Part 3 – Sweet Reprieve

 

We celebrated the Kurdish New Year on March 21, 1991 (NewRooz) for the first time ever in freedom. there were dancing in the streets, chanting freedom songs and cheers, feast, happiness all around the city. happiness I have never felt in my life… it was the kind that made the cheeks hurt from non stop smiling…



despite the celebration we knew the worst was yet to come. we knew such powerful government with an iron fist leader can not give up so soon, but as the news spread of the Allied Forces leaving Iraq territories… we couldn’t believe it, we heard the President of the USA, The Commander in Chief saying to us, raise up against your leader.
to us, this meant ‘we go your back’ get up and fight.
but to our dismay, the government detoured it’s powerful army, what’s left of it straight towards the liberated Kurdish cities …
it became so scary we could hear it, smell it and feel it in our chest… it was terrifying… from the distance, we hear the bombing …. the news got worse and worse from the radio…

My eldest brother was in the military base situated on the outskirts of northern Baghdad, he was in the army since he turned 19, in 1989 it was a mandatory for all able men to do so.

My dad pulled one of his scariest stunts ever on the intense first hours of the Desert Storm war, he drove the RV into the military base, with bombs exploding and anti aircraft guns going nonstop overhead. It was night, my brother was operating the radar.
My dad shouted his name, called him into the RV and drove out of that base.
That was a crime punishable by immediate execution the moment he’s found, on the spot.
My dad was determine, he had that intense feeling that it’s a lost war and the government will fall. There is no way he’s sacrificing his son for a mad man (Saddam Hussein). My dad hid my brother under the couch of that rv as he drove back to Sulimany bringing his son home alive.

Numerous military check points stopped my dad and twice the entire rv was searched. They couldn’t find my brother.
When he arrived home my mom passed out on the floor from pure joy of seeing her son and the terror of what will happen to him if /when the government finds out..
After the uprising and the celebration, my brother volunteer to fight alongside of the Kurdish fighters.

He was ambushed near the city of Kerkuk by the Mujahedee khalq.
A tank shell exploded beside him … He was barely alive as his fellow fighters pulled him out of danger.

After surgeries and few units of blood, he gradually started to get better but my dad pulled him out of the hospital with the rest of us into that rv, on April 1 in the late late hours of the night, we escaped next to millions.. Escaping a brutal army of Saddam Hussein…. His army was regaining powers back to control the region the Kurds have liberated.