Baghdad flashbacks.

• Author: AlHaj, Rahim
• Position: Cover Story

ONE HOT SUMMER DAY in 1986, I sat in my bedroom upstairs, facing the street. Suddenly, I heard a car screech to a halt outside. An uneasy feeling welled up in my stomach. My fear was justified. They were coming for me. Three soldiers with drawn handguns ordered me to go with them. They blindfolded me, put me into the car, and sped away to a place in Baghdad which is still unknown to me.

A couple of hours later, the questioning began. They told me they had information about my entire life. They boasted about having enough evidence to execute me. They prodded me for names of friends I worked with in the Iraqi opposition. One chided me, "Are you happy to be against your country and your president, your dignity, your glory, and your status as a decent Iraqi person?" I responded, "I am still a decent Iraqi person, and I love my country, and I am happy to die in this country."

When the interrogation ended without success, the torturing began. It was random, creative, excruciating, and seemingly endless. My fear was that they would break my fingers. I was, and still am, a musician, whose main crime was writing poetry and composing compositions against the Iran-Iraq war. I spent one-and-a-half years in prison that time, and then they released me because the torturing did not illicit the desired response. Later in 1988, they imprisoned me for another six months with the same results.

In 1991, after the Gulf War was supposedly over, a new war, called sanctions, embraced my country and people. My mother sold many of her belongings and bought me a false travel document to get me out of the country. While my fellow Iraqis waited to see what type of death they would suffer--bombs, missiles, starvation, malaria from contaminated water, or leukemia from the depleted uranium--I left my country to save my life.

Like millions of other Iraqis living inside and outside of Iraq, I am eager to see my country free from the tyrant Saddam Hussein. But I am not in favor of Bush's war plans.

One week after Bush's declaration of his intention to oust Saddam by any means necessary, I received a phone call from my mom in Baghdad. After her usual greetings and endless questions about how I was doing, she began to express her fear and frustration about what she heard America was planning to do. She unconsciously put me on the side of the United States, considering me an American now. She demanded, "Isn't it enough that we've been starving and struggling under sanctions for...