report them to the authorities. They were HIV-positive, the poster informed us, and were part of a wicked Zionist plot to deliberately spread AIDS around our great nation.
    Hakim and I did not know the women, of course, so we thought little more about them, although the posters continued to appear in shop windows across Baghdad. A few weeks later, however, word spread that the women had been apprehended. The authorities had made no effort to arrest them formally, and they certainly had not been given any opportunity to defend themselves through any legal process. Instead, they had been taken to Abu Ghraib prison, twenty miles west of Baghdad.
    The notoriety of Abu Ghraib was enough to chill the fervor of even the most revolutionary