A Disappearance in Damascus by Deborah Campbell Page A

mass destruction and make reparation for the war against Kuwait, with the tacit goal of persuading Iraqis to rise up against him. But in fact they only crippled his opponents. “
His
people had everything they needed,” Ahlam said. Whatever they didn’t have, they took.
    The riverfront of her father’s property had already been confiscated in 1983. Men with hard faces appeared one day and fenced off the land below their house. There was no question of negotiating. The men were armed. The land was for Saddam Hussein’s half-brother, a man named Sabawi, who wanted a country estate—during the Gulf War Sabawi became head of the secret police.
    Southeast of the village, Saddam Hussein had taken more prime riverfront. His son Uday, known to the villagers for sending his men around the city to kidnap beautiful girls for him to rape, held parties there whenever his soccer team won a match. These parties, which the villagers could hear at night, were unabated by sanctions. “Here we were barely surviving,” Ahlam said, “and every time his team had a victory he had singers and dancing and feasts that could have fed our entire village for a week.”
    Ahlam married in 1994 at the age of twenty-nine—very late for a traditional woman from a rural family. The only reason she married at all was because, at the already ancientage of twenty-eight, she had refused a doctor’s hand and announced to her mother that she wanted to do a master’s degree. “I saw the look in my mother’s eyes. She was so worried about me. She imagined I was going to be alone, my chance finished.” A curse, as her mother saw it, for a woman to be without a man.
    So when an engineer some years older proposed, she gave him a choice. He knew she was educated, active in the community, had many male friends. She was not, like other women, bound to hearth and home. If he accepted that, and did not insist that she conform, she would marry him. If not, they should go their separate ways. He accepted, and only a small number of times—three that she could think of—did he bother with the thankless task of trying to control her.
    A year later came their first son, Anas. Another son and a daughter followed, each two years apart. They were hungry but they still had enough land to grow their own food. In the poorer south of the country—undeveloped, and punished for backing a failed Shia uprising against Saddam Hussein by having their historic marshlands drained—people were moving to Baghdad in search of work.
    The year after she married she went with her husband to visit a friend of his who lived in Saddam City, a Shia slum in Baghdad, since renamed Sadr City. What she saw there shocked her. People lived in shelters built from stacks of empty oil drums. Their floor was a sheet on the ground. “They lived in the open. A gust of wind could blow down their homes. How could they send their children to school?” Education was free but they had to buy uniforms—impossible. And the kids had to earn. Girls and boys were set to manual labour from the age of five or six; their mothers andfathers joined the Fedayeen Saddam militia in exchange for a salary. “Nobody cared about their poverty. Later they were among the main looters.”
    Her older brother Samir had finished high school behind Ahlam, since during the war with Iran their father had ordered him to fail his exams so he wouldn’t graduate only to die on the battlefield. Samir went on to do a PhD in economics, though the most lucrative part of his education was learning English. He began working as a driver and fixer for foreign journalists, employing the charm and resiliency that was a family trait. It was Samir who first introduced Ahlam to the correspondents who came to report on the sanctions. The first one she worked with was Stephen Glain, an American reporter for the
Wall Street Journal
.
    Glain met Samir for the first time in 1999. He had been directed to the Al Rashid Hotel, a base for