My name was Uday Salah. It meant to rise above; it meant righteousness. Now it means that I am a terrorist. My name is Arabic asshole now.
I climbed out of the taxi, closing the door behind me. We laughed when we saw each other, my brother and I. We both asked with our eyes, “How did you get to look so old?” We grabbed food and got back to the taxi going down a lonesome dirt road.
Later, we got on a bus; it was encrusted with dirt, and had foreigners packed in like sardines. My brother Aziz started feeling ill before he even stepped on. He’s always been the man with the weak stomach, could barely keep water down.
“It’s just too slushy,” He would say. Drowning from the inside out wasn’t very pleasant, as anyone might imagine. Aziz would though, every time he got into a car, a plane, a bus, he’d be puking up, coughing, gasping for air like he had just come up from out of the ocean.
While Aziz drowned, I attempted to sleep. Before I could relish any success, I heard a grumble of thunder. The sound surprised me, we were just getting into Afghanistan, and there were no storm clouds within sight. All at once everyone on the bus began to get excited, pointing at the small pops and dramatic bursts of light in the distance. As it grew dark, the erratic thundering started to take the sun’s place, lighting up the sky in an instant.
We arrived at Kunduz, thankfully. The drive had been long, tiring, you know, the usual. But it hadn’t felt normal; the way the desert had claimed all the villages and outposts. No one around, all abandoned as if inhabited by ghosts.
Aziz was still drowning. He was puking up his liver when the thundering began to start again. I stood against a brick wall, mopping my neck with a wet cloth. As I felt the ground vibrate, and watched the lights pop, I realized what they were. I had known, but somewhere in my mind it didn’t register like it should have, like it did at that moment. Of course we were stuck there.
The place was filled with foreigners. Some of them had guns, and seemed to look at us hungrily; others looked as lost as we were.
Word had come that the Americans had actually broken the line. Everyone panicked and started running towards the trucks, the ones that had been taking armed men in and out of the place since we got there. I grabbed hold of a guy’s hand and he pulled me up onto a vehicle, while everyone else did the same. I scanned the crowd for Aziz, but no matter where I looked all I saw was the same thing: concealed faces. Feeling like I was suffocating, I jumped off the truck and struck the dirt hard. Then I ran around, looking in every possible and impossible place. But it was useless.
They said, “Don’t worry, you’ll find him, you’ll find him.”
The trucks drove all of us down to the outskirts of Kunduz. I think that’s when I realized, we were the only people left. It was pitch dark by the time we got to the edge were Kunduz met the barren desert. All of us sat there, drawing stick figures in the dirt, wondering what the hell we were doing there. I sat mourning the loss of my weak stomached brother.
Out of nowhere the bombing started. It made the night feel like noonday. The particles of debris tickled my face and burned the backs of my legs and neck. Lights were flashing in all directions. Men were getting up, running. The sound of helicopters spun in and out of my ears. Machine gun fire rained down like a plague from the sky.
My courage split and I began to run too. In wide circles with the group, shouting and making retorts when a bomb would blind me. Into the night we ran, and by the time morning came, we had come back to where we started. The light of the sun shone on what was left.
It was unspeakable. Bodies lay on the ground. Every one of them was either missing a limb, had their intestines spilled out around them, or had their heads blown off. The ones who were still alive would call out to us. One older man kept insisting: help me, help me, help me, Allah, help me. It was one of the hardest things, to look at them, knowing that you could not help them. Faded human remnants destroyed, burned and brushed away, left abandoned to be blown away by the harsh winds of the desert.
More trucks came. The fifty or sixty who had survived began to pile on, not knowing what getting into that truck would mean for them later. As I jumped up I heard a name. It was my own. I spun around and saw only the men getting on the truck, none of whom was my brother.
After traveling for three or four hours the truck stopped. We were then forced into a group by soldiers. They were holding guns up to our faces and I thought they were going to shoot me, right there in the sand.
As the soldiers continued to gather all of us on the ground with our hands up in the air, my eyes wandered. I saw men digging, and dirt piling up around them. They were throwing men in ditches like sod; whether they were dead or alive, in they’d go. I was terrified of what might happen, whether one of those mass graves being dug were my brother’s, or even my own. My mind retreated into my childhood, when I moved to England. I was so scared, I missed my home in the deserts of Pakistan, and the white children seemed to look at me as if I were a character from a storybook. I felt a feeling I had never felt before in all my years.
As I sat shocked and shaking uncontrollably, ready to puke like Aziz because of my fear, I began to understand that feeling, that finally in my entire human existence, I was a subject to immediate and unhidden hatred.
