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War Torn
the Vancouver Courier, January 18, 2003
Photo: Dan Toulgoet
Ali Alsaadi spent the last few days driving past the countless lakes of Northern Ontario, the snow-dusted prairies and the icy Rocky mountains as he carried a load of dry goods from Toronto to Vancouver in his semi-trailer truck.
This journey, which Alsaadi makes several times a month, would have been unimaginable a few years ago when he was living in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia. Every morning and night, he could only look at the sharp barbed-wire fences surrounding the site, just one of 23 camps encircled by a higher perimeter fence.
Alsaadi (not his real name, as he's concerned for the safety of his family in Iraq) spent five and a half long years in Saudi refugee camps after fleeing Iraq in the wake of the Gulf War.
Living in primitive sand huts covered with tarps, he endured intense desert heat in the summer and brutal cold in the winter-once, out of desperation, he burned one of his own wooden tent posts to keep warm.
"It was like a prison," recalls Alsaadi. "Actually, a prison would be better. At least you would have a real wall and not a wall made of sand. At least you would have some heat in the wintertime."
Today Alsaadi, who lives in Surrey, is waiting to hear that a war has begun against his homeland-a war he hopes will finish off Saddam Hussein once and for all. He thinks it will be soon.
Alsaadi is one of the estimated 2,800 Iraqis living in the Lower Mainland, many of whom are refugees.
As masses of U.S. troops head towards the Middle East and the possibility of a war grows, the prospect of war is being hotly debated in the Iraqi community around Vancouver. The issue isn't if there will be a war-most feel it's inevitable-but whether it will improve the lives of friends and family still living in Iraq, or merely result in more poverty, misery and death.
Alsaadi was only 18 in 1991 when the Gulf War broke out. He was hiding on a farm outside his home town, the holy city of Karbala, because he didn't want to join the Iraqi military. He kept out of sight to avoid sharing the fate of his older brother, who had been executed for leaving the army during the Iran-Iraq war. After his brother's death, the family wasn't allowed to have a funeral, and even had to compensate the military for the cost of the bullets used to kill him.
After the war, Alsaadi headed back to Karbala, where he heard that defecting Iraqi troops returning from the front were taking control of many major cities. The revolution against the much-hated regime had begun, and Alsaadi and his friends waited anxiously for the liberating forces to come to Karbala.
"We were ready. Saddam's troops were ready. We were just waiting for someone to start the fighting. One night around 4 a.m., I was in bed, and I heard the shots. I went upstairs and I saw the fires burning downtown. I knew it had started."
Armed with machine guns, he and his friends went downtown, where Saddam's many opponents were gathered. Alsaadi scaled the wall surrounding Saddam's party headquarters, where he found a cache of weapons that he distributed to the others. Soon, the city was in the hands of the anti-Saddam forces.
Many of the rebels hoped the U.S. would assist in their attempt to oust Saddam, but no help was forthcoming. Within a week, Saddam once again had a firm grip on Karbala and the rest of the country. Alsaadi knew he'd better leave Iraq quickly, or end up like his older brother.
He walked for three days through farmers' fields and along back roads until he came to Saudi Arabia, where he was wowed by the lights of the buildings-the entire country of Iraq was without electricity at the time. Alsaadi never imagined he would spend five and a half years there, doing virtually nothing but listen to the radio, hoping every day to hear news that Saddam had been overthrown so he could go home.
Finally, a representative of the Canadian government visited the camp, and Alsaadi was accepted to come to Ottawa. The Ottawa refugee reception centre-with a kitchen, telephones and two people per room-seemed like the lap of luxury to Alsaadi. Soon, he moved to Vancouver, where he enrolled in English classes and got a job sticking bilingual labels on imported juice packages.
Now 30, Alsaadi has saved enough money to purchase his own truck, which he uses for hauling loads across the country. He considers himself settled in Canada, but still yearns to see his family in Iraq.
"It's been 12 years since I've seen my mother and sister," he says. "But if I went back to Iraq, I would be dead the next day."
Though he questions the Americans' motives, he's hopeful a U.S. war against Iraq will topple the current regime and allow him to visit his country again.
"If America does it, it won't be because they want democracy in Iraq-they don't want democracy in Iraq. It won't be because they like the people of Iraq-they don't like the people in Iraq. They'll do it because they want the oil and they want to secure the area so they can do what they want.
"The U.S. is bad, but Saddam is worse. If Saddam is gone, I will be happy. The people of Iraq haven't gotten anything from Saddam. Each family in Iraq has had somebody killed. It used to be very rare for people to see a coffin being carried in the streets, but now, it's so common, it's normal."
Alsaadi says the number of people who might die in a war would be far fewer than the people who die each month as a result of economic sanctions against the country.
"Sanctions have starved the country for 12 years because of one man. We need a new leader, and I just hope that whoever comes in will be more peaceful."
Even though he's keen to see military action against Iraq, Alsaadi hopes Canada won't be involved. He imagines himself returning one day to the Middle East and being proud to say he's a Canadian, proud to say he lives in a peaceful country that doesn't participate in the warfare and violence that was the only thing he knew when he was growing up.
Not all ex-patriot Iraqis are as keen on a war against Iraq.
Ahmed Ahmed doesn't believe another war will solve anything. "The U.S. says they're going to save Iraq, but I don't trust them. If the U.S. bombs and quickly gets rid of Saddam-then what? Democracy won't come. There will be just another dictator. We need a comprehensive solution, not a military solution."
