So this blog post is something really personal to me and it's a way I can express my feelings without having to 'water it down' for people... I will speak about growing up in London while having most of my family in Iraq and having nobody that really knew much about what was happening around me.
My mum, dad and brother left Baghdad, Iraq in 1991 to escape the the Gulf war, just 2 years after the Iran-Iraq war had finished and over a million people on both sides had been lost.
They mainly left for my brother because they were worried about their safety and who wants to raise their child in a war zone? So they stayed in Bulgaria for 6 months (random I know) before they decided to come to London, I'm not sure what the actual dates they came here were but I assume it was the end of summer 1991.
Anway, I was born here and yadee yadee ya, let's skip a few years but let me briefly say that while I was growing up nobody knew where Iraq actually was. I remember telling people when I was like 7/8 and them sort of just being like "where?" (it was only after 9/11 that people really knew where Iraq was).
While I was growing up, the news was always on (and still is), mainly because my family could only really connect to our country by doing that but to also keep updated on the 13 year financial and trade embargo imposed by the United Nations Security Council on Iraq.
It was after 9/11 where we got really worried... I mean my parents had lived through 5 wars already, and now they were away from their families so they couldn't even make sure everything and everybody was ok. I was in year 4 at this point but I remember the confusion that everybody around me felt and my whole family was dreading what was going to happen after it. Loads of stuff about Iraq sparked off from this incident, shit about the Al-Qaeda and all that and that's when I knew something was going to happen.
It was really tense for the next year and a half and as it got closer to 2003 we were getting more worried and protests were being organised. I obviously went to all of them with my brother, mum and our family friends. It didn't come as a surprise that shitty Bush and Blair decided to go on with the war to supposedly 'liberate' the Iraqi people. "Operation Iraqi Freedom" as they said. Complete bullshit.
I remember watching BBC news in early March 2003 (aged 10) and I called my mum saying that they're definitely going to fight us, I think my mum thought that because I was young she could just sort of protect me by saying every thing was fine.. She told me to not watch the news and to not worry. Just before calling my mum the news report showed a woman in Iraq crying because her son had been shot, she was calling for freedom and was begging for the war not to proceed, and this is the moment I stopped watching the news because the prick of a news reporter suggested that she may be lying. And that's when I knew that the war was definitely going to happen.
So the war finally begun on March the 19th 2003 and we had done all we could against it. Millions of us marched globally, 3 Million people marched in Rome, over a million in London... but it was a definite war that was actually pretty predictable.
Anyway the whole reason i'm writing this post is because I went to Iraq for the first time in December 2003 and I haven't spoken about it much, what I saw, what I felt, my experiences ect...
Ok December 2003...
We flew out from Heathrow airport to Amman airport on the 9th of December (there were no direct flights to Baghdad for a few years, not sure how many though but I know the airport opened in 2009). This was the first time I had been on an airplane and it was exciting but I was so nervous, I had never been to any Arab country before and it would be weird seeing family that I didn't know. When we got to Amman we got in a car to Baghdad, the driver was mental! It took us over 20 hours to get to Baghdad because he would just randomly stop off to buy some falafels hahaha. He was the fastest driver too... I remember the atmosphere, it was warm, there were loads of white GMC's driving to Baghdad and loads of checkpoints.
I slept most of the journey but woke up to see American soldiers questioning my family, I remember jumping up and saying that I could speak English, I wasn't scared at all, they weren't as bad as I thought they would be but of course they wouldn't be, we were British citizens. We brought our camera and video camera with us and I remember when we went for lunch I was showing the driver how to use them.
So after all the checkpoints, crazy holes in the road, dead foxes on the street and tanks surrounding us we finally got to my dad's mums house. All my family were waiting for us there and when the car pulled up my aunty ran out (I thought she was my gran lool) and brought us in the house. Baghdad was a beautiful city, we have palm trees in our gardens and they sleep on the roof in summer, I fell in love with the place and I know it sounds weird but when I was younger I used to cry to my mum saying "I want to go home". I would be at home and I didn't know what I meant by 'home' until I went to Iraq and realised that even though I wasn't born there, that was my home.
