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leading tribesmen arranged for Saddam’s car to be marked with henna. Secretly, the tribesmen arranged for militia armed with RPG-launchers to be stationed on rooftops on the street where Saddam’s fleet would pass; their instructions were to destroy the henna-marked car on sight.
    As arranged, the militia destroyed the marked car, along with nineteen other cars. They then came down to street level and destroyed all except three of the remaining vehicles, which retreated with great haste. A checkpoint guard who was collaborating with the tribe reported that Saddam was in one of those three cars. His head of security had been suspicious and arranged for him to be moved to an unmarked vehicle.
    The entire town immediately fled to Mosul or Samarra: everyone knew retribution would be swift and uncompromising. Within hours, armed helicopters arrived and laid waste to Balad. Then bulldozers arrived to destroy whatever was left of the place. In twenty-four hours, a whole town was turned to rubble; any civilians unlucky enough to have remained in what was left of their homes were bulldozed or burned to death.
    During my teenage years, I made no secret to my family of the fact that I wanted to leave all this. As I grew up, I witnessed more and more of my friends in Baghdad—many of whom were older than I—somehow managing to make it across the border. Some made the dangerous trip into Iran, others made it to Kurdistan. I even heard that some claimed asylum in Israel. I longed to do the same. “At least finish your schooling,” my mother would beg me. “Then at least you will have some sort of grounding.” So I persevered at school, but with a certain reluctance: I simply saw it as an obstacle to be got out of the way before I could make attempts to leave the country.
    But there were other obstacles too. In 1990, when I was fourteen, my father—who was by now back from England—took me against my mother’s will and my own to live with him at the College of Forestry and Agriculture near Mosul, where he was based. I didn’t want to be there, but my father had a hold on me, and there was little I could do.
    From an early age it had been drummed into me that the best career path I could possibly follow would be medicine. Doctors would always be in demand, it was said, and medicine would be a noble calling. To gain a place at medical school, however, was not easy. Applications to university were accepted on the basis of your average mark for your final exams in high school. Unfortunately for me, academic merit was not the only factor to be taken into account when this final mark was calculated. If the father of a student was an active member of the Ba’ath party, for example, the student would receive an extra five points; if the father was an officer in the military, the student would be awarded another five. It was reasonably common for students to finish high school with an average mark of 110 out of 100.
    My father had no military or political connections. I was not a bad student, but my final mark of 86 was always going to be insufficient for me to achieve what I wanted to. I applied for medical school, but I knew that I was unlikely to make the grade against people whose marks had been doctored as a result of their parents’ connections. Sure enough, I was rejected.
    I made other applications too. My father persuaded me to apply to the College of Forestry and Agriculture—he would be able to keep an eye on me, he said, and make sure my grades were good—and I was offered a place. But I had no desire to live with him any longer than I had to, so I also did some research into which colleges in Baghdad were likely to accept me, and I was offered two other places: one to study veterinary medicine, the other to study accounting and finance. I made the applications without much enthusiasm and chose to enroll in the latter course almost at random. I never expected to attend; I already had made other plans.
    There was a period