Off The Cuff: A wry look at life

On the 12th floor of our apartment building back in Mississauga, live an Iraqi couple, both of whom are engineers. They have two daughters, and the youngest, a cute kid named Nadia is the same age as my younger son.

The wife works in retail in one of the leading hardware stores. The husband, Sa'ad, an electrical engineer, works as a 'technician' in one of the giant subsidiaries in the electronics sector.

The Iraqis are known as the Teutons of the Middle East, and are very precise, very hardworking and unlike many Germans, who are cut and dry in their relationships, very friendly.

Iraqi military engineers, as we all know, did a great job of rebuilding the 'high-profile assets' (as the American army brass called the bridges and other important structures in Baghdad) as fast as they were blown up by the screaming missiles and other ordnance thrown at them.

This highly educated and professional couple spend long hours at work to earn salaries which are a little better than the minimum hourly wage of $7.90 offered by most private sector companies in Canada.

Sometimes Narges asks my wife to pick up Nadia from the bus stop across from our apartment block, when she cannot make it home from work at noon. It's a hard life in Canada for this new immigrant couple.

I am not sure what life in Iraq must have been like for them, but Sa'ad told me this little anecdote when I said that I had stayed at one of the infamous hotels in Baghdad, a couple of months before August 1990.

This was the time when Saddam was haranguing countries in the region for more aid, saying they had all the peace and security while Iraq slugged it out with its neighbour.

"We had our wedding reception at the Al Rashid Hotel," Sa'ad said. (Incidentally, this is the same hotel which has an image of Bush senior on the walkway from the entrance to the reception).

"We wanted to spend our wedding night at the Hotel and for some reason, we were offered a larger suite. When we entered, we saw this huge mirror on the wall, right in front of the bed. We spent some time covering it up with bed sheets. Crazy man, Saddam Hussein," he said laughing, turning his first finger in his temple.

One should have seen Kuwait City in the spring of 1991 to really see how crazy. Dark as midnight even at noon, from the smoke of the burning oil fields that were torched on Saddam's command by the retreating Iraqi troops. Scurrying from alley to alley in the dark, we could hear gunshots.

Later we found out that it was the sound of Kuwaiti vigilantes hunting down collaborators.

When the surrender was being signed by the Iraqis, we were taken in a helicopter to the site, a few kilometres from a small border town. Sitting silently in a helicopter and bemused at the destruction on the ground, you suddenly realise after looking at the 'Highway of Death',that the Americans can also be equally brutal.

It must have been truly chaotic in the last minutes in the lives of the fleeing Iraqis on this highway from Mutla'a in Kuwait to Basra, as the American war machines bore down on them. The Iraqis were apparently carrying home everything they could get their hands on.

The bodies had been removed and all we could see now was blackened shells of trucks, luxury cars and pickups, frozen in time.

A Unicef official in Riyadh told me wryly one day that the largest number of refugees around the world today are Muslims. From Azerbaijan, Afghanistan to Zagreb, you find these people fleeing their homelands, fleeing from their own.

And incidentally, the fastest growing immigrant group in North America today are also Muslims.