Twenty Days in Kuwait: A Memoir of Home, Exile and Return

By Ahmad A. Sbaiti

This is a book about a drama and an adventure. The drama tells the
story of Saddam Hussein’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait in
the early hours of Thursday, August 2, 1990. His action was precipitated
by his eight-year war with Iran, and thereafter by actors on the local
scene like Kuwait and other Arab countries, and compounded by the
actions of outside players like the United States of America, the Soviet
Union, Europe and the United Nations. Part One of the book tells the
story of Saddam’s fateful action that August day of 1990, and the role
played by each of the other actors to bring about the confluence of
events that led to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

When the invasion occurred, the author, who had been living and
working in Kuwait for 15 years, was on vacation in the United States
with his family. When the crisis was not resolved in time for them to
return to Kuwait for the new school year, he and his family decided
to make Dallas, Texas, their permanent home. Part Two of the book
recounts the events and the author’s day-to-day activities during what
he termed as his “adventure in a journey of misery” when he returned
to Kuwait in October of 1990, while it was still under Iraqi occupation,
to retrieve his family’s household belongings. The journey lasted for
thirty five days-twenty days in Kuwait itself, and fifteen were spent on
the road for the trip to and from Kuwait.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499007190

Ahmad A. Sbaiti

When he is not incorporating his editor’s notes into a manuscript, Ahmad is writing one. Twenty Days in Kuwait: A Memoir of Home, Exile and Return is his second book to be published after NORA: A Tale of Love in Time of Conflict was published in 2013. Next in line for publication will be: Bitter Harvest, the Pastor, The Two Brothers, I’ll See You in Paradise, and the End of the Miracle. Ahmad holds a doctorate in Operations Research from Southern Methodist University. He is retired and lives between Carrollton, Texas and his village in South Lebanon.

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Copyright © 2014 by Ahmad A. Sbaiti.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

PART ONE

PROLOGUE:

Anatomy of an Invasion

Preface

-1- Action by Iraq

-2- Action by Kuwait

-3- Action by International Mediators

-4- Action by Arab Mediators

-5- The Invasion

PART TWO

Twenty Days in Kuwait

BOOK ONE

Disrupted Vacation

-1- Williamsburg, Virginia

-2- Washington, D.C.

-3- The American Northeast and Canada

-4- Washington, D.C.

-5- Dallas, Texas

Book Two

Into The Snake Pit

-1- New York City

-2- On Board The Royal Jordanian Airline

-3- Amman, Jordan

-4- On the Road to Baghdad

-5- Baghdad, Iraq

-6- On The Road to Kuwait

-7- Into The Snake Pit: Twenty Days in Kuwait

Book Three

Out of Kuwait

-1- Kuwait City

-2- Baghdad, Iraq

-3- At the Iraqi-Jordanian Border

-4- No Man’s Land: The Iraqi-Jordanian Border

-5- Amman, Jordan

-6- Damascus, Syria

-7- On The Beirut-Damascus Highway

-8- Beirut, Lebanon

-9- Amman, Jordan

-10- On Board The Royal Jordanian Airline

-11- Dallas, Texas

In

Memory of

Mubarak Ennoot, and the honorable women and men of

Kuwait and Iraq, who sacrificed their lives in resisting

Saddam’s tyranny.

INTRODUCTION

On Thursday, August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait. The tiny Kuwaiti army was no match for Saddam’s million-man army, all experienced veterans of his eight-year war with Iran that had ended two years earlier, in 1988. Kuwait quickly capitulated and its emir and his immediate family, cabinet, members of parliament and other politicians, as well as the majority of the Kuwaiti people, sought refuge in Saudi Arabia. Saddam lost no time in annexing Kuwait to Iraq, declaring it the 19th governorate of his country.

When the invasion occurred, my family and I were on our annual summer vacation in the United States. We had been living in Kuwait for almost fifteen years. My wife worked as the English publications editor for the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC),¹ whose membership included all the oil producing Arab countries. I served on the technical staff of the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development (Arab Fund), and as the head of its computer department.

When we left on vacation in the summer of 1990, we had only our short sleeve shirts with us, so to speak. We were scheduled to return to Kuwait on August 18. With the invasion and the war and destruction that ensued, we opted to stay in the United States for good. Our decision to stay in the U.S. was made easier by the fact that our daughter was scheduled to graduate from high school in the coming school year, and wanted to go to a university in America the year after. We wanted to be in the same country, if not the same town, as our daughter when she would go to the university.

