Samira and Mouna survived the war. They hate the overthrown regime, but also the destruction wrought in getting rid of it, reports Lara Marlowe
Some readers may remember Samira and Mouna, the widowed Iraqi sisters whom I wrote about at the beginning of this month. I returned to their home yesterday, to make sure they were all right.
Samira, the younger, more talkative sister, came to the front gate. In more than a decade, she had never said a hostile word to me. "I'm sorry, I can't receive you. I've just been around the city," she said, her voice a mixture of ice and rage.
Samira kept removing and replacing the comb in her grey hair as she spoke through the iron gate. "I'm too disgusted - they have sacked the city. It's worse than Hulagu."
When Hulagu, the grandson of Genghis Khan, sacked Baghdad in 1258, legend has it that the Tigris turned red with the blood of those massacred by the Mongols, then black - from the ink in the books he dumped in the river. Baghdad held one of the finest libraries in the world then.
Samira knew that arsonists had just destroyed Iraq's National Library. "I hear the Americans smashed down the bank doors with their tanks for the looters," she continued. It wasn't true, but in her state of mind, I couldn't convince her. "The Americans just stand by and let them do it . . ." she fumed. On that point, she was right.
As I was about to leave, Samira asked if I could get a message to her daughter in Europe. The offer of a call on a satellite telephone readmitted me to the lovely villa by the Tigris.
In the back garden, we were soon joined by Mouna, the quiet, older sister, and Mouna's son, Qassem. "Tariq Aziz [Saddam Hussein's deputy prime minister\] has taken the women to Lebanon," one said. The women? Saddam's wife - or wives; he has two - and daughters.
"The defence minister [Gen Sultan Hashem Ahmed\] is in Switzerland," Qassem alleged. "He was taken there by the Americans, to thank him for giving up - there was collusion."
Mouna stared at her rose bushes. "We have no water. We spend our time carrying water. I don't know why my rose bushes are flowering."
Samira and Qassem believe Israel is orchestrating the vandalism and arson attacks which are destroying dozens of cultural buildings, including the Archaeological Museum and National Library.
Iraq once had the largest Jewish community in the Middle East. But as documented by former high-ranking Israeli officials like Moshe Sharett, after the foundation of the state of Israel, Mossad organised anti-Jewish attacks to persuade the city's Jewish population to emigrate. This historical precedent has convinced some Iraqis that Mossad is again up to dirty deeds in Baghdad.
"They want the new Iraq to have no past," Qassem said.
Then Mouna began to talk, for the first time ever to me, about her family's experience of 35 years of Baathist rule. Theirs was a wealthy family when the revolution took place in 1968. "They wanted to make an example, so they chose my brother. He was a lawyer, and he represented a lot of foreign companies," she said.
At 4 o'clock one morning, six young Baathists armed with tommy-guns broke into the family house and took him. "We had no news for 22 months. The money my father spent - we sold building after building, in the hope of buying information."
In those days, Mohamed Said al-Sahaf, the information minister who disappeared with the rest of the regime last week, was the young Baathist spokesman who read the lists of those hanged in the purges.
"Every time Sahaf was going to be on television, I had to take valium before I could listen," Mouna said. "I was so afraid of hearing my brother's name."
By becoming an ardent Baathist, a first cousin of Samira and Mouna had been able to appropriate much of the family fortune for himself. It did him no good: he was tied to a chair and shot in one of Saddam Hussein's Stalinist purges.
For more than three decades, the rest of the family tried to maintain a low profile. "My father used to say 'God let us be forgotten [by the regime\]'," Mouna recalls now.
But the worst thing of all, Mouna said, was her constant fear for her son Qassem, a British-educated engineer. "He couldn't get out - they wouldn't let him leave the country. He was crying the other day because so many of the buildings he built were destroyed in the war."
Although he disliked the regime, Qassem said he was pulled in two directions. "We don't want an occupation, and we don't want a tyrant. We want to be governed by people with education and tolerance, who have seen the world."
This scion of an old Baghdadi family attributed many of Iraq's problems to tribalism. "In the Bedouin tribes, a person's manhood depends on how brave he is when he goes and steals from others. The mentality lingers; it takes generations to change it."
I asked Mouna if she was relieved that the regime had fallen, that Baathists no longer threatened her loved ones. "Not yet," she said. "I don't know what is going to happen. The poor people love my son, because he did a lot of good in Saddam City. But there are enmities. There are still agents at large. These people are geared for harming each other."
Then this ageing, dignified woman, survivor of nearly 80 years of Iraqi history, made a strange confession. "I don't know what I am," Mouna said. "I used to be proud of being an Iraqi. I have Turkish blood in me. Damn the Turks. Damn the Kurds. Damn the Arabs. I wish I could die in my sleep."