Central Command said that because records of individual prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2003 would be difficult to retrieve, military officials could not immediately confirm Namiq’s arrest or detention. “I endured the dogs and the torture, but I couldn’t stand that music,” Namiq says, without a trace of humor in his deep voice.Ī spokesman for the U.S. He was submitted to mock executions, he says, and constant, deafening rock music. He says he was hooded and beaten, and bitten by guard dogs. He says that his cell was kept dark 24 hours a day and that guards threw in buckets of water to keep it constantly wet. soldiers - including a female interrogator who told him he looked like actor Tom Selleck - questioned him daily about weapons of mass destruction and the hiding places of top aides to Hussein. Namiq says that when he was held at Abu Ghraib, U.S. He sacrificed everything he had, including his two sons, for the sake of the country.” So he started something new - jihad against the occupiers. “In his heart, he knew that everything was gone and that he was no longer president. “Saddam knew there would be a day that he would be captured and executed,” Namiq says. Namiq clearly still reveres Hussein, who was hanged in 2006. “I wanted to make the Americans feel dizzy and confused,” he says. Knowing the Americans would be analyzing the recordings for clues to Hussein’s whereabouts, Namiq says he once drove 10 miles to the city of Samarra, parked on the side of the road and recorded the sounds of urban traffic. Namiq says he and Hussein recorded them together on a small tape recorder. Hussein released several fiery speeches during the time he was in hiding, exhorting his supporters to fight the Americans. His only visitors were his sons Uday and Qusay - Namiq says he helped arrange their secret trips to the farm. Namiq says Hussein wrote to his wife and daughters but he never saw them. Namiq says that Hussein read and wrote extensively, prose and poetry, and that his writings were confiscated by the U.S. Hussein never used a phone, he says, knowing that the Americans were listening for his voice. Namiq says his family, mainly he and Qais (who declined to be interviewed), helped move Hussein among various houses in the area after the March 2003 invasion. “I won’t tell you everything,” Namiq says, over and over, during the course of a couple of hours. Four of his brothers cook and wait tables for customers watching a big flat-screen TV showing Turkish dramas and men’s volleyball. The restaurant is a small cinder-block shack, with a couple of grills and a few plastic tables set outside. Once a driver and an aide to Hussein, he has spent the past few years driving a taxi, finally saving enough to open his family restaurant a few weeks ago.Īt his restaurant on the riverbank, Namiq greets an American reporter graciously, offering grilled chicken and sweet tea on a sweltering evening. Namiq says he and Qais were arrested along with Hussein and spent a miserable six months in Abu Ghraib prison. military was searching for him, it became convinced, correctly, that he would find shelter among his Tikriti clansmen in these lush orchards of date palms and orange and pear trees. Hussein was born in a village near Tikrit, just north of this little town on the banks of the Tigris River. “He said, ‘You might be captured and tortured.’ But in our Arab tribal tradition, and by Islamic law, when someone needs help, we help him.” “He came here and he asked us for help and I said yes,” says Namiq, 41, wearing a long white dishdasha robe. But for whatever reason, Namiq now folds his tall, broad-shouldered frame into a little plastic chair, tugs on a cigarette and talks about hiding the man his family had known for decades. A map showing Saddam Hussein’s hometown and where he was captured.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |