Personal Narrative: My Family In Iraq

1. What was your childhood like? (In the answer, talk about his parents)(Chapter 1)

Well I had a rather sheltered life as a child, my parents were well off. Actually my family has the royal line in it. Through my father I am, in fact, a descent of Prophet Mohammad, and my Grandfather was the Head of the Sunni faith in large parts of Iraq and the Moslem world. The leadership is handed down through family but neither my father nor his older brother would take on the role when he died. Instead it was passed on to a cousin. Through my father I am also descended from the most traditional of Iraqi aristocracy, one of the nine families that originally ruled Baghdad. My family the Al Muderis family’s political and social power has tied very much to the establishment, so its influence weakened with the revolution of the Monarchy, the rise of the republic and
In 1980 Iraq invaded Iran, I distinctly remember this because we were in the U.S. when we heard the news. My Father decided we had to get back to Baghdad. We found out that the Baghdad airport had been bombed. This meant we had to fly to Amman in Jordan and went for a torturous overnight drive, on wooden plank seats in a vehicle that was more like a truck than a bus, from Amman to Baghdad. Saddam Hussein started this war, but before the war, Baghdad was actually prospering, yes he ruled with an iron fist and there are many bad things he did. But he did introduce quite a few good things, for example: free education through to high school, free medical treatment in hospitals and as well as that, industry was developed. Although all this was developed the war brought Baghdad back onto its knees. Educated and hardworking people were no longer able to make a living. When I was first qualified as a doctor in Baghdad I used to get the equivalent of one dollar