Story

Anfal Street

One breezy, devastating night, one could hear the sounds of the seagulls squawking like a woman singing opera, spread all over the villages of Kurdistan in mid March 1988. The breezy weather continued with north easterly winds, coming from all directions almost causing the windows and doors of the tiny, village houses to break open. Trees surrounding the streets had also gone old with dead autumn leaves hanging over the brown-like branches like the face of an elderly wrinkled man. The houses felt uninhabited and haunted, especially that on lonely Anfal Streets.

Towards the end of this street, close by a small, arched deli was an old yellow cottage where Leila lived with her husband, four sons and three daughters. Leila was a bright, young woman with long plaited, brown hair. She was an ordinary Kurdish housewife and devoted, loving mother. Despite her poor lifestyle, Leila was always humble and happy, enjoying her life with her family and baby boy, Adam. Although she was a fair mother, and loved all her children equally, Adam had a special place in her heart. When he was only one week old, Adam got tremendously sick and Leila feared his life would end. After days of constant praying to God, fortunately, Leila's wishes were answered and Adam miraculously survived, and has been a healthy boy since then. Who would have known that Leila would have to pray once again?

On one particularly dark night in mid March, the air on Anfal Street was covered with the smoke of heavy cigarettes which spread amongst the suburb. The night was especially darker and quieter than any night before, as if death had walked the streets of Kurdistan.  Suddenly, at midnight, a dozen of aggressively racist Arab soldiers approached Leila's neighbourhood in trucks bigger than any seen before, armed with guns and covered in masks.

They broke down every door on Anfal Street, until they passed the deli and got to Leila's yellow little cottage. Refusing to listen to her screams and pleas, they took her three eldest boys and her husband, tied them down and dragged them out of the house and onto their massive trucks. As with all other mothers of the village, Leila did not understand what was happening and could do nothing else but scream. "Do what you want to us, but have mercy and don’t snatch our hearts away!" Leila said fearfully, but the trucks drove away leaving tyre marks on the dry, dull concrete road, leaving her and all the mothers with no explanation. "What have we done? What are they going to do to us?" screamed the men of the suburb, their voices slowly fading away.

Suddenly, the street was moaning as if a funeral had just taken place. Thinking that was the horrible enough, Leila was shocked to discover that the remaining women and children of the village were swiftly being herded onto another truck. Knowing that she, her daughters and Adam would be the next victims, Leila feared the worst was yet to come. Without allowing them to take any extra clothes or clean water to drink, Leila and what remained of her family were forced onto a truck surrounded by crying women and children, barely having any space to breathe. Although the trip actually took a couple of hours, it felt endless through Leila's mind, because her thoughts of what was yet to come were going to places she could never have imagined. It even got to the point when she thought murder was the easy way out. She felt that she had to expect the unexpected, and was trying her best to stay strong for her family.
After hours of agonising herself, the truck came to a halt, and the women and children were forced to jump off into what seemed like a prison in the middle of nowhere. They were taken to the Topzawa Army base; it was a haunted, ghostly place, with an infinite number of diary entries from previous political prisoners covering its bare walls.

As Leila walked through the smelly uninviting corridors of the prison with her three daughters and Adam, she realised that her family needed her the most right now, and that her screams and tears were useless after this point. Looking around at all the other mother's faces, Leila knew that she was not the only person thinking that.

Leila, her family and probably hundreds, if not thousands of other women and children were all crammed into one giant prison cell. Without any food or water provided to them, the soldiers closed the doors, as the smell of starvation crept in.

Days went by, and Leila, her daughters, and Adam were continuously losing their energy and health. The food provided was old and dirty, and water was undrinkable. Diseases and other illnesses spread quickly due to the little space with minimal oxygen that the prisoners were provided with. The terminally sick and dying prisoners were provided with no medical attention either.

Day by day, Adam just got sicker and weaker. He refused to eat the food the Iraqi soldiers provided, and Leila was unable to breastfeed him because of her lack of nutrition. He lost lots of weight within one or two weeks, and Leila's worries got even worse. He started to feel nauseous and had constant diarrhoea and was vomiting. He would constantly cry, sometimes until his breath was nearly gone. Watching this, Leila would plead the Arab soldiers to take her son to the nearest hospital, or to provide him with any sort of medication. Unfortunately, her begging was pointless.

One sad evening, after hours of crying and whaling, Adam was slowly running out of oxygen. Leila constantly tried to feed him, or put him sleep but nothing was working. He would not leave his mother's arms, and was constantly pulling at her clothes in an attempt to stop the pain he was feeling. After a while, his crying was getting less and the baby was calming down; his energy was fading away, almost as if he was ready to give up. Sensing this, Leila looked into her baby's eyes with fear and terror, and watched as Adam lay his last moment in life on her precious arms.

For the next couple of minutes, Leila just watched as Adam stopped breathing. She could not interpret what had happened, until her daughters started crying in front of her and she sensed this was real. She screamed her lungs out, until daylight came up.

The next morning, the soldiers forcefully took Adam's dead body away from Leila's arms and dumped it outside of the prison. Feeling paralysed and heartbroken, Leila dragged her feet along the concrete floor to a window to find her son's dead body. Not wanting to let go, she watched as his body lay there, so helpless and lifeless at the same time. Suddenly, she could see about twenty German Sheppard’s approach Adam. Not understanding what she was seeing, Leila cried and screamed for the prisoners to move his body, but no one listened.
"I looked outside and saw legs and hands of my son in the mouths of dogs. The dogs were eating my son", she said.  

After one long, hard month, Leila and her daughters, still devastated over Adam's death, kept each other together and prayed that the rest of their family was safe. Leila's anxiety and hardships still existed even after her son's death, and lived everyday with no news of her husband and sons. This continued for a few more months of starvation and hardship, and everyday was an even harder struggle for life. However, Leila never stopped praying, and was hopeful that one day God will answer her prayers.

One hopeful morning, on the 9th of September, the Prime Minster of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, issued a general amnesty to the Kurds. He stated that the women, children and elderly in the prison were to be freed. Unfortunately, what was meant to be outstanding news was not so entirely, as the families could not just leave and go home anymore. The Iraqi Army had over taken four thousand Kurdish villages, completely destroying the homes and memories of these families. Leila then decided that her and her daughters will resettle in the Chamchamal district.

Days after Leila's release from pain and destitution, she tried to learn of the fate of her husband and three older sons. One morning, she was informed that the men who disappeared in the tragic disaster were never found. She also discovered that many were killed and were buried in massive graves in the desert along the Kuwait border. In this situation, most women prayed that their husbands and sons were still in prison, and that was the lesser of two evils at the time. Similarly, Leila still believed in her heart that her husband and three older sons were still alive, possibly still in prison. She would cry all the time, hoping to reunite her family one day.

After years of praying and hoping, Leila once said miserably "I have not slept well since my husband and my sons were taken from me. Please beloved God above let me know if they are dead or alive, then I will sleep in peace. My head is filled with terrible nightmares and thoughts day and night. The day I die is the day I will forget that the dogs ate my son's dead body".

Based on a true event that happened in March 1988 when the former Iraqi Prime Minster Dictator Saddam Hussein executed, buried alive, and poisoned over 3 million innocent Kurds for no reason. Simply because he did.

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