Stories from Iraq

I spent some time over the weekend with a couple of Iraqi friends, one of whom will now be in the air somewhere over the mediteranian on route back to Iraq for the first time in 31 years. Iraqis are great story tellers, and some of the anecdotes they told me are worth repeating.

The first took place in the Ministry of Planning back in the early 1970s, when my friend first came face-to-face with Saddam, not yet president, but already holding most of the reins of power. The meeting concerned projections for the economy, and Saddam's reaction to one particular statistic is very revealing. He became very angry with the statistician who estimated the population growth rate at 3.2%. "You must make it higher," Saddam bizarrely insisted, "we need to have more people than the neighbouring countries." He was candid about the reason: "I need people to fight when we invade Iran." Remember that he said this almost a decade before the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war - he was already hungrily looking East.

The second anecdote concerns an Iraqi gradute student studying linguistics in the UK in the 1970s. The title of his Ph.D thesis was "The similarities between the Tikriti accent and Hebrew." My friends explained that people from Tikrit (Saddam's home) speak in a thick accent which can be incomprehensible to other Iraqis - a bit like an American trying to understand thick Glaswegian English. In fact one of them claimed that an Israeli might be able to understand more of it than an Arab. The reason being that historically the Tikrit area was settled by Jews (because of the Assyrian and Babylonian transmigration policies), whom later assimilated into the Arab world, many embracing Islam. Hence the Tikriti dialect of Arabic is strongly influenced by Hebrew. At least this was the contention of my Iraqi friend and the subject of the Pd.D thesis. This is intriguing stuff. Unfortunately there is an unhappy ending. The Iraqi embassy in London heard about the thesis, and was not best pleased with someone investigating links with their enemies in Israel, and an offical was heard to said that the student was liable to end up being put in a diplomatic box and shipped to Iraq. Soon after the student disappeared, and has not been heard of since.