Deciding to make our permanent home in the USA meant furnishing a whole new household, which was costly and time consuming. Instead, we considered the possibility of retrieving our household belongings that we had left behind in Kuwait. The contents of our apartment in Kuwait that we had been accumulating for the past fifteen years, some of which were irreplaceable for various reasons, could fill two houses in America. The idea of getting those belongings out of Kuwait became appealing with time because of the fear that they would be lost to looting, or be destroyed when war to liberate the country would surely be waged. It was also a frightening idea because the only way to get the household belongings out of Kuwait was for me to get back there, box whatever I could gather and ship back to the US. All of this against a background of President George H.W. Bush’s increasingly apparent battle cries and a looming ultimatum he would later deliver to Saddam.

So, on October 1, 1990, a good friend of mine, Khalil Radwan who was in my same situation, and I decided to go back to Kuwait, despite the Iraqi occupation, to rescue our belongings. It was a risky journey that took us by air from New York to Amman, and then by car to Baghdad, to Kuwait and back to Amman, and then Damascus. From there, I drove to Beirut and Khalil accompanied the truck to the Port of Banias to ship the load to America. Afterward, we regrouped in Amman and flew back to the States.

The journey from Dallas to Kuwait and back lasted for 35 days, from October 1st to November 5th, 1990. Major unforeseen problems awaited us in almost every one of the cities we traveled to, and sometimes life threatening danger lurked on the roadway to Kuwait and back, and especially during our stay there which lasted for 20 days—hence the title of this book. The other 15 days were spent on the road during the round trip to America. As I write this memoir, almost twenty four years later, I still believe that that journey had to be done, despite all the risks we took and the dangers we faced, and am glad to have done it. I still believe that rescuing household items of profound family history and memories like our children’s ‘firsts’ in life, in addition to some items of high monetary value was well worth the risk I took.

This book, a memoir of that journey, is written in two parts. Part One, Anatomy of An Invasion, is a prologue that tells the story of the invasion, detailing the events that eventually led to it against a backdrop of related modern history of the Arab world. Part Two, Twenty Days in Kuwait, is a detailed account of the day-to-day activities and events that happened with, and to me since the first day I left Dallas, until I returned to my family on November 5, 1990.

In writing Part One I made extensive use of the interview that the television series FRONTLINE had with Said K. Aburish and aired on the PBS-television station KERA in Dallas, Texas on October 26, 2011. Aburish was a journalist who reported for Radio Free Europe and the London Daily Mail. He had intimate knowledge of the Iraqi regime for many years as a consultant and a middle man, and dealt with Saddam himself. He later wrote an in-depth biography of Saddam Hussein he called "Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge. I also relied on the excellent book written by Pierre Salinger and Eric Laurent called Secret Dossier; the Hidden Agenda behind the Gulf War." FRONTLINE and the book, are credited wherever quoted in the manuscript.

*****

Many people throughout my journey in Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Syria and Lebanon helped me to solve problems and deflect danger. To them all, I offer my sincere thanks and gratitude. I have changed all their names, including my family members’, to protect their privacy. I mention only a few of those people by their real names in the hope that they will forgive me in taking liberty in doing that. After all, they were all public figures and some remain in the public eye to this day. They all helped me at crucial junctures in this adventure. To them all I shall forever be grateful and owe a lot, more than I can repay some day. They are: Dr. Salim El Hoss, who was the Prime Minister of Lebanon, Abdlatif Al Hamad, the director general/chairman of the board of the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development in Kuwait; Dr. Mohammad Al Imadi, the former director general/chairman of the board of the Arab Fund and the former Minister of Commerce and Foreign Trade in Syria; and Ahmad Ibrahim, the ambassador of Lebanon to Jordan.

Last, but not least, I want to thank Maurice Girgis, Hatim Hajj, Mohammad Salim and Nadya Sbaiti for reviewing the material and offering valuable comments and suggestions. Special gratitude goes to Lisa Bowers who edited the manuscript and offered insight into making it a better read. Also, special gratitude goes to my niece and nephew Zeina Dghaim and Ahmad Dghaim who diligently collaborated on the design and production of the cover.

