Waiting in the immigration queue at Saddam International Airport, I was feverish with anxiety. I watched as my father, Sadiq Rahim, leaned into a glass booth where an Iraqi officer slowly checked our family’s passports. Taped on the glass was a photo of Saddam Hussein in sunglasses and a black beret. Before flying out, our parents had warned my older sister and me that Iraq wasn’t like Britain: a stray joke or misplaced comment could land us in serious trouble. Our one protection was our British citizenship—Saddam being an ally of the west. Cigarette smoke drifted from the booth. Then the officer stamped our visa pages and nodded us through. The date was 28th July, 1990. Five days later Iraq invaded Kuwait, and our short tourist trip turned into a months-long nightmare.
Thirty years on, I find it hard to describe what happened to me in Iraq. The bald facts are that, at the age of nine, I was locked up for a month in a Baghdad hotel with my family. We were pawns in a larger diplomatic battle. After the UK condemned the Kuwait invasion and threatened retaliation, all British citizens in Saddam’s control were held as bargaining chips. I left with my mother and sister when women and children were released at the end of August. My father was forced to stay on until mid-October.
We were usually described in the press as “human-shield hostages,” but that still sounds melodramatic to me. The theory that Saddam kept us close to military targets to deter Allied bombing makes little sense—by the time the Gulf War started in January 1991, he had released us all. Hostages? Well, we weren’t allowed to leave our hotel floor and the lifts were guarded by armed goons. But no one actually put a gun to our heads—at least not our family. Saddam called us his “guests,” which he might have been delusional enough to believe. The Rahims always refer to it as the time “we got stuck in Iraq,” as though we had been caught in motorway traffic. Perhaps a better description would be “enforced lockdown.” Like coronavirus, Saddam was unpredictable and potentially lethal; and like now, panic spread by seeing how others, seemingly at random, suffered more than we did.
Perhaps because of the sheer weirdness of the experience, I don’t tend to bring it up in conversation. The best time for disclosure, I’ve found—and my mother and sister say the same—is during the playful interrogation of an office bonding game. Tell us three things about yourself: two lies and one truth. No one ever guesses “I was Saddam Hussein’s prisoner.” Later, someone might tentatively ask how the experience has affected me. The answer is complex. I was a child at the time, and barely understood what was happening. Much of this article has been retrospectively pieced together from family interviews and newspaper reports. But I did sense my parents’ helplessness when they told us we couldn’t go home; and I heard the raw fear in the night-time screams piercing our hotel corridor. Looking back, those weeks in Iraq gave me a taste of living in fear—to know that your fate is in the hands of someone with no conscience, and that if a sentence is pronounced no appeal is possible. In short, what ordinary Iraqis suffered all the time under Saddam.
It has also made me reflect on the arbitrary nature of identities—how the privilege of having a British passport was briefly turned into a curse. My family’s situation was further complicated by our dual heritage. When Saddam gave the order, I suppose he was imagining that he could use telegenic white families to taunt George HW Bush and Margaret Thatcher. What he didn’t anticipate, I’m certain, was the existence of such a thing as a British Muslim. We were an anomaly.
There are more layers. We were in Iraq as Shia pilgrims, visiting shrines in Karbala and Najaf during the sacred month of Muharram. Saddam, a secular Sunni, hated Shias because he thought they had sided with Iran during the eight-year war between the countries. Early in his rule, he had murdered senior Shia clerics. My father had delivered speeches in London condemning these atrocities. Could Iraqi spies have been listening in? (This was the source of my anxiety at the immigration queue.) A child’s overactive imagination was not so far from reality. A Shia family friend had been arrested while visiting Iraq in the 1980s. Accused of being an Iranian spy, he was held for months, interrogated and tortured—including, I remember this detail, being forced to wash his hands in scalding hot water.
A few days into our trip, we were granted an audience with the most senior cleric in Shia Islam, Grand Ayatollah al-Khoei, at his house in Najaf. I remember sitting for ages with my father in a carpeted reception room. Born in 1899, al-Khoei was a quietist who avoided political interventions. Still, he was an important figurehead who was intensely disliked by Saddam. Access to him was controlled by his sons, who swished round in flowing black cloaks and turbans. (One of them, Majid al-Khoei, would later flee to London and become a good friend of my father’s.) We were led to the side room where the ayatollah lay in bed. He had incredibly fair skin and as I bent down to kiss his hand, I saw blue veins under his skin.
