Nomads in Hussein’s Reach

Sheik Wallay Rakan draws no lines in time, no measurements in months or days. His life moves in seasons. The signposts that mark his road are the births of his children, the loss of his camels, the death of his eldest son.

So he can’t tell the exact year when the black days began. But when he had to sell his last, favorite camel, Aliyan, he knew he was losing his grip on survival.

He sits cross-legged, his back ramrod straight, under the roof of chaotically stitched sacks that line his low, black-wool Bedouin tent. His face is chiseled, proud, impassive. His eyes are as black and mournful as the story he tells.

His son brings a tin bowl of tart sheep’s milk, and Rakan watches sharply as a guest receives his hospitality, then smiles with approval when a compliment is offered. Before the day is out, he’ll be offering to slaughter a sheep for the stranger under his roof.

Rambling through the desert, singing to the sky, playing games with stones to pass the time, Bedouin nomads in southern Iraq seemingly posed scant threat to Saddam Hussein. Yet even they were caught up in his regime’s tentacles, which curbed their freedom and hastened the decline of their ancient way of life. Their experience illuminates just how thoroughly the Hussein regime dominated the lives of ordinary Iraqis, even those far from the world of cities and politics.

Out in the flat desert sands, Bedouins such as Rakan and his friend Shaty Bassat tried to avoid officialdom, shunning the documents and pieces of paper that inundate a city dweller. They were not interested in a regulated life or the man called Saddam Hussein.

But officialdom was interested in them. And even out in the sandy plains, there was no way to escape the regime, which reached everything, like fine dust blasted by the wind into every crevice.

Hussein’s regime banned them from wandering freely across the border to relatives in Kuwait. Their teenage sons were conscripted for the army, where those who deserted were often caught and executed. In a final blow, Hussein diverted the rivers running south to block water to resistance forces. That was catastrophic for the Bedouins, whose source of life dried up.

“I don’t care for governments or politics. It’s not my business,” said Bassat, whose family of six usually travels close to Rakan’s. “All I did was I took my animals and my family and traveled from place to place.

“In my father’s time there was no Saddam,” he said through an interpreter. “You could go wherever you wanted and stay wherever you wanted. It was a beautiful life.”

They call that time “before.” The precise years are hazy, but one of the main dividing lines between “before” and the present desolation was 1991, when the government cut the water supplies to areas of southeastern Iraq to punish rebel factions.

Rakan, 61, said he had to sell his three camels after that because he could not find feed for them in the desert. He also sold his horse and all but two of his 15 donkeys. He has just 30 sheep left, a fraction of what he once owned.

“Aliyan was my friend,” he said, with a fond smile for his favorite camel, whom he suspects was turned over to butchers after he sold it. “He was very smart. I’d put the water on his back, and he’d find his own way home. When I smoked, he came up to me because I used to give him a puff of my cigarette. I put the cigarette near his nose, and he inhaled it.

“I kept Aliyan to the end, then I had to sell him. When I started to lose my animals it was a huge loss for me, because it is my life.”

Their memories of the past are not idealized. Life was always tough; but now, they say, it’s becoming impossible. They cling to a precarious existence -- camping for a few weeks at a time at one place or another, usually near a highway or settlement where they can get water.

Under Hussein, they became dependent on food rations. With the rations gone, the families are selling off their remaining livestock to buy food -- typically bread, sugary tea and homemade sheep’s yogurt. Sometimes they have rice or lentils.

A grown sheep fetches the equivalent of $100. They used to sell only the lambs, to keep the size of their flocks stable. But both men’s flocks have gradually shrunk, and in time they could lose all their animals, and their only means of income.

“Of course we love our animals, but what can we do, if there’s not enough food for them and not enough water? It’s difficult to survive with our animals. We can’t live without salaries in this new world,” Rakan said.

At 54, Bassat appears much older, with a hacking cough. He passes his time sitting, smoking, worrying about survival.

As a young man, shepherding his sheep, Bassat wafted dreamily through the hours. Neither Rakan, Bassat nor their children went to school.

“I’d call my sheep with a special call. I’d drive my camels and take all the animals, the cows, the sheep and horses and donkeys, all together into the big desert until early evening,” Bassat said.

“I used to sing to myself alone. Nothing bothered me. I did not have to think about the future. I was just singing and playing with stones or something.”

Springtime was magical, the happiest time. Everything was green. The air was perfumed with the nectar of flowers and filled with the calls of birds, and there was plenty of water.

Brewing coffee offered a chance to socialize. As they ground the beans, Bedouins would bang a large pestle against the side of a brass mortar, so that it sang like a bell.

