Skip to main contentAs the inaugural bombs of the new Gulf War burst in the streets of Baghdad, many Portlanders took the news with an indifferent shrug. But for Nick Said, a local auto mechanic and Baghdad native, the tidings brought a strange mixture of elation and terror. Said backs the U.S.-British military assault on his homeland, but he knows that every explosion could rob him of a brother, a sister or a mother.
Twelve years ago, Said was still living in Iraq's capital city with his parents and siblings--six sisters and one brother--when he heard the elder President Bush's call to rise up against Saddam Hussein. Like many who had suffered under the dictator's tyrannical regime, Said joined the rebellion. And like many others, he was left high and dry when the promised American military aid never arrived.
"Bush told us to fight Saddam," the 39-year-old Muslim says with more sadness than bitterness, "but the Americans did not come. Many people died."
Said managed to escape execution by Hussein's Republican Guard by making his way to a refugee camp in the northern deserts of Saudi Arabia. For five years, Said waited among tens of thousands of other exiles for a way out.
"It was very hard," he recalls. "They kept us always away from the cities, in the desert. Some of my friends are still there."
His break came when visiting emissaries from several sympathetic nations granted amnesty to a few refugees. Suddenly, Said found himself transported from the dry heat of a Saudi Arabian desert to lush, frosty Canada and made a Canadian citizen. A few years ago, he moved down to Portland, where he now has a family and part-ownership in an auto garage.
Along with his new life, Said has taken a new name; he does not want his given Arabic name to be printed for fear that any of Hussein's followers who still bear him a grudge will retaliate against his family. When he calls his siblings in Baghdad, Said pretends he is a friend of their beloved brother, checking in. In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, he says, authorities believe him to be long dead.
Though his family will be living in an American-made firestorm, Said is an adamant supporter of the war on Iraq. To him, life under Saddam Hussein is no better than death.
"Their polls say that 99 percent of Iraqi people support him? Bullshit!" Said fumes, his normally smiling countenance abruptly slashed with a scowl. "Iraqi people hate Saddam."
Said tells of his school days back in Iraq, when government thugs would go door to door telling families when they were required to show up for pro-Hussein rallies. And in the polls the dictator says show the country's undying devotion to him, voters are given sheets of paper on which to write their name and address and just one box to check. "If you do not do these things..."--he slides an imaginary blade across his throat--"they come get you."
"Last time, it was a game," Said says of the first Gulf War. "This Bush is serious, though. I want to tell Bush the Iraqis support his war. But please do not hurt the Iraqi people. They do not support Saddam."
When the first bombs dropped, Said was filled with both happiness and terror. Hussein will finally get what he deserves, but at what expense? And given that Baghdad is incapacitated, dead phone lines twisting in the wind, how will he know if something terrible has happened to his loved ones?
"I just hope," he says, his eyes red with tears. Said hasn't been able to get through to his family since the day the bombing started, and the last conversation he had with them was far from encouraging. "I called my brother and asked him to please take my family and leave Iraq. But he cannot. No one is allowed to leave. So I just hope."
Said won't be leaving anytime soon, either. Even if Iraq is released from the claws of Saddam Hussein and made into a democracy--something Said claims the Iraqi people want desperately--he will remain here in the United States, working on cars in his garage.
"This is my home now," he says, his smile returning. "Here, I am free."
WWeek 2015