The last time I saw Nadia and Mohammed al-Hayali in Baghdad was in early 2006. They were waiting for visas to Dubai, joining the middle-class exodus out of Iraq. "We are just surviving day by day," Nadia said. "Terrible things are taking place all around us. Unless we get out now, something bad will happen."
But the al-Hayalis and their two children were destined not to make it together to their new life. Just when a place of safety was within reach, the violence of their homeland caught up with them in a particularly brutal way. I found out some of the story in a phone call from Nadia while I was in Helmand province. Even amid the strife of Afghanistan, I felt a sense of foreboding. Few happy calls come out of Baghdad.
At the other end of the line, Nadia was flat, emotionless. In December last year, the family had been kidnapped by an armed gang, she said. She and the children had eventually been freed, but Mohammed had been kept behind. A ransom had been demanded—and paid—for his release, but as yet there was no sign of him. Meanwhile, Nadia and her two children, Dahlia, eight, and Abdullah, ten, were being kept prisoners in their own home, having been ordered to stay there by the kidnappers.
A few weeks later, Nadia and the children fled to her parents' home in a safer part of the city. It was only then that they learned of Mohammed's fate: despite the ransom payment, he had been shot in the head, his body dumped in the street. Nadia and the children left at once for Dubai, then made their way to Amman in Jordan. They now live there in a tiny flat and Nadia has found an office job. But Amman is not a place she wants to stay. It is, she feels, too close to Iraq.
"Do you remember how it was, even a few years ago?" asked Nadia when I finally visited her a couple of months ago in Amman. I remembered her as a confident, articulate woman, but the trauma of recent months was written on her pale, drawn face. "We thought things couldn't get worse, violence will ease off, things will get better. How wrong we were.
"I still cannot make myself believe Mohammed is dead. I keep on thinking they have made a mistake. I remember the last time I saw him was when we were in the hands of the kidnappers. They had beaten him. He was crying, I don't think he was crying from pain. He said he knew we would not see him again. He just looked so sad."
"The only pictures that I have of Mohammed are in my bedroom. This is not our home. All we had, all the good times we had together as a family, all the happy thoughts are somewhere else…" Her voice trailed away to a whisper.
I first met Nadia, then 39, and Mohammed, 40, at the Hunting Club in Baghdad, a private establishment where those who could afford to would gather behind high walls, surrounded by armed guards. With a joint income of about $1,100 a month, Mohammed and Nadia represented the comfortable middle class. The Hunting Club was the one public place in the city where the al-Hayalis and their set could socialise in safety, using the restaurants, tennis courts and swimming pool. This was the autumn of 2004. President Bush had declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq 18 months earlier. The insurgency was under way, the murders had begun, there were daily power cuts, and petrol queues looping around blocks for miles. But the al-Hayalis still hoped that the country would settle down after this period of turbulence.
I told the al-Hayalis' story in the Independent. They were the kind of people— educated and modern—who should have been the driving force behind a new secular democracy. Both were fluent in English, and Nadia also speaks French. Both had lived abroad: Mohammed in the US and Nadia, who was born in Montpellier, briefly in London, where her uncle Isham Ashawi had been the Iraqi ambassador to Britain before going into exile because of his opposition to Saddam Hussein.
Nadia, a teacher, was also a talented artist who specialised in painting on silk. She is a Shia, although not a pious one, and she had initially thought that the invasion was worth the pain. "I thought that what they said about the chemical and biological weapons was bogus. But I thought: at least this gives us a fresh start. I did not realise that the Americans and the British would get it so wrong."
Mohammed, who earned about $500 a month working for the medical charity Merlin, was a Sunni. He was opposed to the war. Not, he stressed, because he was a lover of Saddam's regime, but because he thought it would open Pandora's box.
I got to know the family well. We would dine together at their house in the prosperous Jamiyah area of Baghdad. Mohammed had built the house on a plot of land given to them by his father. Nadia had decorated the place with Japanese vases, Rajasthani prints and her own paintings. I would meet their relations and friends. The talk was often of what they would do when life returned to normal. Mohammed, despite his opposition to the war, was the most upbeat. "The war was a disaster, but things will get better after the election," he would say.
At the end of 2005, things were not better for the al-Hayalis and their friends. Suicide bombings were a daily occurrence. Death squads, often made up of members of the security forces, roamed the streets. Kidnappings had become common. Trips to restaurants and the theatre had ceased, and visits to the Hunting Club had stopped too after it emerged that abductors were watching the entrances for potential victims.