“We made music by ringing the coffee grinder to announce we had fresh coffee,” Bassat recalled. “Uncles and cousins and all the family would come and talk.”

They traveled from place to place as they wanted, with the men on horses or camels, and the women walking behind. (Today, they often rent taxis or trucks for long journeys.)

At weddings there was singing and dancing, and the shooting of rifles and pistols in the air. Great platters of rice with whole roasted lambs were prepared for 200 or more relatives, and the celebrations went on for nearly a week.

At 15, Rakan married Jamela Faraj. “I’d seen her. She was my cousin.

“I was dying for her. I was crazy for her,” he said.

But she was not prepared for what marriage meant.

“I did not love him. I was afraid. I was 10 years old. I was just a child,” she said.

Married life brought with it hard work: rising at dawn to milk the animals, collect wood, build the fire and make bread. At first, she often burned the food and her rice was gluey, but her husband did not complain. In time, she learned to love him.

“When we moved to another place, I would pack up the camels and ride the horse. She had to walk behind me. She was stronger than me because she was younger,” Rakan said.

She never asked him for a television, electricity or city comforts. Now both Rakan and his wife dream of an easier life in the city. The daily struggle for survival has worn Rakan out. He wants to swap his ceiling of stars for a brick house and a town job with steady pay. But that seems beyond their reach.

Bassat also married a cousin, paying 300 Iraqi dinars to her family. He had never seen her under her black Bedouin mask. A bride’s price, he said, was based on her beauty, and his cousin was expensive.

“It’s like a car,” he said. “Some are expensive. Some are cheap.” His bride bore him six sons and 18 daughters.

For Faraj, Rakan’s wife, the happiest moment was the birth of her first child, a son, Ahmed, and the days of sweet motherhood that followed. Her blackest time came 15 years later, when Ahmed was executed for deserting the army during the Iran-Iraq war.

To Bassat, “before” meant he didn’t have to carry nationality papers and was free to wander the countryside. He is not clear on the year or dates but vividly recalls the changes.

“Before, no one had nationality papers, because Bedouin don’t care for papers,” he said. “Then they offered us houses and promised a good life with electricity, better than the Bedouin life, just so they could control the Bedouin, so we couldn’t run away in the desert.

“Before, when someone died, we’d bury him in the desert. Then they started to send someone to check the graves and the body and there was all kinds of bureaucracy.”

Bedouins were offered land on condition that they give up a nomadic life. But Bassat could not give up wandering. He had his relatives look after the land. But they too deserted after the land became unviable when the waterways were cut.

Nationality papers also meant national service. Bassat served 15 years in the army, because he repeatedly deserted. Each time he ran away, several more years were added to his service. Like Rakan’s oldest son, two of Bassat’s nephews were executed for desertion.

As Iraq waged war against its neighbors Iran and Kuwait, the Bedouins were barred from crossing or approaching Iraq’s borders. Those who were caught defying the ban had their animals confiscated.

The regime’s program to dry out marsh areas in southeastern Iraq to choke opposition fighters was the most puzzling and catastrophic change for the Bedouins. The Bedouins were not the target of the policy, which came in reprisal for the 1991 uprising in the south. But they were caught in the middle. Because of the water shortages and the salinity problem that plagues Iraq’s south, the land deteriorated. Fodder became more difficult to find.

“Saddam was a tough leader. He dealt with thieves and the opposition by killing them. There was no negotiation. So that’s why he hurt us, because he needed to punish them by blocking off the water,” Bassat said.

Rakan’s father had shown him secret places in the desert where water could be found. But after 1991, they dried up or the water became brackish.

“You can’t go into the desert without knowing where to get water,” Rakan said.

For weeks, his family has been bivouacked close to a place where he can find a broken water pipe, not far from a highway, where army convoys and international humanitarian agency vehicles rumble by.

There is no time to think of rest. Rakan sits, brow knitted, with one thought dominating his mind, like a bleak desert view devoid of life. The savage, grinding problem of survival is all that occupies him.

“I just think how to stay alive, always. I think how to get the family enough food and water,” he said.

By evening, he decides to move on, three hours northward by road toward the city of Nasiriyah. At dawn the following day, he loads his family and dogs into an ancient Chevrolet taxi with an Iraqi-built timber shell. He ties half of his remaining few dozen sheep onto the roof, the others he herds into the crowded cab.

“This way of life is dying out. It’s almost finished. Everyone who can will leave the Bedouin life and go to the city.

“This is my life. I’d like to stay the same. But there is no way to survive in this life.”