“I used to tell people that Saad went out to ask about his father and didn’t come back and Ibrahim had gone to school and hadn’t come back,” she said. Their mother, Zahra al-Badri, looked after and protected them for all those years. “Our movements were very limited, we spent most of our time in this room,” he said gesturing at the cramped 16 meter square space, crammed with books and three beds. “We arranged things in the house so that our names would never be mentioned, and for 23 years they weren’t,” recalled Saad. At that point the brothers realized they needed to disappear as well. Security forces then arrested their father on the same charge, followed by their brother Mohammed. Their long confinement began after the their sister Sabeeha was arrested in 1980 because her husband was suspected of being a member of Dawa, a then-banned Shia organization that is now the party of the country’s prime minister. “When I used to put my head on the pillow, I always had the same dream and would wake up terrified,” he said. Saad laments how human dignity and personal security have declined so much in today’s Iraq, but he also remembers having constant nightmares for over 20 years about security forces barging into the small room he shared with his brother. “We have to know if people have kept the principles they had when we once knew them, or if they have changed because of the difficult conditions of the many wars.” “When we finally went into society, we had to be very careful in dealing with people,” said Ibrahim, 45. ![]() Saad and Ibrahim, like hundreds of other Iraqis thought to have disappeared in the prisons of the Iraqi regime, emerged from hiding to a country greatly changed after two decades of war and sanctions. “Two grown-up men like us asking people how to go back to our own house? It was really embarassing,” recalled Saad, 47, adding that their clothes, dating from the 1970s, also provoked comment. After all, things had changed quite a bit over the 23 years that the al-Qaisi brothers had spent hidden away from Saddam’s secret services in a small upstairs room. BAGHDAD: When, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, brothers Saad and Ibrahim left their family home in the leafy middle-class Baghdad neighborhood of Karada for the first time in two decades, they promptly got lost.
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