Khalid Sheltagh

interview

10.00.15
I’m very proud of my father. He stood firmly against the fascist regime when it launched its suppressive campaign in 1978, which escalated and reached its peak in the early eighties. Throughout, my father refused to leave his country or hide, especially as he was a politically and socially known figure. He was a well known member of the Iraqi Communist Party. He used to say “We can’t leave these poor people, who depend on us, to the mercy of the regime”.
01.34

01.36
On the 14th August 1980, my parents were arrested at home. That was the last we heard of them. My aunts told me when they went to the house they found it had been taken over by the intelligence. A neighbour told my aunts that a fleet of cars and a large number of Intelligence officers had raided the house in the evening and taken my parents away. They occupied our house and confiscated everything, personal effects, documents, records, books. A home holds many precious memories and mementos. They’re all lost to us. We don’t know anything about them.
03.31

03.32
Karim had just been accepted at university. Circumstances meant that he didn’t even get to go there. He was born in 1958. The poor boy was only twenty years old when arrested. He was taken by force from my aunts’ house, five months after my parents were arrested. I think the intelligence had been informed he was hiding there. Nothing was seen or heard of him until the regime fell and archives came to light. His name was found on a list of those executed in 1982.
05.19

05.21
My cousin Nabil was even younger than Karim, 17 or 18 years old. He was arrested a month before my parents were. Nabil came out prison almost dead. He had been injected with a substance nobody knew anything about. He survived, after prolonged treatment, during which his father took him from one hospital to another. But he remained very ill. Just as he had begun to recover he was arrested again. Nothing was heard of him until his parents were informed he had been executed. The authorities continued to harass his parents, taking his father in for questioning by the head of the Yarmuk District Intelligence. That man was so vile. He represented the Intelligence all over Iraq. Beatings and insults were a normal daily practise for them.
07.15

07.18
Nabil was in high school, no more than eighteen years old. What could he possibly be accused of? That his uncle Hamid Sheltagh wasn’t a Ba’athist? That he wouldn’t become a member of the students’ union. He was a good, simple, well educated human being, loyal to his friends. Karim and Nabil were always together. In those difficult circumstances there was no opportunity for young people for political activity. The regime was a fascist one which killed tens of thousands of innocent people for the most senseless reasons. People were cut down in their youth for unbelievable reasons. If the world was told of some the reasons they would think the stories were exaggerated or untrue. The crimes committed by the regime went beyond human comprehension.
08.45

08.46
The situation was very difficult in the eighties and nineties. Iraqis who had left the country could not have put with the severe conditions of state terror and control and the economic hardship. I would imagine the suffering my parents and brother and cousin endured in prison. I would hear every now and then of a prison “cleansing” campaign through thousands of executions. You start to expect the worst. The worst scenario was that they wouldn’t make it out alive from the Intelligence prison cells after so many long years. But I would cling to the hope that I would see my parents and younger brother again one day. That will never happen. How and where they were buried, I still don’t know.
09.53

End Khalid Sheltagh