Betrayed Page 23

  In the car was a familiar figure. It was Rob, from the CPA. He gave me a big grin. ‘You’re on your way,’ he said. ‘Took a little bit of work, but here you are.’

  As we sped from that street and began to head south, one of the Blackwater men, Ed, said: ‘You’re safe now. Everything’s under control.’

  ‘I just need one thing from you,’ said Rob, handing me a piece of paper and a tape recorder. ‘Just need you to repeat these words so we have a record that all is in order.’

  It was a simple legal document declaring that I was leaving Kurdistan—and Iraq—under my own free will. What an inner thrill I had to read those words: my own free will. At last.

  There were Kurdish checkpoints ahead at which police normally checked the identity of every person passing through. But because we were able to show that we were in an official US vehicle—the model was easily recognisable and Ed held out an ID as we approached—we were waved through without question. I just had to be sure I lay down flat across the back seat, with clothing over me. There would have been hell to pay if I, a Kurdish woman, was found travelling in an American military vehicle.

  I was told I would be flown to Baghdad from a military compound set up at Mosul airport. The area was surrounded by razor wire and sandbags, just like the compound in Dohuk, and on the runway I could see a Hercules aircraft. I couldn’t believe that this was happening. It was all so fast and unexpected. I’d left my father’s home for work that morning and now I was in a US compound in Mosul, staring at an aircraft that would soon be flying me to Baghdad on my way out of this wretched place.

  But it was not going to happen immediately. I was told I might have to wait for a day or two while final arrangements were made for my transportation. I was shown to a temporary building, like a trailer, which would be my quarters until everything was ready for my flight. It was fitted out with everything that I might need—including novels written in English and even a Harry Potter book! I felt as though I was already back in the West. There were snacks and a small TV and a single bed. Creature comforts indeed.

  Opening the bag the men at the Dohuk base had given me, I found they had thought of everything for a girl making an emergency escape; personal medical items, a nightgown, toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner, comb, T-shirt, a notepad and pen, a small hand-towel, a packet of chips and a small container of juice.

  Looking through these simple items I felt a great wave of love overwhelming me—their love for me and mine for them.

  I dined with some of the Americans that night in the food hall, enjoying a choice of sausages, hot dogs, Asian food, fruits and all kinds of deserts. To my delight, one of the soldiers who was eating there had been based in Dohuk and we managed to have a quiet chat. He, like the others, was sad that I was leaving, but at the same time delighted for my sake. As instructed I had to pretend that I was an Iraqi journalist, but I had to make sure I kept my distance from two or three other journalists, Europeans, who were staying at the base, waiting to take the same flight to Baghdad. I might have had trouble bluffing my way past their questions about who I worked for and what stories I’d been covering and so on. Despite ensuring I stayed away from the other journalists, I was happy to be shown around the base by one of the soldiers—a move for which I was to be criticised later for showing myself when my escape was so top secret that only a few people knew about it.

  As this was wartime, there were no set flight schedules. Aircraft had to come and go when it was decided everything was perfectly safe and flight paths were revealed at the last minute, so the following morning I was still told that my departure was on hold. I was uneasy about having to wait around.

  A third day arrived. It was then that one of my escorts, a soldier called Donnie, said to me over breakfast:

  ‘I don’t know what that bitch has against you.’

  I stared at him. ‘That bitch who’s in admin,’ he explained, although I did not know who he was talking about. ‘She’s a Kurdish American but she has all the say-so around here. She’s refusing to let you leave.’

  He paused for a moment. Then said: ‘She’s insisting you be returned to your family.’

  NINETEEN

  I had tried to imagine what was happening back in Dohuk when failed to return home that night. As it turned out my guesswork was very close to reality.

  My cousin the taxi driver, I learned later, had arrived at the headquarters of the US Army’s 416th Civil Affairs Battalion, where I had been employed, to take me home. When I did not show up, he made inquiries, only to receive shrugs. No-one knew where I was. He drove to my father’s house and reported my absence. My father waited impatiently, but whether he had already pulled out that piece of cable again or reached this time for his gun to blast me down at the sight of me I don’t know.

  What I do know is that my planned escape placed every single American soldier in Dohuk and Mosul in grave danger. At midnight that night, following my failure to arrive home, my father, my cousin the taxi driver and an uncle turned up at the compound with weapons looking for me. The soldiers at the guard post said they knew nothing—they hadn’t seen me and had no idea where I could be.

  One of my relatives—and I suspect it was my father—then said: If any Americans were involved in her disappearance, we will turn Dohuk into another Fallujah.’

