Free A Disappearance in Damascus by Deborah Campbell Page A

power in Iran, overthrowing the decadent American-backed Shah and his American-trained secret police. A group of Iranian students, worried—given the CIA coup of 1953—that the Americans were about to stage a counter-coup, had taken dozens of American diplomats hostage at the US embassy in Tehran, holding them for 444 days. Meanwhile Saddam Hussein, long known for a scale of violence shocking even for Baghdad, had taken the presidency of Iraq. With the support of the United States, which backed him even when he started using poison gas, 17 he would invade Iran within the year, launching a war that killed a million people, half of them Iraqis.
    By then a small war was raging inside Ahlam’s house. She had never seen her father like this: smoking cigarette after cigarette, furious at his own relatives, yelling at his sons. Since she was the first of their girls ever to attend high school, the entire village was talking, pressuring him to stop this dangerous and pointless precedent. Usually her father was calm, generous, decisive. Now she could hear him shouting: “She is my daughter and I decide!” And to the astonishment of the men who came to state their objections,even to jeer at him that he seemed to want a daughter who could support him financially, he said, “I trust she will do something great.”
    That her desire to go to high school coincided with the rise of Saddam Hussein had a lot to do with their objections. Since the assassination of the royal family in 1958, Iraq had been rocked by a series of violent military coups. By the end of the 1960s the Baath Party had consolidated power, having murdered thousands of suspected communist sympathizers based on lists provided by the CIA. 18 Saddam Hussein became vice-president to his cousin, a former general named Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, but in 1979 al-Bakr stepped aside.
    It wasn’t so much the change in leadership that upset the villagers—leaders had always come and gone—but his purge of senior members of his own party was alarming. Twenty-two men convicted of plotting against him had been executed. Meetings were held around the country to calm the situation: these men were traitors so no one was to feel sorry for them. Ahlam recalled her schoolteacher, a high-ranking Baath Party member who must have been rattled, telling her class she had seen Saddam Hussein shoot his own brother-in-law in the head.
    What really upset the villagers, what affected them directly, was the new leader’s education law. It required all children—girls and boys—to attend school to the end of sixth grade. This policy eventually made Iraqi women the most educated in the region, raising literacy rates from one in ten to nine in ten. 19 If the new law was intended to drag Iraq into the modern age, it was also viewed as an attempt to undermine tribal authority. And here was Ahlam, the daughter of the village’s most prominent man, intent on going even further than the lawrequired. The struggle to stop her united the village. Her father refused to back down.
    “What happened then?” I asked.
    “The men shut up. He’s the father, the sheikh of the village, so they could do nothing.”
    To Ahlam he spoke words she would recall for the rest of her life.
    “You’re a free bird,
lozah
.” His pet name for her, almond. “Don’t let anyone put you in a cage.”
    She could continue with school on two conditions. One, that she behave. People would be watching for her to mess up. And two, that she wear the hijab and the abaya, the awkward shroud of black cloth that covered her from head to foot. “The most miserable thing was the abaya.” She kept tripping on it and falling down. “Everyone laughed at me. But I had to wear it. If not—stay home.”
    The school was fifteen kilometres from the village. On the first day her father pressed coins into her hand. He pointed towards the highway where she would find a collective taxi to take her there. Despite her pleas he refused to go with