Our arms were tied, and positioned behind our backs. The bonds were so tight I could feel my heartbeat in my hands, pulsating madly, a metronome for our canter. We were forced to walk in the desert; we were at gunpoint, which was the only reason we had to keep walking.
We were put on trucks once more. It took about a day to get to Mazar-e-sharif. There we were moved to yet another truck, except this one was like a mover’s truck with only one opening. As time went on it began to get unbearably humid and hard to breathe. It felt like suffocation, claustrophobia set in and soon everyone was screaming. We screamed, banged, prayed, anything to make the suffocation stop. Suddenly, a pair of hands pulled me under the surge of screams.
When I woke up it was to the sound of shooting. It went on for about half an hour. It sounded like some guy was just out shooting at a wall for fun. Then I slept.
I woke up this time because I was soaked and freezing. Everywhere around me, underneath me, were corpses. There were lights coming from bullet holes in the walls of the truck, the lights made patterns across the mountain of blood and flesh. Someone shook my shoulder, and I saw my brother Aziz. He had another man’s blood streaked across his face. I praised Allah that he and we had found each other, alive.
The armed men threw the dead out of the truck and began searching their pockets. The stench of death was always present from that moment onward.
We were put into a prison with other men. It was so crowded in there; we had to take turns sleeping. I began to recognize some of them. There was a psychotic man who always yelled at people in Arabic. A younger guy I recognized was the one who pulled me down in the truck, he probably saved my life.
One day, one of the soldiers guarding the cell came in and asked if anyone knew English. I immediately spoke up, ready to do whatever they wanted, as long as it got me out of that hellhole filled with the stench of innocent dead.
They bound me and pushed me in front of a white soldier. He was leaning against a table, nonchalantly.
“What is your name?”
“Uday, Uday Salah.”
“Where are you from?”
“Leicester.”
“Where the fuck is Leicester?”
“England.”
“You Arabic asshole! What the hell are you doing here?”
I hesitated; feeling already like nothing I would ever say would please this guy. He looked like a regular Captain America, ready to purge the world of all injustice.
“My brother and I were taking a trip-”
“Your brother. What’s his name?”
“Aziz Salah.”
This went on for five minutes, until finally I had pissed the guy off so much that he began to scream at me, spitting in my face. I have never seen so much animosity in anyone, and I was startled because of the hatred that seemed to fuel his repeated accusations.
Then they took me and bound me up, my legs, arms, and put a bag over my head. I could feel others in a line beside me, so I suppose there were many of us. I could hear the sound of a plane taking off, so I suppose that we were flying. I could feel the ground beneath me, so I suppose we had landed. I couldn’t see light through the bag, so I suppose that it wasn’t a new day.
There was a stance we were forced to take, what I call the “position”. You had to assume the position if you valued your life. You were expected to stand when they grabbed you, while in shackles nonetheless, and then walk while they held you by your arms, which were behind your back, and by your knickers. All the while, they’d be screaming at you as if it were a drill for a school football team.
Another rule you learned is to never look at an American, never stand, never lift your head up, never speak, never pray. I curse the day that I was forbidden to look up at the sky.
It was a constant pattern every day after that. Hot in the day with interrogations, and cold at night when they would wake you up every hour and call you by number. At times, the interrogations got so bad, that I just wanted to say that I was Al Queada and that I knew where Osama Bin Laden was, but I didn’t. My face was getting so numb from the beatings, I couldn’t tell if I had one or if the American’s had just ripped it away. Guantanamo Bay would do that, rip off your face, and plaster on a new one. One that wasn’t true, wasn’t real, wasn’t even in the slightest accurate. I felt like I was in George Orwell’s 1984, that I would eventually truly believe that two plus two wasn’t four but five.
Eventually we were taken aboard a plane again. This time it was a longer trip. We were told that it would be our final destination.
I feel like an orange banana. This suit isn’t comfortable. My eyes, they sting. Welcome to Guantanamo.
I’m debating whether to drink the water they gave us. I sweat most of it out anyway. Why should I drink it if I can just wear it and get the whole process over with?
“Shut up!” The man, he doesn’t seem to like us. He keeps pacing, pondering what to do with us; whether to kill us as he’s been threatening or to just beat us like dogs, black dogs. The man in the cell next to mine is praying, his lips are quivering before Allah. I’m not sure the American will like that so I’m pretending to be still. I’m pretending to be unaffected, unscathed, untouched. I’m pretending that watching my brother starve is okay, and that I don’t care what happens to him. I’m pretending to be a bloody terrorist who doesn’t care about anything or anyone. Because this place can either destroy you or make you stronger.
Why did the Muslim cross the road?
So he wouldn’t be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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