Our religious duties done, we returned to Baghdad. On the night of 2nd August, we were woken by gunfire. My father went out to investigate and I followed him. We wandered the sodium-lit streets as soldiers assaulted the skies in celebration. “What’s going on?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Maybe Saddam’s been overthrown?” Back at the hotel we saw the TV broadcasting pictures of Iraqi soldiers marching into Kuwait City. Saddam claimed he was taking back sovereign Iraqi territory. It’s true that the Anglo-Ottoman convention of 1913 carved out a space that later became Kuwait, but this was well before Iraq became independent in 1932. More likely, he was tempted by the chance to wipe out a $14bn debt he owed the Kuwaitis—and to control 21 per cent of the world’s oil reserves. Or perhaps after his bloody stalemate with Iran, he wanted a little ego-boosting war. He saw little risk. After all, his gassing to death of 5,000 Kurds at Halabja in 1988 prompted no response from the west. A Foreign Office briefing said, “Punitive measures… would damage British interests to no avail.”
My mother, Yasmin Rahim, tells me what happened next. “We knew we needed to get out of the country as soon as possible,” she says. The airports were shut so we, along with the other members of our tourist group, hired a bus to drive us to the safety of Amman 600km away. Since most of the army was in Kuwait, the Iraq-Jordan border was poorly patrolled. During the eight-hour journey my 13-year-old sister, Ruhi, caught a stomach bug from a disgusting roadside toilet. The bus paused to let her vomit by the road. “I was more worried about my sickness than I was about getting through safely,” Ruhi tells me now. Naturally concerned for their daughter’s health, my parents were also worried about the delay: time was running out.
We were stopped at the border crossing and Iraqi guards demanded to see our papers. At the time, my mother had dual Kenyan-British nationality, but had decided at the last minute to travel on her UK passport. Others in our group had Tanzanian citizenship even though they were resident in England. A young couple were split up—the husband told to get off, while his wife was forced to stay behind. The bus, now filled only with US and UK citizens, was turned back towards Baghdad.
Back at the hotel our passports were taken away. Anxious for real news, we plugged in my sister’s silver tape recorder which was also a radio. After some fiddling my father tuned it to the World Service. It turned out that we were at the centre of a major international incident. President Bush had described Saddam’s invasion as an “outrageous and brutal act of aggression.” He warned that defending Saudi Arabia, potentially in Saddam’s sights, was “of vital interest to the United States.” Bush’s line in the sand would eventually lead to a huge deployment of US soldiers on Saudi soil. (These troops would enrage an obscure militant called Osama bin Laden and serve as a pretext for 9/11.) But Bush seemed much less sure what to do about the western citizens detained in Iraq. “I want to see them out of there, obviously,” he said. “But what he does, that’s a bit unpredictable.”
On 8th August, we were transferred to the grand Al-Mansour Melia hotel on the banks of the River Tigris. “Hostages do not stay at hotels, drink beer and enjoy their lives,” said Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s deputy prime minister. Superficially, he had a point. Early on there was an almost party atmosphere among the British contingent, mainly made up of BA cabin crew and expats. We were allowed out of our rooms three times a day for breakfast, lunch and dinner—plus time in the swimming pool mid-morning. But the atmosphere was surreally sinister. Saddam’s spies stalked the pool, conspicuously speaking into walkie-talkies wrapped in newspapers. These pool visits soon ceased: I later learned we were being photographed for propaganda purposes.
The Rahims were given two rooms facing each other. For reassurance, my father stayed with me and my mother with my sister. At the lifts about half-a-dozen guards sat round playing cards and smoking. Aside from mealtimes we were not allowed to leave our wing. Our lives became restricted to a few square feet of carpet space. How did I fill the time? I read my five or six books over and over again. (Every frame of Asterix and Cleopatra is burned into my memory.) Using the hotel notepaper, my sister and I played the fortune-telling game chatterbox.
The corridor became our play area. We played cops and robbers, diving in and out of each other’s rooms, nabbing villains. When I returned sweating from my exertions, I would be told off by my mother. She now tells me she was in a “constant panic and a state of flux”: if you didn’t see someone for five minutes, you didn’t know if they had been disappeared. One time, I got impatient with the lift taking us to lunch—a meagre buffet with mouldy bread and gristly meat: the meals had started fine and got worse—and skipped down the stairs on my own. For that my mother made me cry hot tears of rage. Everyone was anxious. My father took up smoking again until Ruhi shamed him into stopping: “I told him that would mean Saddam was winning.”
Every day a badly written English newspaper was pushed under our doors telling us how superbly Saddam was bestriding the world stage. The BBC told a different story. Listening surreptitiously on Ruhi’s radio, we heard that Saddam was throwing out panicky gambits to row back from what had clearly been an enormous blunder. He offered to withdraw from Kuwait if Israel pulled out of the Palestinian territories. When that was rebuffed, Saddam fell back on talk of the invading crusaders and reviving the prestige of the Arab-Islamic world. The British and American governments said they wouldn’t negotiate with Iraq. We would remain in limbo.