PART ONE

PROLOGUE:

Anatomy of an Invasion

PREFACE

Saddam Hussein’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait in the dawn hours of Thursday August 2, 1990, were the result of the proverbial perfect storm whose clouds had been gathering in the Arabian Gulf region since August 9, 1988, the day after the guns went silent on the Iran-Iraq war front. The dictionary defines the term perfect storm as an event where a rare confluence of just the exact circumstances will aggravate a situation drastically, resulting in an event of unusual magnitude. Saddam’s actions in the early morning hours of that fateful August day were of such unusual magnitude that they stunned the Arabs and put the rest of world on edge. That perfect storm was precipitated by actors indigenous to the Middle East like Iraq, Kuwait, Iran and other Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, plus the Arab League, and compounded by the actions of outside players like the two superpowers at the time, the United States of America and the Soviet Union, as well as other European countries and the United Nations. This is the story of the role played by each actor or group of actors to bring about the confluence of events that led to the perfect storm that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was.

-1-

Action by Iraq

The invasion of Kuwait was but one of a series of Saddam Hussein’s misadventures that brought ruins to the Iraqi people, to his neighbors and eventually to his regime and himself. Always ambitious and hungry for power, Saddam descended from humble origins. Born to a poor family in 1937 in the village of Al-Awje, just outside Tikrit in Iraq, even as a boy, Saddam Hussein always showed signs of ambition, buttressed by strong-headedness and a fearless determination to get what he wanted. In later years, as leader of Iraq, when he was confronted with a seemingly impossible problem to solve, he was often heard as saying my mother did not call me Saddam for nothing.(Saddam means the one who confronts.)

Since he was an infant, Saddam Hussein did not enjoy a tranquil home life or a stable and loving family environment. His shepherd father, Hussein al Majid and his strong-willed mother Subha Al Musallat were second cousins from the poorest of the poor tribe of Albunasser Bedouins who had settled in the Tikrit area. His father disappeared from his life for good several months after his son’s birth. Shortly thereafter, his mother, now a virtual widow, lost a teenage son to cancer. The dual loss of her husband and son proved too depressing for Subha, and she could not cope with having to raise Saddam by herself. At age three, she sent him to Baghdad to live with her brother Khairallah Lutfah who was a second lieutenant in the Iraqi army. But a few years later, Subha brought her son back to Al-Awje to live with her. During his stay in Baghdad, she had gotten remarried to Hajj Hassan Ibrahim, an ill-tempered man who was quick to physically discipline little Saddam.

The family was dirt poor. Their house consisted of one room which had to accommodate Subha, Hassan, Saddam and a step brother his mother had given birth to in his absence. There was no running water, electricity, kitchen, toilet or any other amenities we associate with a house. The whole family slept on the mud floor in cramped and unhygienic conditions.

This kind of living conditions produced a particular type of child, one who hates his living conditions and runs away from them. But there was nowhere else to go to except the dirty narrow alleys of his village. There, boys formed gangs, stole from farmers and from one another and fought clan wars. This gave them added toughness, courage and viciousness at an early age. This gave them a common name as Awlad Al Azziqqa (Sons of the alleys). Many of them never went to school and ended up as laborers, shepherds or at best taxi drivers. These were the elements that shaped Saddam’s personality: tough, difficult, conniving and secretive, and this was the fate that awaited Saddam had it not been for his strong-willed mother and his kind and generous uncle Khairallah.

Saddam’s step father sent him at age six to work as a shepherd and a farm hand. The little boy had to endure hard work during the day and harsh treatment, including physical and verbal abuse from his stepfather at night. When he could no longer take his stepfather’s abuse, and his mother could no longer tolerate the constant feud between her husband and her son that always ended in a beating of the little boy, she enticed him to go back to live with his uncle Khairallah again, who had since become a school teacher at Al Shawiesh, a village also close to Tikrit. Since Saddam’s first stay with him, Khairallah had been sacked from the army for taking part in the rebellion of General Rashid Ali Al Keilani against the British in 1941 and forming a pro-Nazi government. The British quelled the rebellion and sentenced Khairallah to five years in jail.By then, ten years old and still had not gone to school, he was jealous of his cousin Adnan, Khairlalah’s son who could read and write, Saddam requested his uncle to send him to school. Saddam’s jealousy of his cousin, who was one year younger and showed off that he could read and write and Saddam couldn’t, would remain dormant within him until many years later, and rumor had it that it would ultimately cause Adnan’s death at Saddam’s hands.²

Khairallah Lutfah was an ardent Arab nationalist and an active member of the Ba’ath Party. He reared his children and Saddam with the belief that all the Arabs, no matter the Arab country they lived in, were parts of one people called the Arab nation, that all the Arab countries should be united in one Arab state called the Arab Homeland, and that all attempts by the Arabs at such unity had been thwarted and disrupted by the West. Khairallah also enrolled his older son Adnan and his nephew as party members.

