Going to Palestine Via Iraq

BAGHDAD -- Among the many thousands of Palestinian refugees who made Iraq their home, Ahmed Rahal was one of the most driven.

From an impoverished childhood in the West Bank, he rose to the pinnacle of Saddam Hussein’s army, becoming the first Palestinian to hold the rank of general. Every step of the way, he had one dream: returning to an independent Palestine. The dream sustained him, but also blinded him.

He cast his lot with a ruthless dictator, and did his bidding. He followed Hussein because he was the only leader who fostered the hope that a pan-Arab movement would create a Palestinian state and welcomed Palestinians to Iraq while they awaited his grand plan’s fulfillment.

Now that plan lies in ruins.

These days, Rahal, bitter and without remorse, sits alone in his darkened Baghdad house -- the generator turned on as little as possible to save money.

He sent his wife and five children to Jordan months ago but may never be able to join them because of his past. He avidly follows the attacks of anti-American insurgents on Al Jazeera television and feels a kinship with them.

His reversal of fortune reflects one consequence of Hussein’s ouster that has passed largely unnoticed outside the region. For decades, many Palestinians who held fast to their hopes for an independent state relied on Iraq’s staunch support. But Hussein’s pan-Arab campaign proved a dead end for their aspirations.

The arc of the 51-year-old Rahal’s life traces the rise of the Palestinian cause in Iraq, its gradual distortion as Hussein embarked on grandiose nationalist adventures against Iran and Kuwait, and its recent collapse.

The bitter irony for Rahal is that he staked everything on reversing the effects of one occupation, only to find himself trapped in another. In a recent conversation, Rahal, a lean man with carefully combed thinning hair, shrugged in an exaggerated gesture, as if to suggest that Iraq’s take-over by coalition forces meant nothing to him. But his words belied that.

“You have broken the whole Iraq, and not just Iraq but Palestine too,” he said as he sat in his living room, an electrical generator, a sign of his once favored status, rumbling in the background. “Now the West can dictate any resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict it wants, because the only one who had the cause of Palestinian independence at its heart was the Baath Party.”

After years in pursuit of his national aspirations, Rahal is further than ever from his homeland.

“We are living a nightmare,” he said. “There is no future for my children, there is no future for the Arabs. We will live as slaves.”

Now, Rahal must pin his hopes for an independent state on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process -- but an agreement and safe passage for former fighters are probably a long way off.

The story of Ahmed Rahal and his six brothers and sisters reflects the extremes of the Palestinian diaspora -- its enormous achievements and its degrading defeats.

His eldest brother, Khadar Hussein, became an oncologist, moved to the United States and has a successful practice in Oklahoma City. But the rest of the family has wandered through the Arab world for much of their lives, looking for a home. Four are settled now in Jordan, and a fifth lives in Bethlehem, in the West Bank. Their 90-year-old father lives in Jordan, too, waiting for Ahmed, the youngest, to come home.

One sister, Mazuza, who lives in Jordan, captures the family’s longing for the Palestine of memory and myth. The family’s village has become its city on the hill, a golden place. “I have heard Artouf is paradise,” she said, referring to the village her family was forced to flee and she has never seen.

Artouf today is a heavily industrialized area, the small stone houses and fenced grazing lands entirely gone. But that is not the Rahals’ Artouf.

“I imagine it has orchards, plums, peaches and oranges and mountains,” she said. “My father had sheep there and olive groves.”

Unable to return, the Rahal family has been drawn in two directions -- the one taken by Khadar and the one taken by Ahmed. Khadar turned west to a world where education could trump politics. Ahmed turned east and took up arms, but could not shoot his way back home.

*

Born in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Jordan Valley, Ahmed lived in his eldest brother’s shadow. Khadar was the family’s academic star and, as a boy, its radical.

When Ahmed was 9, he looked on admiringly as Khadar joined the youth wing of the Baath Party and was arrested for posting an inflammatory proclamation against Jordan’s King Hussein on a police station wall. “You know he is the reason I joined,” Ahmed said, adding with a touch of pride, “He was putting the poster up when they caught him.”