  This was a reference to four months earlier when the mutilated bodies of four US contractors were dragged through the streets of the town west of Baghdad before two of them were strung from a bridge. At around the same time, five US soldiers were killed when a bomb exploded under their armoured personnel carrier. People took to the streets chanting: ‘Fallujah is the graveyard of Americans.’

  My father paced up and down outside the 416th compound declaring: ‘If I find her, I will kill her. She is going to die this time. She will receive no mercy.’ He and other family members had then toured the streets of Dohuk searching for me, pounding on doors of relatives and neighbours, their obsession at finding me driving them to ignore the time of night as they startled people in their beds.

  What I had not been aware of in the lead-up to my escape from Dohuk was the official documents that had been passing between the Americans and the Australian Embassy—known then as the Australian Representative Office. The CPA, in an official report to the Australians, had outlined my predicament which had come to light in my discussions with Rob at the CPA. The official note stated that my father was in the process of arranging a marriage for me within a month. It went on to say that I had ‘informed the interviewing officer that she is not a virgin and that because of her age and background it is likely she will be forced to undergo a physical examination at a local hospital as a prelude to the marriage ceremony. Whether as a result of that examination or on her wedding night, she says when it is discovered she is not a virgin, her father, whom she describes as “aggressively traditional”, will kill her to save the family honour. She claims she knows of other young women who have been murdered by their families for similar reasons. This conforms to anecdotal information known to CPA Dohuk staff … her manner was composed but trembling. She wept briefly at several points during the interview. She appeared wholly credible and under great emotional stress.’

  The report went on to say that elements of my story were believed to be true to the extent that I knew them. ‘She appears to have a credible fear of physical abuse and clearly fears for her life.’

  Rob had then informed the Australians that he was in detailed discussions on how best to make me ‘vanish’ without raising the alarm until I had, in fact, disappeared. ‘The fewer moving parts and the fewer people involved, the better,’ he wrote in an email.

  The Australian Embassy, furnished with the vital passport details that I had written down before my mother confiscated my passport, placed my case in the hands of Stephen Rowe, the Consul General in Baghdad. This was not the same official who had hung up on me when I had called in desperation earlier. After making their own inquiries into my
background, the embassy had agreed to give me consular protection and issue me with emergency travel documents. All I had to do—the same insistence as before—was to get to Baghdad. But this time I had the Americans on my side. They had agreed to fly me to the war-torn capital.

  That was the plan. But then had come that potentially fatal snag. The Kurdish-American administration officer in Mosul was determined that I should not be flown to Baghdad but returned to Dohuk and back to my family—and my certain death.

  Fierce arguments broke out, involving the administration officer and Rob and others who had been involved in my attempted escape, over whether I should be forced to return to Dohuk or allowed to get aboard the Hercules plane to Baghdad.

  On Wednesday, 2 June, 2004—1093 days or 26,232 hours since my nightmare in Kurdistan had begun—a C-147 Hercules took off from Mosul. On board were US military personnel, some journalists and… me! I was on my way home!

  An email from Donnie, who had been my guardian at the Mosul compound, told Rob what had happened that day.

  ‘Just got word back from Mr Rowe that they met her on the tarmac and escorted her to their office where she was given her passport and a ticket to Down Under.’

  Rob had replied: ‘Whew! Now all we have to do is keep our own idiots from broadcasting the details.’

  I owe my life to the Americans. They were just fantastic. They had gone out of their way, risked their lives to help me and had asked for nothing in return, not even a repayment of the cost of driving me from Dohuk, the manpower hours, the flight to Baghdad.

  The Australians sent me a bill for flying me home to Sydney and for sending a representative to meet me en route in Bahrain. She was a lovely woman who gave me some women’s magazines to read and asked me what I was going to do when I got back to Sydney.

  ‘After living like a nun for the past three years,’ I said, ‘I’m going to go swimming naked at Bondi Beach!’

  I didn’t mind having to pay the bill for my fare home to Sydney. If I’d had a million dollars, I would have gladly handed it over. I wondered what the reaction would be when my grandmother and my aunties finally found the key to unlock that secret drawer in my hastily abandoned closet. My diary with my descriptions of them, my saucy underwear, a photo of David and me together and, oh yes, that raunchy movie I was looking after for the neighbours. I allowed the smile to spread across my face.

  The sun was breaking as my flight touched down at Sydney airport. I wanted to just hang around the airport, listening to the Aussie accents all around me. A friend picked me up and gave me a place to stay. My nightmare was finally over.

  My mother remarried. It was no surprise to learn that her new husband was none other than my Tom Jones look-alike lawyer cousin, whom I suspected she planned to marry when she moved me and my sister and brother to Germany. As for my young sister and brother, I’ve lost touch with them. The ordeal which had almost cost me my life in Kurdistan had killed off my relationship with my siblings.