Photo: Dan Toulgoet
Sitting at a table at a Main Street coffee shop in mid-December, near two students with textbooks stacked high on either side of them, Ahmed (who jokes his first and last names are the same because his poverty stricken family could only afford one name) remembers one late night when he was in university, studying for his midterm exams in computer engineering. Jan. 17, 1991, to be exact, at 2:30 in the morning.
He was in his parents' house, in a well-off section of Baghdad, when he heard the first American bomb. Many people were saying the war wasn't going to happen, and Ahmed wasn't prepared for the terrible booms that shook the house as the bombs fell around him.
"My family decided we would all sleep in the same room," recalls Ahmed, who has short dark hair and a close-cropped beard. "That way, if a bomb hit, everyone would die, or none of us would die."
The bombing continued all night, and for the 42 days that followed.
"We listened to the radio, and heard about all the places that were bombed, one after another. We had the feeling we couldn't do anything. It was not a man-to-man war. It was done by programmers and pilots playing video games, not by soldiers like in a traditional war."
There was little to do in the next few weeks except sit around with friends and family and wait. When the war ended, Baghdad no longer had a functional power, water or sewer system. The phone lines were down and many bridges inside the city were gone. Ahmed says people wanted to return to normal and most things were quickly rebuilt-but life in Iraq never returned to the way it was before.
Sanctions meant that Ahmed had to use old, outdated text books at university, as it was impossible to get new ones. Foreign magazines, newspapers and even basic food supplies were hard to come by, and the standard of living in the country plummeted.
"If they believe sanctions will get rid of Saddam, it's a joke," Ahmed says. "It's made him more powerful. Now people have to work harder than before to support themselves. You can't get together with friends; you have to work all day."
After Ahmed graduated from university, he realized he would never achieve his ambitions of accelerating in the field of computing if he remained in the country. At the age of 23, he went to Jordan, the only country Iraq had diplomatic relations with at the time. Ahmed says 20 out of 30 people in his graduating class now live outside of Iraq.
Three years ago, Ahmed came to Canada, where he had two cousins. Now he works at a software company and just bought a townhouse in South Vancouver. He's applied for citizenship, and hopes to call himself a Canadian within a few months.
He recently returned from visiting Jordan to meet with his parents, sister and uncle-he decided not to go into Iraq because he didn't want to risk getting stuck in the country. With a war looming on the horizon, his thoughts are often with his family in Baghdad.
"We had such a bad experience with the Gulf War," says Ahmed, who finds it hard to believe his adopted country would participate militarily in a U.S.-led war on Iraq.
"I believe the Canadian people don't want war. They have compassion for Iraq and they know the true intentions of States. I'm not worried."
However, with Defence Minister John McCallum proposing sending a contribution to assist the U.S., including the deployment of navy frigates and the elite Joint Task Force 2, Ahmed could soon find his adopted country at war with his homeland.
At a Middle Eastern restaurant on Denman Street, diners listen to the rich and haunting melodies of Kurdo Galali's keyboard. Thirty-nine-year-old Galali lives comfortably in Burnaby with his Tunisian wife and their children, but dreams of returning to his home in Iraq. He manages to make a living here as a musician, but would do much better in the Middle East, where his style of music is more popular.
As a Kurd growing up in Northern Iraq, Galali knows first-hand the cruelty of Saddam Hussein. His brother was tortured in an Iraqi jail, and after the 1974 Kurdish revolt, eight-year-old Galali, his brother, sister and mother gathered their donkey and horse and traveled 70 kilometres to the border with Iran.
"All the kids in the refugee camp in Iran could tell the names of the Russian-made airplanes the Iraqis used from the sounds they made when they were flying overhead. We looked at sky and we were scared." After a year in the camp, Galali and his family returned to Iraq. In 1990, however, he went into exile again, this time in Canada. He had been involved in protests against Saddam's government, and after watching countless classmates and neighbours disappear, decided to apply for refugee status in Canada.
Galali's story has some parallels with the character he plays in the 2002 film Jiyan. Galali is the lead actor in this docudrama, which screened at various international film festivals last year. The cast and crew shot the film by flying into Turkey and crossing through the border into Kurdish Iraq, later smuggling the film to Belgium for post-production work.
Galali's character, Diyari, is a Kurd who was in a refugee camp in Iran after the 1974 Kurdish revolt and later ended up emigrating to America. He returns to Iraq as an adult to build an orphanage in Halabja, the Kurdish town that was the site of a notorious chemical attack by Saddam's troops in 1988. Diyari befriends Jiyan, a 10-year-old orphan whose face is disfigured from the chemical attack. The girl becomes close with Diyari, and he names the orphanage after her. But after the project is finished, he returns to America, and she returns to the place they had met, a quiet swing on the desolate hillside, waiting for something to happen.
The chemical attack at Halabja is yet another reason Galali hates Saddam. When he talks about the leader of Iraq, his eyes darken and his body grows tense.
"I have so much anger," he says intensely. "People sitting at home, they don't know what has happened to us. They don't know about the millions of mothers that have lost a loved one. I wish the U.S. was doing this in order to help people. They're involved because of their own interests. But if a war gets rid of Saddam, less people will die in the long run."
He hopes the next leader of Iraq won't be from the military, but someone who will bring democracy and give some autonomy to the Kurds.
"The Kurds are asking for federalism, like we have in Canada. Federalism is our goal, our dream, our desire. We want all national and religious groups in Iraq to be free."
Galali hopes it will be soon.
"I follow the news every day," he says. "I watch CNN and satellite TV minute by minute, hoping to hear that Saddam is gone."
So Galali, like Jiyan, the little girl in the film, waits for something to happen.