But Khadar Hussein dropped all involvement with the party during college. Ahmed Rahal remained a member for decades until the party was dissolved this year when the Americans arrived in Iraq.

Adrift at the end of high school in the sprawling refugee city of Zarqa, Rahal fled Jordan, where the family would forever be refugees, and in 1969 went to the newly welcoming country of Iraq; a few years later, many family members followed.

Iraq’s pan-Arab ideology fit well with Rahal’s Palestinian loyalties. At the time, the lack of Arab unity was widely perceived as responsible for the loss of Palestine to the then-2-decade-old state of Israel. The Baath Party philosophy dominant in the 1950s and 1960s emphasized a secular Arab nationalism and opposition to colonial rule.

For the first time, Rahal felt he belonged.

“To be Baath was to be part of a movement. It was nationwide, people-led, and it fought for one land, liberation and brotherhood of all Arabs,” Rahal said, repeating with fervor the rhetoric he learned as a young man but that in recent decades became nothing more than empty Hussein propaganda.

He joined a branch of the Palestine Liberation Organization there and enrolled in the country’s military academy -- its West Point. In military sciences, Rahal found his metier, going on to attend postgraduate seminars in military engineering, bridge building, mine laying, bombs and explosives.

Those were heady days. Young Palestinian fighters had a cause and the financial backing of Iraq. A war was gearing up in Lebanon in whose outcome they had a major stake.

Eager to use his recently gained military expertise, Rahal left for southern Lebanon in early 1974. The civil war in that nation was a brutal fight between guerrilla factions of the PLO based in Lebanon and Christian Lebanese militias. It widened into a broader war.

Looking back, he thinks his stay in Lebanon was the happiest period of his life. Largely unburdened by commitments to family, he could give his all to his first love.

“I was fighting for Palestine,” he recalled with a wistful smile. “It was the best of times. We had a mission.”

Rahal joined the Arab Liberation Front -- the arm of the PLO that subscribed to Baathist ideology and had close ties to Iraq -- and began to draw the attention of his superiors. Recognizing his potential as a guerrilla commander, the Arab Liberation Front selected him for special training at the Red Banner Military School in Odessa, in what was then the Soviet Union.

Rahal is proud that he was selected and shows a visitor his graduation portrait. The 10 young PLO commanders -- dressed in suits, clean-shaven and very young -- look soberly at the camera. In the center of the group are their instructors, two middle-aged, broad-faced Slavs in military uniforms.

The course completed, Rahal returned to southern Lebanon and quickly gained a reputation as an exemplary fighter.

“He was always going here and there, visiting fighters in their bases in the mountains. He would sleep with them outdoors, in huts, wherever they were,” said Ratib Imleh, the acting director-general of the West Bank-based Arab Liberation Front. “He was not an ordinary fighter -- he was an original leader.”

Those days ended abruptly in May 1982 when the PLO was expelled from Lebanon.

For most PLO fighters, it was a moment of choices. They could go to Algeria, to Tunisia, to Iraq or try to get into Europe.

Rahal never thought about going anywhere other than Baghdad. “My family was in Iraq, my brothers, my parents,” he said with a shrug. So was his wife, Buthaina, an Iraqi of Palestinian origin, who also had been a Baath Party activist.

Rather than starting from scratch, as he would have elsewhere, in Iraq he knew he would have a job -- a salaried position in the Iraqi army -- a house in a solid middle-class neighborhood and, because he was a Palestinian, status.

But more than that, he believed the road to an independent Palestine ran through Baghdad.

“I started my life in a clear way with my focus on Palestine,” he said. “I could not change it.”

*

On his return from Lebanon, he barely stopped in Baghdad long enough to embrace his wife and pack some fresh clothes. Within 72 hours, he was racing to the southern front of the Iran-Iraq war -- the hot, humid, marshy region near the border.

Unlike the conflict in Lebanon, the war with Iran required a willingness to kill hundreds of soldiers at a time, over and over. Rahal justified his role with the rationale that he was fighting to end the occupation of territory in his adopted homeland. And indeed, Iraq was becoming home.

