The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2 August, 1990 caught everyone by surprise. Despite the passage of 29 years, trauma of the invasion has left indelible scars in the memory of many. Aisha Rao, along with her husband and son, was among the tens of thousands of expatriates who experienced first-hand the dreadful invasion and its aftermath. Here, she recalls how she and her family lived through those harrowing early days of occupation and their subsequent escape from Kuwait through the evacuation organized by the Indian government.
Aisha would like to think of that disastrous event as a closed chapter in her life, but the memories of those dark days continue to haunt her. On the morning of 2 August, as usual she had set off to her office in Kuwait City but slowly realized that something was amiss. There were hardly any traffic on the roads and most of the streets in the city appeared deserted.
By the time she reached her office, she knew something had gone terribly wrong. Some of her colleagues were standing outside the locked doors of the office, faces masked in fear and asking the same question – what was going on?
After several futile attempts, they managed to contact their boss, who notified them about the invasion and asked them to go back home. On reaching home, she found her husband and six-year-old son were waiting for her with the same news about the invasion. Aisha’s husband, who worked at the airport, told her about military tanks stationed outside the airport and how he had luckily managed to escape from there.
Aisha and her family, who had been living in Kuwait for quite some time prior to the invasion, had many close friends. Though fear and anxiety about the future was a common pervading emotion among all their friends, during the early days of the invasion they called each other whenever possible to offer moral support and assistance.
It was a tough period for everyone in the country. It all happened so suddenly that no one was prepared for the tumultuous events as they unfolded one after another. One week we were living a normal life and then suddenly we found ourselves searching for basic necessitates, said Aisha.
The amount of food available was barely sufficient to meet daily needs and supermarkets would be open only for an hour or so each day. On some days there would be no food to go around and we realized the pangs of hunger for the first time in our lives. The country was in turmoil and crime was rampant; calling it the worst days in her life, Aisha recalled how one day while they were out to get supplies, they saw a dead body lying on the road. After asking around, they learned that a shop owner had been robbed and then brutally murdered. “The image of the man lying dead on the road haunts me to this day,” said Aisha.
In October, rumors began to spread that Iraq would launch a biological or chemical attack against Kuwait, if the United States intervened on behalf of Kuwait. Everyone became desperate to leave the country and Aisha too decided to leave the country with her family.
Following an evacuation plan that took them on a nerve-wracking journey from Kuwait to Baghdad and then through several camps in Jordan before they were finally able to board a flight for Mumbai. Near the Iraq–Jordan border, we had to reside for days in camps pitched on ‘No-man’s Land’ and had to rely on food supplied by the Jordanian government. “To this day, I feel grateful to the Jordanian government for providing us with necessary supplies,” said Aisha. At the airport in Amman the family had to remain in a long queue and wait for nearly 48 before their turn came to board the Air-India evacuation flight to Mumbai.
While the traumatic experience of those days has left a deep scar in her life and painful memories continue to haunt Aisha, she is determined to view life in a positive manner. “After coming back to Kuwait and finding our house completely ransacked and all our possessions lost, we decided to start afresh from scratch; leaving all the dark memories behind, we vowed to take each day as it comes and to always move forward with hope,” said Aisha.
– The Times Report
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