January, 2005
ESQUIRE MAGAZINE

The American Dream (continued)

Her case was given top priority by Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who was in Iraq as senior policy advisor at the interior ministry; he assigned two military investigators to look into her claims. Their investigation lasted four months. Having heard her description of the prison concealed behind the Baghdad Police Academy, with its dead tree stumps still trussed with barbed wire for yoking and raping women prisoners, Kerik went to see for himself. "To be physically there, to look at the barbed wire that was hooked into the trees, to think about the stories she told and then actually see the devices they used…" He paused. "It was sickening."

Her memory for details was superb, and unlike most Iraqi women, Hanna seemed fully at ease with American men—even while recounting the most graphic events. She told them that she was the only daughter of a prominent Assyrian Christian family from Arassat al-Hindya, a part of Baghdad frequently compared to Beverly Hills. Following the death of her much-loved father, Mikhail Hanna, a pharmacist, when she was eleven, Hanna traveled throughout the world with her mother, Jeanne d'Arc Bihnam. She went on to attend Oxford University, where she received a master's degree in accounting. Later, she opened a fashionable boutique in Baghdad, catering to the city's wealthiest women.

Because of her wealthy and privileged background, suitors clamored for her hand. But Hanna was determined to marry for love, and in 1993, at the age of thirty, she began a courtship with a wood-carver, the son of Indian immigrants who had come to Iraq along with thousands of Indians during the British occupation of 1919 to 1932. Haytham Jamil Anwar was uneducated, poor, and—despite being born in Iraq—not deemed an Iraqi. In a country where tribal bonds trump citizenship and genealogy defines identity, Hanna's choice was considered shameful. Her mother opposed the marriage.

That was just the start of her problems. As Hanna later explained, Saddam had made it illegal for Iraqi citizens to marry non-nationals. By marrying Anwar, she would be breaking the law and risking state backlash. But Hanna was a risk taker, and on August 15, 1993, she and Anwar found a sympathetic priest to perform the ceremony. Afterward, anxious to make it right with the state, she considered applying for an exemption to Saddam's dictate. Instead, anticipating a bureaucratic logjam, she decided to use her family and business connections and go straight to the top.

She asked for an appointment with Uday Hussein, the son of Saddam and Sajida. Why not? Hussein's first wife was a backward peasant who shopped at Hanna's boutique and came to rely on the young woman's consummate fashion sense—from how to dress to how to cross her legs like a lady. After Sajida confided that Saddam, her first cousin from Tikrit, no longer showed any interest in the marital bed, Hanna showed her how to create romance with candles and designed her a set of sexy black pajamas. The way Hanna saw it, Sajida's son owed her a debt of gratitude. He granted her an appointment, and at 10:00 a.m. on November 15, 1993, she arrived at his office at the Olympic Committee, was shown to a reception room, and instructed to wait. Hours passed. Her cigarette lighter wasn't working, and as she waited, she grew increasingly anxious. Finally, three men entered the room, slipped a black hood over her head, tied her hands behind her back, and steered her down a narrow corridor, into an elevator, and out into a garden, where her high heels sank into the sand. They half carried, half dragged her into another building, pushed her into a room, and tied her, spread-eagle, to a bed. "Please," she begged. "I'm like your sister." "If our sister married an Indian, we would kill her," they responded.

She was raped for days. A virgin when she entered, she heard the guards ask "Master Uday" what he wanted to do with her blood. He ordered them to sprinkle it around the rim of his whiskey glass like salt on a margarita. "I called out to Jesus, to Mary, and to Muhammad," she said. "They damned them all."

On the fifth day, a commander entered the room, accused Hanna of spying for the British, and applied electric shocks through a rod inserted in her vagina. She lost consciousness and, when she awoke, found herself in Loose Dogs Prison, where the daily regimen comprised torture, rape, and a diet of green soup and one slice of bread.

Her mother assumed that Hanna had eloped with Anwar. But he, too, had been arrested and was being held in the men's cellblock—no farther than a football field away from his wife. After seven months, three men appeared at Jeanne d'Arc's mansion with a handwritten letter from Hanna, asking her mother to sign over her house in order to secure her release. Jeanne d'Arc agreed, eventually signing away two houses. Still, Hanna wasn't returned. For nineteen months, the men drained Jeanne d'Arc of all her remaining wealth until, homeless, she was forced to lodge with a poor Muslim man who opened his door in an act of charity. By the time Hanna was released in 1996, her head shaved, Jeanne d'Arc didn't even recognize her.

<< Page 1      Page 3 >>