“I’m a Palestinian, but my second country is Iraq, which embraced me when no other place would,” Rahal said as he thumbed through a book with maps of the Iran-Iraq border, pointing out his battles.

As waves of Iranian soldiers advanced toward the southern Iraqi city of Basra, Rahal helped map one of the larger minefields, charting a path through the middle for Iraqis to get in and out. Iraqi soldiers, attacking from either side, drove the Iranians into the minefield. Hundreds were blown up while others who had found the path down the middle were picked off by Iraqi gunfire.

“I saw so many soldiers killed there. They were lying like matches on the ground,” recalled Rahal.

The slaughter of war disturbed Rahal, and after an Iraqi victory at Huwaiza where thousands were killed, he volunteered to bury the bodies of the Iranian dead. Under Islamic law, the dead must be promptly interred -- in the humid heat of southern Iraq, it was all the more urgent. “I had almost 30 trucks,” he said. “It took us a month.”

Looking closely at the Iranians, he saw that many were so young they could barely heft the rifles they carried.

“It was hard and sad, but what could I do?” he said. “They came toward me to kill me. If we didn’t kill them, they would kill us.”

Later in the war, he was posted to Haj Omran, a border town in a mountainous area of northern Iraq and a site of vicious fighting. The same region contains the town of Halabja, where Saddam Hussein’s forces gassed 5,000 Kurds, many of them civilians, whom Hussein accused of siding with the Iranians.

Although the use of chemical weapons is largely undisputed, Rahal alternately defended it as a humane form of warfare and denied the gassing ever happened. He never saw a chemical weapon himself, he said.

“The Kurds were fighting with the Iranians, side by side against Iraq,” said Rahal, who was named a major general in 2000 in recognition of his dedicated service to Hussein’s regime. “So any man could use any method to defend his country, and this was the only way.”

Still, in the humid heat of the Basra marshes and the bitter cold of the snow-covered Kurdish mountains, it was a childhood memory that kept him resolute until the war ended in August 1988.

“There is a small cemetery for Iraqi armed fighters in Jenin [in the West Bank]. It is for those who fought for the Palestinians in 1948.... Every year they had a celebration, a sort of memorial day when they laid flowers on the graves, and I went on that day with my father to read the Koran there. Perhaps I will be buried there.”

*

Rahal returned from the front to a changed country. Hundreds of thousands of men had been killed in the war, and Baghdad, the city of sidewalk cafes and artist studios, was falling into disrepair.

Its decline matched his own sense of having come to the end of his run. Without a war to fight, it was harder to tell himself he was working for the Palestinian cause.

It hit home that his fighting days were behind him in 1990 during a family vacation in Jordan. On Aug. 2, he awoke to headlines that Iraq had invaded Kuwait.

Aghast that he was so far from the action, he bundled his family into the car and raced for the border, expecting to find orders to the front waiting on his Baghdad doorstep.

But when he arrived home, there were no orders to fight. Instead, Hussein sent him to Kuwait to assess the status of Palestinians there, who because of the perception that they were sympathetic to Iraq were being targeted by Kuwaitis furious about the invasion.

Without a physical battle to fight, Rahal took an increasingly large role in representing and promoting the Palestinian cause in Iraq; part of the job was blind support for Hussein.

He appeared on television to proselytize for the Palestinian cause, he raised funds for Palestinians in Iraq and organized pro-Palestinian parades and rallies -- events Hussein favored as a way to fan anti-Israeli sentiments and, by extension, anti-American feelings.

Even now he refuses to admit Hussein did anything wrong.

“He never stole anything -- the palaces were open to the people. They could line up one day a week and visit them,” he said.

Eager, it seems, to exonerate the man he fought for, Rahal blames the dictator’s two corrupt and sadistic sons, Uday and Qusai, for Hussein’s tyrannical image. “The president’s problem has been his clan and his family. But we are finished with them. His children have been killed, and those close to his clan are gone,” he said.

