The Fall of Baghdad

ONE
Nasser al-Sadoun lived in a secluded limestone villa on the outskirts of the Jordanian capital of Amman with his wife, Tamara, their two German shepherds, and a Sri Lankan maid named Daphne. From their house, they enjoyed a sweeping westerly view over a panorama of rolling stony hills dotted with scrub pines and olive trees. Just beyond the last of these hills, the land falls away into the deep cleft of the Great Rift Valley, where the river Jordan and the Dead Sea straddle the present-day border with Israel. When I first visited him, a few months before the Iraq War began, in early November 2002, Nasser proudly showed me around his living room, which was festooned with old muskets, swords, battleaxes, and other family heirlooms. He pointed out two of his most prized possessions, a pair of spiked bronze helmets that dated from the seventh-century Islamic wars that ensued after the Prophet Muhammad's proclamation of the birth of Islam in A.D. 610. On a sideboard stood a personal photograph of Iraq's ill-fated last king, Faisal II, shirtless, smiling, on water skis, taken not long before he was murdered along with most of his family in the revolution of 1958. On the walls hung framed portraits of other illustrious ancestors?sheikhs and pashas and royal guard commanders, all bearded, all wearing dashing robes with daggers?from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Iraq was still called Mesopotamia.

Nasser, a handsome, silver-haired man in his late sixties, is a descendant of a legendary Sunni Muslim clan that once possessed its own sheikhdom, called the Muntafiq, which had ruled over most of southern Iraq for four centuries. One of his great-uncles had served as prime minister of Iraq four times in the early twentieth century, and his Dagestani-born grandfather had been the commander of the king's army. Nasser is also a direct descendant?thirty-sixth in a direct line?of the Prophet Muhammad. He pointed out, teasingly, that the late King Hussein of Jordan, a distant relative of his, "was only forty-third." Nasser displayed a kind of rueful good humor about his family's decline and fall, attributing it to a woeful penchant for making bad choices: "We used to rule over an area in the south of Iraq that was larger than England and Wales put together. But we made one mistake, which was to side with the Turks against the British, and so we lost our land, our powers, and our land was distributed to other tribes. . . . One of my grandfathers took Kuwait, stayed a few days, and left again, saying: 'It's not worth staying here.' That was a few years before they discovered oil." Nasser chuckled and threw up his hands in a fatalistic way, with no trace of bitterness.

During Saddam Hussein's rise to power in the early seventies, Nasser and his wife, Tamara Daghestani, who is also his first cousin, moved to Jordan at the invitation of Crown Prince Hassan, and they never returned. Tamara became pregnant and gave birth to a son, and Nasser, an engineer who in Baghdad had helped run the central power station, Al-Doura, found employment with Jordan's electricity board and later as an adviser to the Arab Potash Company, where he worked until he retired, a few years before I met him. Nasser remained active, however, serving on the company's board of directors, and he still drove a company Mercedes. He was not rich, but he was comfortable, and he seemed quite content with his life. Once a year he and Tamara visited London to see friends and relatives who lived there, and Nasser indulged himself buying old, out-of-print books about Iraq at London's rare book dealers.