23 years of hiding from Saddam

AFP:

When, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, brothers Saad and Ibrahim left their family home in the leafy middle-class Baghdad neighbourhood of Karada for the first time in two decades, they promptly got lost.

After all, things had changed quite a bit over the 23 years that the al-Qaisi brothers had spent hidden away from Saddam's secret services in a small upstairs room.

"Two grown-up men like us asking people how to go back to our own house? It was really embarassing," recalled Saad (47) adding that their clothes, dating from the 1970s, also provoked comment.

Saad and Ibrahim, like hundreds of other Iraqis thought to have disappeared in the prisons of the Iraqi regime, emerged from hiding to a country greatly changed after two decades of war and sanctions.

"When we finally went into society, we had to be very careful in dealing with people," said Ibrahim (45).

"We have to know if people have kept the principles they had when we once knew them, or if they have changed because of the difficult conditions of the many wars."

Saad laments how human dignity and personal security have declined so much in today's Iraq, but he also remembers having constant nightmares for over 20 years about security forces barging into the small room he shared with his brother.

"When I used to put my head on the pillow, I always had the same dream and would wake up terrified," he said.

Their long confinement began after the their sister Sabeeha was arrested in 1980 because her husband was suspected of being a member of Dawa, a then-banned Shi'ite organisation that is now the party of the country's prime minister.

Security forces then arrested their father on the same charge, followed by their brother Mohammed. At that point the brothers realised they needed to disappear as well.

"We arranged things in the house so that our names would never be mentioned, and for 23 years they weren't," recalled Saad.

...
There is more. Antiwar Democrats should be ashamed when they are confronted with stories like this.

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