  I’ve remained in touch with the Americans who helped me. Without their help I would never have made it back to the West and would probably not be alive today.

  And oh, did I go swimming naked at Bondi Beach?

  I certainly did—but that’s another story.

  EPILOGUE

  I have vowed to do all that I can to help women who have found themselves forced into marriage or who live in fear of death simply because they have lost their virginity. Archaic honour killings must stop but it requires enormous international pressure on those countries where it is practised.

  Even as I came towards the end of writing this, my story, I learned with sadness of two shocking cases in Pakistan.

  Three teenage girls who tried to defy centuries-old traditions by announcing they intended to marry men of their choice were driven into a remote area of Baluchistan and gunned down. While they were not fatally shot, they were thrown, bleeding, into a ditch and then buried alive. Two elderly women who tried to rescue them met with the same fate.

  Shortly after reports of that appalling incident reached the West came another tragic story from Pakistan. A girl forced into marriage at the age of nine to a man aged 45, went to court in the Punjabi city of Sahiwal to seek—and win—an annulment. She was now aged 17 and had spent eight years of her childhood as an enslaved wife and mother. As she left the court building she was surrounded by a group of men employed by her parents and shot dead.

  It’s all very well for religious groups, yes, Muslim organisations among them, to condemn these barbaric acts, but action, not words, is required.

  I believe I would not be alive today to tell my story had fate not been on my side and the Americans had not helped me escape from the prison that had been my home. As an Australian, I should not have been there in the first place, but betrayal is part of a culture that believes honour is more important than the gift of life itself.

  I wept when I read of the latest honour killings. There will, I have no doubt, be others. But I hope my story will help to provoke action that will chip away at ancient customs and bring freedom to all women who are forced to wear a veil, which for them is nothing more than a symbol of physical and moral slavery.

  The last ever photo of me and my sister Bojeen and my mother during one of their visits to Dohuk

  Me with the cuddly bear given to me by Diyar, who was desperate to marry me. My right eye is still bruised from a recent beating by my father.

  I wasted many hours in the front yard of my father’s house—here I am wearing a dress I made and embroidered to pass the time.

  This bride (second from left) was tied down and forced to have sex with her husband on their wedding night.

  One day with my great aunt Fatima, I visited the tomb of my father’s tribal leader.

  Dohuk, showing the main highway and the mountains surrounding the city.

  a typical Kurdish mountain village.

  Me (second from right at rear) with university students in Dohuk—a mixture of Catholics and Muslims.

  this photo of me and Abdulla, whose wandering hands I was always trying to avoid, was taken during Ramadan-Eid, a time of forgiving!

  In the centre is my supposed ‘dying’ grandfather. On the left is aunt Mahdia and my mother is on the right.

  I wore red to brighten my day when I posed for this picture with my good friends, the sisters from across the road.

  At a neighbour’s house on the day of my father’s wedding to Jamilla. I’m in the middle.

  In the men’s room at the home of the sisters across the street. This is where I made my ‘forbidden’ phone calls.

  a curtain divides the men from the women at the wedding of one of my closest friends. Notice that no-one smiles. I am fifth from the left.

  Me and my cousin Areeman on the day I cut my hair short when I found it was falling out.

  My father in his garden, listening to news about the US invasion of Iraq.

  My grandmother.

  Me and my cousin from Texas, Vahel, who came to Dohuk as an interpreter with the US military.

  My father, in white, with his new wife Jamilla, at a cousin’s wedding. I am second from the left.

  Me with my friend Shilan as we prepare for her engagement party.

  On one of my mother’s visits to Dohuk with my sister Bojeen, we went to a juice bar with my aunt Vian. On this occasion, like others, I pleaded in vain for my mother to take me out of Kurdistan.

  My friends the Americans outside the compound in Dohuk, where I worked.

  I accompanied two of the Americans as an interpreter to a barbecue in the hills, where we were greeted by the village chief.

  At a work barbecue—the soldiers were never without their weapons, even while they ate.

  One day I accompanied one of the soldiers into town to interpret as he shopped for rugs.

  Kurdish soldiers working for the US military.

  Free-almost! Waiting in a Baghdad hotel on my way home, still shocked by my experience.

 
The aircraft that flew me out of Mosul.

  A fond momento photo of me and one of the US soldiers who was so kind to me.

  On my way home to Australia, I was met by an Australian diplomatic official during a stop-over in the Gulf.

  The weddings continue. A recent photo of my cousin Vasheen’s wedding—and his 14—year old bride. My mother is second from the right.