From sober truth we turned to the lurid lies of Iraqi television. Between the Hollywood films on repeat (western cultural imperialism was fine, it seemed) there were some bizarre transmissions. Camera crews were sent to the camps near the power stations, ports, dams and factories to where less fortunate detainees had been taken. Perhaps I dreamed this but I think an English couple actually got married in one camp. When asked if they would return to Iraq, they replied: “Oh yes, we’d love to come back!” Whether the target audience of one—initials SH—believed what he was seeing or simply enjoyed humiliating westerners, remains unclear to me. The reality of life in those camps, described in harrowing detail in Tim Lewis’s book The Human Shield, was quite different. British detainees were horribly ill-treated. Some suffered mock executions. Others were beaten. Both men and women were raped. For us their trauma was always at the edge of the frame.
Our parents told us to never call ourselves hostages and never to speak ill of the guards—or even speak to them. The rules applied inside and outside our rooms: they could be bugged. My sister and I searched like the intrepid Famous Five (I had an Enid Blyton with me) for these listening devices. We settled on a silver nail hammered into the mirror frame. Looking back, it was just a nail; but our parents indulged us if that meant we would keep schtum. Saddam’s name was verboten so my sister came up with the nickname “Freddie.” Freddie because he had a moustache like Freddie Mercury, and because, like Freddy Kruger from A Nightmare on Elm Street, he might murder you in bed.
The Iraqis working at the hotel were much more gracious than the contemptuous guards. At dinner we were served coffee by a waitress with big hair and high heels. She was once harassed by a man in our group—something as pathetic as “do you come with dessert as well?” She flashed a fake smile and walked away. The poor woman didn’t want to be there either. Despite the language barrier, my mother Yasmin struck up a friendship with the middle-aged ladies who cleaned our rooms. She recalls their small acts of kindness. At great risk, they smuggled in basic medicines and creams for us in the voluminous front pockets of their overalls.
British banker Patrick Herbert, who was being held near a fuel dump at Basra airport, told the Guardian in 2003 about his strange experience of meeting Saddam. He described “a charisma which normal circumstances you would say was almost great, but was probably an evil charisma.” The ever-theatrical Iraqi dictator enjoyed filming his encounters with westerners. In one notorious instance, he ruffled the hair of five-year-old Stuart Lockwood, while his family looked on. “Does Stuart get his milk?” asked Saddam, wearing a smart grey suit while his guests were in ragged holiday clothes. “Yes,” Stuart’s father replied. “Cornflakes too?” The reply was again, yes. Saddam added bitterly that Iraqis didn’t get cornflakes with milk. He could move from the jovial to the sinister in moments. This would make a great experience for their diaries, he suggested to his audience, then adding that if war came, he would smash his enemies. His only truthful sentence was inadvertent: “We will treat you in the same way we treat people in Iraq.”
Watching the performance on Iraqi TV, we felt the Lockwoods had been lucky to be allowed to petition in person. My father, Sadiq, started to plot an audience with the dictator. Saddam seemed sympathetic to children. But we needed some kind of party trick. So I was sent to the lady three doors down, a fellow British Muslim who knew Arabic, to be intensively taught how to recite the Qur’an. That way I would be able to perform our Muslimness to Saddam.
In the end that didn’t happen. There was no Sameer Rahim dressed in a white dish-dash and skullcap reciting to the smiling moustache; there was no dramatic reading of Qur’anic verses emphasising mercy and manumission. But I have dreamt that scene many times over the years.
At the end of August, it was announced that women and children would be released. Saddam was being increasingly challenged during his “guest interviews” by mothers asking why their children were not allowed back to school. Thatcher told him he could not hide “behind the skirts of women and children”—a line designed to prick his patriarchal Arab pride. I insisted that I wouldn’t leave my father. He replied it was my duty to look after my mother and sister. I remember nothing of our parting except staring blankly out of the bus window. We were taken to another hotel ready for our flight to Paris and then London. That evening we decided to return to the al-Mansour Melia for one final goodbye. We told the guards we had forgotten some clothes. Upstairs, I vividly remember my mother and father embracing with tearful sobs, finally unable to hide their emotions. On his shelf, my mother tells me, he had placed one of our fortune-telling chatterboxes.
