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.
”Our movements were very limited, we spent most of our time in this room,” he said gesturing at the cramped 16 square metre space, crammed with books and three beds.
Their mother, Zahra al-Badri, looked after and protected them for all those years.
”I used to tell people that Saad went out to ask about his father and didn’t come back and Ibrahim had gone to school and hadn’t come back,” she said.
In those days, dissidents or subversives could easily disappear from one day to the next, never to be seen again, after being picked up by the secret police.
In 1984, security officials told Badri her husband, daughter and sons, including Saad and Ismail, had been executed.
Even though the brothers were supposedly dead, the visits by security continued.
”They used to pay us a visit once or twice a week,” said Ibrahim. ”Then it became once or twice a month and this went on until one month before the fall of the regime.”
When Badri heard the news on the radio of Saddam’s fall in April 2003, she finally decided it was safe to let her sons out again.
”I lived in anxiety for years and I didn’t relax until the [US-led] occupation,” she said.
To stay in shape, the two brothers would pace the confines of their small room, which still includes the bed of their executed brother, and sometimes they would even walk up and down the stairs.
”We used to face real emotional challenges and even depression, but we got over it by thinking this is what life is — this is the life forced on us,” said Saad.
”We lived by the proverb that the best friend at all times is a book.”
They read extensively from their father’s library of religious and scientific books and consulted medical manuals when they became ill.
Their life improved somewhat in 1996 when the trees in their large back garden had grown sufficiently that they could work in the garden at night, undetected.
Today the two brothers are getting on with their lives.
They’ve updated their wardrobes and like everyone else are struggling to make their way in a changing Iraq.
Saad got back his old job at the Dura oil refinery and his brother has entered university, a couple of decades late, as an engineering student.
The two have learned to treasure their time outside their old room.
”If you lose your freedom, then you know what it tastes like,” said Saad.
For their mother, however, the worries are not over.
The fear of Saddam’s security services has been replaced by fresh uncertainties as insurgents fight the new order. ”I am still worried for them because of the explosions — when someone goes out, you are never sure if he will return,” she said. – AFP
