When I graduated from Basra University in 1982, the Iraq-Iran war was waging as fierce as ever. At the time, university graduates were required to enlist in the army and would be sent to the front lines after a short period of military training. My colleagues complied with this order, but I chose not to. War for me meant you either kill or be killed — become a killer or a victim; a choice I rejected, as I could not even entertain the thought of depriving someone of their life. I decided to defy the order of joining the army.

Now, the penalty for such an act in the midst of war amounted to execution. For a few months I remained underground, constantly on the move from one hiding place to another among relatives and close friends. In 1983 I slipped to the north of Iraq to join the leftist opposition there. Later on, I was smuggled to a neighbouring country from which I flew to Copenhagen, where I have been residing since 1984.

The year 1988 marked the end of the Iran-Iraq war, which claimed more than a million Iraqis dead and missing. Two years later, Saddam Hussein embarked on another military venture by invading Kuwait, an act that prompted the US and its allies to confront him militarily. The rest is history.

I was alarmed when my wife woke me at dawn. She was crying as she was trying to tell me that the American fighter jets were bombing Baghdad. It was terrifying to see your city on the receiving end of 1,000 bombing raids every day, bombing that destroyed all the beauty of the city: bridges, souks and streets that bear the prints of my childhood. Baghdad was pulverised. The bombing spared nothing: electricity grids, sewage systems, water-treatment facilities… It was a horrible nightmare.

The nightmare was compounded by my concern for my younger brother, Sharif, who was 15 as I bid him farewell when I left the country. I learnt that he had been conscripted into the army, and now, at 23, he was with his unit in Kuwait. My brother must be under heavy bombardment, I thought, the type of relentless bombardment that was the lot of the Iraqi army in Kuwait. Even when the army retreated to Iraq in the final hours of the war, the retreating columns of tanks and vehicles were subjected to deadly punishment on what came to be known as the Highway of Death. The sight of charred bodies of people trying hopelessly to leave the burning tanks and trucks was horrifying. Thousands of civilians fled to the countryside, while hundreds of others fell victim to the bombs and missiles that did not distinguish between military and civilian targets. The bombing of the al-Amirya shelter is a case in point: over 400 people, mainly children and women, were incinerated beyond recognition.

Owing to the US bombing of telephone towers and communication centres, all communications between Iraq and the outside world were severed during the war and its immediate aftermath. Months passed without word from my family in Baghdad. Were they alive or dead? As for my brother, Sharif, I didn’t dare think of his fate. It was only some time later that my telephone rang in the dead of night. The voice at the other end was of a stranger, speaking in a Bedouin dialect. It asked if I knew someone by the name of Sharif and if he were my brother. For a moment my heart stopped beating and dark thoughts entered my mind. When I finally answered in the affirmative, the voice told me that Sharif was now a prisoner of war in Saudi Arabia, handed over by the Americans, along with thousands of Iraqi PoWs, to the Saudis.

I was overjoyed that Sharif was still alive. In our family he was the one that was playful, almost unruly, and often prankish. But my joy turned to gloom as I learnt that he would be neither released from captivity nor allowed visits from his family. The Iraqi PoWs were kept in a desert camp — a desert prison, if you will — between the Iraqi and Saudi borders. Crowded into tents, they had to endure the daily whipping of sandstorms and winds. My brother was to remain in that camp for two full years, until my petition for refugee status on his behalf was approved, whereby he was released and came to live with me in Copenhagen.

During Sharif’s first year of captivity, it was not permissible to exchange letters with him. But the thought of saving him from his captivity weighed heavily on my conscience every day, every hour, every minute. This is why I started writing my poems, in the form of letters addressed to my brother, as a means of spiritual bonding and affinity between the two of us. But also I wanted to register this human tragedy, to archive it as a cry against war. This type of pain and loss should never be experienced again by any human being.

Jamal Jumá’s poetry appears in Iraqi Poetry Today (King’s College, London)

By Jamal Jumá

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