The Iraqis' Stories: Sunni captive spared execution by man he saved in battle

IT was a warm Wednesday morning when Abdul Rahman Ahmad, a Sunni, last risked his life by driving into the Shi’ite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City to stock up on supplies for his thriving supermarket.

In tranquil, pre-war times, Ahmad, 52, would make the journey to Sadr City’s Jamila wholesalers’ market every week, lingering to savour its spicy fragrance and its cacophony of banter and barter. But since the militias on either side of Baghdad’s post-war sectarian divide had started picking out victims at random, he paid no more than one peremptory visit a month.

Ahmad always sought safety in numbers. On this particular morning, he arrived with 28 fellow traders in a convoy of 11 vehicles.

The grim fate of frightened groups of men going about their business in Baghdad has become a routine story in the Iraqi media but Ahmad’s account of the horrors that befell his friends is remarkable, not least because he alone lived to tell the tale.

They had been in the market for only half an hour when it suddenly started to empty. Shutters were rolled down and doors locked. By the time Ahmad’s group tried to leave, all the exits were blocked by white four-wheel-drive vehicles surrounded by men in black from the Mahdi Army of Moqtadr al-Sadr, the radical Shi’ite cleric. The men checked identity cards, sending away three traders with Shi’ite names but marching the 26 Sunnis towards their vehicles. They ignored the pleas of their captives who were blindfolded with hands tied behind their backs.

“They drove us off in broad daylight and in front of everyone and nobody could help us,” Ahmad said.

After half an hour, the vehicles stopped in the playground of what appeared to be a school where the blindfolds and bonds were removed.

“We were hit on the head and our families and religion were cursed as they lined us up,” Ahmad recalled. “We were surrounded by 30 armed men all dressed in black.”

It was at this point that a sheikh arrived to declare: “A death sentence has been issued against you.” His announcement created panic.

“We were all begging and screaming and shouting,” Ahmad said. “We were so terrified that the mood was totally hysterical. Some men beat their chests and hit their faces and their bodies as they pleaded. We screamed to be spared. We even knelt on the ground and begged them not to kill us. But I saw death in their eyes.”

During these excruciating minutes, Ahmad felt the gaze of one of the militiamen upon him. The man approached and spoke softly to him amid the pandemonium. “You are Abdul Rahman?” he asked. “I am Karim. Does my name mean anything to you?” Ahmad realised instantly that the two men had been in another desperate situation 15 years earlier when they were soldiers retreating on foot from Kuwait beneath a ferocious American bombardment at the end of the first Gulf war.

“You were injured in the leg and I carried you on my shoulders,” Ahmad said. And he began to cry.

Karim glanced at the other traders, who included Rahman’s 21-year-old nephew. “I can’t do anything for them but I will try to save you,” he said. “I will be your executioner but I won’t shoot you. As we open fire you must immediately drop to the ground and play dead.”

They were made to march for about five minutes and then to stand in a line. “I thought to myself, ‘this is it’,” Ahmad said.

At the sound of the first shot he hit the ground as he had been told to do and two men fell on top of him. The firing continued for perhaps two minutes. He was picked up and dumped in the back of a truck and eventually thrown on a piece of waste ground with the others.

As soon as he reached home after the massacre on August 16, Ahmad and his wife began preparing to flee with their four children to Amman, the Jordanian capital, where he recounted his ordeal last week.

Ahmad’s friends were among 2,200 people who died violently in Baghdad in August.

Read the rest at the Times of London