Nadia's uncle, the former ambassador, had returned from London to stand in the elections for the national assembly. A man in his seventies, he was abducted by gunmen who had sauntered into the parliament building to grab him. He was beaten up, his nose and ribs broken, and then freed after the payment of a ransom of $600,000, which his family raised by selling property in London. "At least he got out alive," Mohammed said. "A friend of mine was kidnapped and his family had to get together $35,000 for the ransom by selling things and getting loans. Then the kidnappers wanted another $20,000. That could not be raised in time, and they just killed him."
Most of the al-Hayalis' friends and relations were leaving Iraq if they could—going to Jordan and Syria, the Gulf states, or to Europe, Australia and America. "The worst thing is knowing that you can no longer delude yourself that things are going to get better. It is awful, living without hope," said Nadia.
Back in 2004, I had visited the al-Hayalis' home quite openly, even stopping at Ali al-Hamdani's renowned pastry shop to pick up presents for the children. At the end of 2005 and beginning of 2006, my trips had to be carefully planned to stop anyone seeing me. In the streets we saw groups of men in dark glasses cruising around in Audis and BMWs. They were, I was told, insurgents, looking for US or Iraqi security convoys to attack.
The al-Hayalis had by now made the decision to emigrate. "We don't want to leave, it's our country," Mohammed said. "But what is left now? The place is destroyed. This is what liberation has done to us." The al-Hayalis' income had dropped by half. Nadia's school, the Baghdad International School, was shut due to lack of funds and the exodus of pupils from the country. The school, secular and co-educational, might have expected to receive support from western agencies. But appeals to the British Council and US embassy yielded nothing.
Mohammed now kept a gun in the house, an old Glock in a holster, left atop a pile of books. "It is the sort of thing one has to have nowadays," he said sheepishly. "But I don't even know how to use it. It's things like this that make me want to leave even more." Emigration would mean an initial separation for the family; Mohammed would stay behind for a while to settle matters. Nadia was unhappy about this. "We have never been apart as a family. The children get worried when either of us are late getting back. They will be upset wondering what was happening to Mohammed in Baghdad." But in the end they felt they had no choice. The visas came through and they began their final preparations. Both Mohammed and Nadia had offers of jobs in Dubai. From there they would try to get to Canada.
Nadia, now sitting in her bare apartment in Amman, recalls: "They said they wanted me… Somebody had told them that I was a Christian, that I was working for the Americans at the airport. They would not tell me who it was. Even to this day I do not know who said this about me, or why… Mohammed said that he would not let me be taken away by myself. He insisted that he go too. The children were clinging on to us, and of course we could not leave them behind.
"We were blindfolded. They took us in two cars. They put Mohammed in one car and I was with the children in the other. There was one man who kept questioning me about my religion. They said Christians were targets because of what was going on in Iraq, but also because of what was happening to Muslims in Europe, like the hijab in France. I told them I was not a Christian. I told them I didn't work at the airport, that I was a teacher. I realised then that it was a Sunni gang. They said they were followers of al Qaeda. When I said I was a Muslim and a Shia, the man said, 'You Shias are worse than Christians.'
"Abdullah was quiet, but Dahlia was crying. At one point she started screaming and one of the men stuck his gun against her face and said he would shoot her unless she kept quiet. I covered her with my body, that is all I could do."
The family were taken to Hazaniyah, a Sunni district half an hour's drive away. Their blindfolds were taken off, but they were separated, with Mohammed put in a room by himself. "There were just a few beds in the house, nothing else apart from some religious pictures on the wall. There were about six or seven of them, one of them was young, only about 15. He was very polite, he called me khala—Auntie. I remember thinking, 'What have we done to ourselves? How did this young boy end up with these killers?' Others were not so nice. There was one man who kept his face hidden with a scarf. He was very religious, he did not think we were good Muslims.
"Dahlia could not speak, she could not even sit up, she just lay shivering. I was so worried about her. I could not think of anything else but her and Abdullah.
"The leader of the group came and began questioning me again. I think he was a Syrian or a Jordanian. The room was dark and a light was shone on to my face. He was later joined by others. They said, 'You don't look like a Muslim,' because I did not have my head covered. They gave me a cloak and asked me to put it on my head.
"They questioned me for five hours. Then they took Abdullah into another room and asked him questions as well. At the end we were all put in the same room along with Mohammed. They gave us dinner, chicken and some rice. I could not eat anything, I was feeling sick. After that we were told to go to sleep, but I could not. Mohammed probably slept for a few minutes, the children slept because they were exhausted, but Dahlia kept waking up, she was having nightmares."