We got into the house and I met everybody, it was full of loads of tears and laughter and chatting over each other. You can imagine how much you would have to talk about after not seeing your family for 12 years. We were invited to a new house everyday for a massive dinner celebrating us being there and we stayed in Baghdad for a month. We went to my mums house after and saw all her family, it was just the same thing again. It was weird seeing my mum run to her mum, as a child you always think your parents are invincible but I saw her as a little girl just weeping in her mums arms. I may have only been 10 but I really do remember everything from that trip so well.
Surprisingly that was the best month I had ever had in my life, and I still think that to this day. It doesn't mean it wasn't hard, I mainly felt guilt. I felt bad that I lived a really good and safe life and we abandoned them in war. I felt guilty for my parents because they left their homes and families and every sort of familiar thing for us.
Other than all the parties we had, I wanted to explore Baghdad and obviously as a 10 year old that wasn't going to be easy but I didn't care. I begged my parents to let me go to my cousins universities with them. I went with my cousin, studying medicine, to her university; The University of Baghdad. I sat a biology lecture with her and my Arabic is not very good but I wanted to make her and her friends laugh so I erm... called her professor a 'rotten fish' in Arabic. Which came as quite a surprise. Anyway, I decided to stop distracting them and my cousin just brought me around her uni, introduced me to some friends and we went to get our pictures taken. I've never got my cheeks squeezed so many times in a month.
I went to my other cousins university later that week, I forgot what one but she was studying Engineering. When she was in the lecture I decided to stay outside and speak to the guard. I was asking him how life was, I felt so English when I was over there, you know that kind of "Oh, you live in Baghdad. Wow. Erm. How is it? Like how do you feel?" kind of awkwardness... Anyway on our way home this man honked at my cousin and I put my middle finger up at him like some brave little shit. He stopped his car and we just ran, I got told off after because I could have gotten us in serious trouble, but oh well! We escaped fast enough :)
I don't remember the order of these things but while this was all happening I was staying at 3 different places, my dad's sides house, mum's sides house and mum's sisters place. My mum was organising my uncle's wedding, she wanted it to happen while we were there. My aunty took me and my brother out for ice cream in Mansour and while we were on the way I saw a man run out of his house with a Kalashnikov and I just heard loads of screams. Me and my brother put our heads down and I remember my aunty just cracking up at us being so scared. Supposedly that stuff happened all the time...
My dad, his brother, his nephew and my brother went to Najaf (without telling me) to visit our families graves. There's like little houses where everybody from the same house is buried and my dad knew that if I found out he was going there, I would have to come.
How could I forget! On the 13th December, literally just 3 days after we arrived, Saddam Hussein was caught. The whole city was alive, except for the ba'ath party supporters. Saddam had hurt most of the Iraqi population so the whole country was really happy. I remember running outside the house and seeing loads of people clap and cry and hearing loads of gun shots for celebration.
I spent New Year's in Iraq and I organised a new years party for both my families, it was at my mums house and loads of family came. I wanted to make them happy and I know a party won't exactly do that but it looked like they all had a good time, I have pictures from New Years and I would have scanned them but my scanner is not working.
On the 4th of Jan my uncle got married, it was a lovely celebration but it was coming closer to us leaving. The day before I had the weirdest feeling in my stomach, I didn't want to leave at all and I was worried. I remember my grandma giving me a bucket beside my bed in case I was sick but when I was downstairs my cousin stormed in the house with blood everywhere. I went upstairs and saw her mum with her and some ice and I didn't know what had happen, I felt even worse now. It came to 6am and the car was outside. I went to kiss everybody goodbye in their sleep, i've never struggled so much to say goodbye and I remember my grandma holding me saying that this was the last time she would see me. We never knew that things would have got so bad over the years.
As the car drove off, I cried. And I cry now because I haven't been back and we've lost people. We drove to Amman and stayed there for a night, it is a beautiful city but I was crying the whole time. From Baghdad to Amman, the flat that we rented in Amman to the Airport, Amman to Heathrow, Heathrow to 'home' I cried.
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