Back in London things looked slightly more optimistic. The men we had left behind were moved out of the al-Mansour Melia and given more freedom to move around. Then we heard Thatcher’s interview with David Frost on 2nd September: the PM said if any hostages were harmed the culprits would be prosecuted for “their totally uncivilised and brutal behaviour.” Far from being buoyed by her strong line, we were terrified it would only make things worse. We were right to be worried: Iraqi radio responded by denouncing Thatcher as a “grey-haired old woman… mentally unbalanced… with a canine harsh voice.”
In the absence of government negotiation, various ad-hoc diplomatic missions got going. Each set of detainees seemed to have their own celebrity diplomat. Former politicians, including Edward Heath, Jesse Jackson and Willy Brandt, flew to Iraq to plead for the remaining men. Each one duly returned with a cohort of the detained—it was the price Saddam paid for the legitimising photo shoots he craved. Dictators’ egos can be surprisingly easily manipulated.
British Muslims got our own champion who combined the right amount of cultural and religious capital. That man was Yusuf Islam, previously known as Cat Stevens—yes, my father’s fate would depend on the man who sang Morning Has Broken and Peace Train. After converting to Islam in 1979, Stevens became a prominent figure in the British Muslim community, running schools in west London. Cannily, in advance of his trip to Iraq, he referred to the Iraqi leader as a “congenial fellow and brother Muslim.” He flew out in October taking our hopes with him.
Meanwhile we waited. My mother Yasmin was relentless in campaigning for her husband’s release, phoning anyone she thought might help. Somehow she managed to arrange a couple of phone calls directly with him. Hearing his voice was both reassuring and scary. Then in mid-October we got good news: Yusuf Islam’s efforts had been successful and, along with four other British Muslims, Sadiq Rahim would be shortly released.
My father was one of the first men to come home and we became the object of media attention. ITN came to our house to interview my mother. Trained to be careful with her words, she stayed studiedly neutral on the Saddam regime, and instead expressed hope that he would be home soon. Us kids needed to be filmed doing something, apparently. Yasmin told us to make posters that read: “Welcome Home Daddy! Thank You Saddam Hussein.” Ruhi was furious we were appeasing the dictator, although she is now more understanding of this position. Still, she resents the patronising way the news reported on our posters: “It’s like they didn’t think we knew Saddam was a bad guy, and our mum was just trying to play it safe.”
We went to Heathrow to greet our father along with a huge number of reporters and photographers, who instructed us to not rush towards him so they could get a clean picture—the final framing shot of the story. My mother ignored them and burst through as soon as she saw him. The first thing I noticed was that he had a Union Jack sticker on his shirt pocket.
Why had he been released sooner than others? “I have no idea whatsoever why I was chosen,” Sadiq told our local newspaper, the Uxbridge Gazette. “I knew there were men there seriously ill… I offered to change with one of them but was not allowed.” He showed the reporter the fortune-telling chatterbox he had brought home. He ended by calling for more dialogue. “The last thing we want is war.” But war there would be. Operation Desert Storm began on 17th January. Victory was swift for the Allies but Saddam was left in charge. After expelling him from Kuwait, Bush told the Shia to take matters into their own hands. Their uprising was crushed mercilessly. Ayatollah al-Khoei was arrested and forced to appear on television with Saddam. Two of his sons were killed.
Twelve years later there was another war, ironically not at Saddam’s instigation, that would lead to his overthrow. Some of the other former detainees were understandably keen to see justice done. But my mother and I marched against the war together. I suppose we didn’t see why Iraqis needed to suffer any more for their ruler’s sins. Just a month or so after Baghdad fell, our friend Majid al-Khoei, one of the ayatollah’s surviving sons, returned to his homeland. In April 2003, he was hacked to death by a mob instigated by a rival Shia group. In a traumatised country, blood would have blood.
Back in 1990 ordinary life resumed—with minor after-tremors. At school, I started losing my temper and got into fights. Ruhi, now a headteacher, tells me that “when a pupil’s grandparent passes away or even if the dog dies,” they are offered counselling. But in those days we just got on with it. We rarely talked about it as a family; it seemed an odd interlude, a rupture that was easily repaired—perhaps too easily.
Our only reminders were the periodic updates from the UN, which was pursuing compensation from the Iraqi government. Saddam, naturally, resisted this demand from his ungrateful guests. Eventually a cheque came in the post—something like $60,000 for my father and smaller amounts for us. (Saddam Hussein helped me buy a second-hand Fiat Punto.) By the time the money came through, though, my father Sadiq couldn’t feel any satisfaction. He had died in 2000 at the age of 55. I never talked to him about his experiences alone in Baghdad. But my mother tells me the first thing he did when he returned to London was to spend a day riding the bus round our suburban streets. Call it the banality of freedom.