The next morning the abductors said they were going to search the family's home. They were looking, they said, for money, the family's identification documents and their computers. Sitting in their darkened, airless captivity, the family were not to know that the computers would seal Mohammed's fate. He had been working for a fundraising agency for small businesses in Baghdad, and this had brought him into contact with US and Iraqi government organisations. Although these contacts were apolitical, the details of his work classified him as a collaborator in the eyes of his captors.
"When they came back they gave us our ID cards but kept the computers. We had around $5,000 in the house, the money we were keeping for the journey to Dubai. They took that," said Nadia.
"They brought someone to the house to look through Mohammed's laptop. Then they began to question him in another room. I could hear raised voices. A little later I managed to see him. He whispered to me that I must deny all knowledge of his work. I said, 'But you have not done anything wrong,' but he insisted that I must not argue with the gang. So when I was questioned, I simply told them I did not know anything about his work. They kept on saying I was lying, but I just stuck to my story. Then they questioned Abdullah about it, and he genuinely knew nothing.
"A little while later they began to beat Mohammed. They were whipping him, using their belts. I could hear the blows. The only thing I could do was try to distract the children from the noise. Then it fell silent. I was afraid that they had killed him. I said I wanted to go to the toilet, and on the way I saw him lying on the floor, covered by a blanket. I saw he was hurt but not dead. I was begging the men to let Mohammed go. I was pleading with them not to kill him. I told them that our religion asks us to forgive people. They said they sympathised with me and they would try to make sure he was not killed. But, they said, they had their bosses who would make the decision."
The next day Nadia and the children were told that they would be released. Mohammed would be kept behind for further investigation. The gang needed Nadia on the outside to get the ransom money they were going to demand.
"That last meeting with Mohammed was just so terrible. He was telling me he did not think he would get out alive, he was saying that he would not see us ever again. He was crying, he asked me to look after Dahlia and Abdullah, tell them how much he loved them. I said to him, 'I will refuse to leave, I'll stay with you.' But he said I must go for the sake of the children. That was the last time I saw him."
Nadia and the children were dropped off near their home by the kidnappers. One of the men gave Abdullah some religious books to read. Nadia was told that they must not leave the house, and to await messages about what to do next. The al-Hayalis' relatives and neighbours brought them food. A few days later Nadia had a telephone call from the leader of the kidnappers.
Mohammed, he said, would be tried before an Islamic court. A fee of $50,000 would help alleviate his guilt and might convince the court to set him free. A frantic round of calls to friends and relations and to Mohammed's company enabled Nadia to get some money, but nothing like the sum demanded. In the telephone calls that followed, however, the kidnappers agreed to accept $10,000.
"I had to walk to a location they had given. I could see I was being followed. But they need not have worried, there were no police or Americans involved. No one in our situation would go to them. When the men took the money, I again asked about Mohammed. I was told he would go before the court and that things may turn out to be all right."
In fact, according to the police, Mohammed was already dead. They had, it emerged later, found his body, but had not yet been able to identify it. It had been taken to al-Kindi hospital, in the city centre, and then on to the morgue.
"I stayed at the house waiting for news. I could see men from the gang out in the street," said Nadia. "I had one phone call from them asking me why I wasn't sending the children to school. I said it was too dangerous, there were a lot of kidnappings. The man said it would be safe, they would look after Dahlia and Abdullah. I really did not have an answer to that."
Relatives of the al-Hayalis had, meanwhile, heard that Mohammed's body may have turned up at the Baghdad morgue. They did not tell Nadia, but two members of the family had gone there and learned that the body had already been buried. They were shown a photograph of a man; one of the relatives thought it was Mohammed while the other was unsure.
"My relatives kept asking me to go to my parents' house. So in the end I went there with the children. At first no one would tell me anything. Then my sister came and she started crying. I found out what had happened. I never went back to our home. I went to Dubai and now here we are in Amman," said Nadia. "I keep on thinking maybe it was not Mohammed in that photo at the morgue. Perhaps the kidnappers are still holding him. Maybe it got too dangerous for them in Baghdad and they fled to Fallujah with him. But I know this is probably a false hope.
"I just cannot understand why Mohammed is not here with us. You see, we have known each other all our lives. Ours isn't an arranged marriage, we met at high school. I know many people have suffered in Iraq. But when you have spent your life with someone, someone you love, it is hard, very hard."
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