Thus, growing up in a household that espoused the ideals of Arab unity and nationalism, and becoming an active member of a party with the declared objective of turning those ideals into a reality, turned Saddam into an ardent Arab nationalist who was strongly anti-Western and particularly anti-British. As a teenager, and into his early twenties, Saddam found his ideals of one Arab nation and homeland being strongly espoused by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.³ In the 1950s and 1960s, Nasser was extremely popular in the Arab world and a hero to the majority of the Arabs, including Saddam. The young Saddam fancied himself becoming the hero of the Arabs one day, a second Nasser.

*****

The Ba’ath Party was established by a group of intellectual Arab nationalists; prominent among them were Michel Aflaq, Salah Bitar and Zaki Arzouzi. Aflaq, who headed the party, was the brains behind the group. He fashioned the party after nationalist and social movements in Europe, yet in its manifesto, he still subscribed to the social and cultural precepts of the Arabs. The word "ba’ath" in Arabic means rebirth. Thus the Ba’ath Party’s objective was to lead the Arabs in their rebirth by forging them into one nation living in one state, and return them to their old days of glory. The party gained membership throughout the Arab world, but more so in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. However, when the Ba’athists brought Hafez Al Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq into power in the 1960s, they made a mockery of their calls for Arab unity, and all such talk evaporated. The party split into an Iraqi and a Syrian faction, which became enemies and acted like two independent parties, although the party remained nominally one under Aflaq who remained residing in Syria. However, a few years into the Assad regime, his relations with Assad soured and Aflaq feared for his life. He fled to Iraq where he was well received and treated as the Party’s elder statesman until his death. Iraq’s good treatment of Aflaq, partly to spite Assad, was the last nail in the coffin of relations between the party factions in the two countries. Already at odds with each other for many reasons that will be made clear later herein, the two men at the helm of each country, Saddam and Assad became mortal enemies.

Like Nasser of Egypt and the other dictators of Libya, Syria, Sudan and Yemen, who descended from modest origins and rose to power from within the ranks of their countries’ armies and arrived at the presidential palace riding on a tank, Saddam also rose from humble origins to power, but from within the ranks of the civilian Ba’ath Party, not the army. He wanted to be a soldier but was turned down by the army. Nevertheless, he played the role of general in the Iran-Iraq war that he started in September of 1980. He shot an army officer with his own pistol because the wretched man openly disagreed with Saddam over some war plans he was presenting to his officers during the Iran-Iraq war.⁴

Saddam became active in party affairs at an early age. At age 15, he became a thug for the party, one of its enforcers, attacking mainly Iraqi communists. In 1959, with logistical support and guidance from agents of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Baghdad, Saddam took part in an attempt at the life of Iraq’s strongman Abdel Karim Qassim. Qassim, with other Iraqi army officers whom he outranked, had staged a successful coup in July of 1958 against the monarchy, declared Iraq a republic and switched allegiance from the West to the Soviet Union. This gained him the wrath of the West and its clients in the Middle East, mainly Turkey, Iran under the Shah, Saudi Arabia, and even Pakistan.

Qassim’s coup had succeeded with the help of Ba’athist and communist army factions, but he later turned against the Ba’athists and persecuted them, while appointing communists to key ministries and positions in the Iraqi government. The Americans feared that Iraq was going communist and wanted to get rid of Qassim. Their objectives coincided with those of the Ba’athists who wanted to take Qassim’s government over. In 1959, the CIA and the Ba’athists cooperated in a marriage of convenience, so to speak, and staged a coup against Qassim.⁵ But the attempt failed. Saddam was wounded in the process but managed to escape to Syria where he briefly stayed. From Syria, the Egyptian Intelligence whisked him away to Beirut where he kept low for a while, and then his Egyptian handlers flew him to Egypt where his idol and hero Gamal Abdel Nasser was president. He was given refuge in Cairo and a monthly stipend that enabled him to live comfortably and enroll in the university. During his almost four-year stay in Egypt, he earned a law degree.⁶

There are records that show that Saddam had been in contact with the U.S. embassy when he was in exile in Cairo.⁷ The visits of Saddam and other Ba’athists to the embassy did not have the hallmark of a long-term alliance but was a temporary meeting of interests: to topple Qassim’s regime. By 1963, America’s patience with Qassim had grown thin. There is evidence that CIA agents were in contact with Ba’athist army officers who staged a