Rahal has one informal picture of himself standing with Hussein. In the photo, both men are stiff, but Hussein, wearing a double-breasted blue pinstriped suit, looks broad and substantial, while Rahal, narrow-chested and thin, has an almost tentative air. It is a picture he was once proud of, but now he doesn’t like to show it for fear that it will be used against him.

*

As last spring’s war with U.S.-led forces neared, Rahal was resigned. He saw the end even before bombs began to fall. “Our equipment was old, the Americans had air dominance, and we didn’t concentrate our troops for the most part,” he said matter-of-factly.

Nonetheless, his son and nephews say he was desperate to join the battle, to revive that sense of purpose that drove him for so many years.

“He wanted to go and fight. He was shouting,” recalled Amjad Atiya, a cousin. “We said, ‘You’re not going out.’ But he’s a military man -- it’s difficult for him to stop doing his duty.”

His 18-year-old son, Mahmoud, said he kept telling his father: “Nobody called for you. Nobody told you to go. Why would you?”

Rahal saw with a painful clarity that much more than the war would be lost. The country that had given him shelter and a sense of belonging would be gone.

Three weeks later, American tanks rumbled down the side streets of his neighborhood.

There were signs that Palestinians would fast become a stigmatized minority. Within days of the war’s end, many, including friends and former soldier-comrades, were kicked out of their homes by Iraqis who previously had been displaced to make room for the favored Palestinians and by others who had simply been outraged by their privileged status under Hussein.

The first calls Rahal made after the bombing stopped were to his brothers in Jordan, Bethlehem and Oklahoma City. He wanted to know only one thing: how to get the documents to leave Iraq.

*

In July, about two months after major combat was declared over, Rahal’s wife made the difficult decision to leave Iraq with their five children, ages 11 to 21. A woman of determination, intelligence and intense loyalty to her husband, Buthaina felt that if she went to Jordan, she would be able to persuade the government there to give him a passport or at least a visa.

Despite having lived apart for much of their first 10 years of marriage, Ahmed and Buthaina are close. Theirs was a love match -- an exception in the clannish Palestinian-exile community where people often are pushed into arranged marriages with cousins. She actively participates in political conversations, and watches her husband to make sure he doesn’t say anything compromising.

When she left at 5 a.m. on July 3, he stared darkly at the street for hours, drinking small cups of unsweetened black coffee. The house seemed empty although all she took was the children’s clothes.

For months, the only bright spot in the house had been the screen-saver on his computer: a menacing picture of a black-masked Palestinian gunman leaping across the screen, his weapon at the ready. As the generator ran out of fuel, the screen would flicker, then vanish. Once the children left, the computer stayed blank.

“As an American, you cannot understand this,” he told a visitor. “You do not know what you would do if your country was subject to an invasion from outside. Maybe you would become a suicide bomber or a sniper.

“What would you feel if the Chinese took over the state of Pennsylvania, if you saw them walking your streets, searching your old men and women, entering your homes?”

At times his frustration prompts him to lash out.

“You see how people celebrate when there is a bombing of an American APC [armored personnel carrier]? You will see this kind of hatred increase every time the Americans retaliate.”

With Hussein’s capture, Rahal plunged into a deeper depression. Even days later, he could not quite accept that this strongman had surrendered to occupation soldiers. “Arresting Saddam is very shocking to me. It is not like the fall of Baghdad. I feel frustrated, bitter, more than ever,” he said, turning away as tears came to his eyes.

“I think the president was put under some kind of drugs or some nerve gas was sprayed into his cave.”

Now the only thing left for Rahal is his family in Jordan. Asked if he could be happy there, he could only imagine his long-held dream: “My next country, the next place I will live, will be Palestine.”

He looked at a photograph in the dining room of Khadar, the elder brother who went west to the United States, and then at a map of Palestine on the opposite wall and began to recite from memory a poem by Palestinian poet Samih Qasim:

All the gallows are medals of honor

And I love my first love more than all the others

And the first love is a tragedy.

He leaned forward to make sure the meaning was clear: “Of course this is a metaphor, because when the fighter goes to be hanged, he remembers his first love, and his first love is the land.”