"I'd developed a strong sense of destiny" ... Rabia Siddique. Photo: Frances Andrijich
The striking brunette with the piercing blue eyes has an AK-47 aimed at her forehead. Crowded around her in a stifling, tomb-like room are about 30 swarthy, bearded men, most of whom are jeering "whore" and "traitor" in Arabic, while tossing up whether to shoot her and her three male associates on the spot, or to spirit them away in their white "death" car to the dusty edge of town. She's the only woman in the room, she feels naked without her hijab, and beads of sweat are slowly forming on her brow. But she shoots her assailant a screw-you stare icy enough to drive his body temperature down by five degrees.
It's September 19, 2005, and Rabia Siddique has been asked to come here, to a police compound in the Iraqi port city of Basra, to negotiate the release of two British SAS soldiers, who - dressed as Arabs - were captured while investigating the infiltration of the police force by Shiite extremists. Hired by the British Army to monitor human rights abuses, Siddique has shown her mettle time and again in negotiations, earning the grudging trust of local judges. So when talks between Major James Woodham, head of the UK brigade's surveillance unit, and the police station's judges break down, the Iraqis ask for her. The Australian woman. The Muslim. The British Army major.
All I wanted was to be acknowledged for the true part I played in the Jamiat incident ... To be ignored like that was insulting.
Still, negotiating the release of hostages isn't exactly Siddique's shtick. She has no training in hostage situations, has little hand-to-hand combat experience, and she's been dispatched to a police compound, the Jamiat, that's riddled with fundamentalist Shiite supporters of the anti-occupation firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, making it just about the most perilous place in Basra. But when she suggests that maybe she isn't the best woman for the job, Siddique is ordered in by her chief-of-staff, Major Rupert Jones. "Do your f...ing job. Get those boys out," he barks. In her rush to get to the Lynx army helicopter for her airlift into the Jamiat, she leaves her white hijab lying on her bunk at the base.
Woman in uniform ... in Basra with Siddique's commander, Brigadier John Lorimer, and Sunni elders, who were pursuing a class action against Shiite terrorists. Photo: courtesy of Rabia Siddique
Against all odds, negotiations begin promisingly. Siddique is taken to a cell to see the two SAS men, who although bloodied and blindfolded, are still alive. She asks for their chains and blindfolds to be removed, here and reminds the chief legal officer in the station that it's illegal to detain British soldiers under the accord between the Iraqi Provincial Government and the Coalition forces. But just when she seems to be on the brink of success, all hell breaks loose. Corrupt police have mischievously broadcast rumours to locals that the SAS soldiers are in fact Israeli spies and that they've slaughtered a local policeman. If there's one thing the extremists on both sides of the Sunni and Shiite divide hate more than each other, it's the Israelis. So now hundreds of locals are besieging the Jamiat, baying for the blood of the so-called "spies". As British tanks t hunder in, desperately trying to create a security cordon, they're attacked by rocket-propelled grenades. Two British soldiers are incinerated.
Once the crump, crump, crump of explosions is heard from within the Jamiat, the extremists seize control, and the moderate judge with whom Siddique is negotiating is gruffly shoved aside. A flushed and angry Arab cocks his weapon at Siddique and Woodham, his eyes darting between them. "One of my relatives has been wounded," he snarls. Just when Siddique thinks she has only seconds to live, another man suddenly wrestles the gunman to the ground.
"Are you okay, Major Rabia?" asks her saviour. Siddique turns in disbelief to Woodham, who, after letting out a yell, has hit the floor behind her. Their rescuer is Captain Jaffar, head of the Serious Crimes Unit (aka the "Murder Squad"), one of the Shiite extremists whose men have been unleashing vigilante revenge - including rapes and killings - against the minority liberal Sunnis who flourished under Saddam's rule.
Western learning ... at Perth's Penrhos College in the late 1980s. Photo: courtesy of Rabia Siddique
Surely it's in Jaffar's interests to see both her and Woodham dead, as she's been investigating his men? Why come to rescue them now? Because their exchanges to date, if blunt, have at least been respectful? Of course, just because Jaffar has saved her doesn't mean they'll be released. Quite the contrary. She and the British soldiers are soon hustled to another section of the Jamiat, the DIA.
Dusk begins to blanket the city, it's still unbearably hot, more than 40 degrees, and Siddique is sopping wet in sweat. While the men are escorted into a walled courtyard to take a piss, Siddique is left standing there. When she asks for an escort, her captors laugh that "only whores go to the toilet with men". If she needs to go, they sneer, she "can go right there". To walk outside alone would be certain suicide. So she lets the urine flow, soaking her clothes, spilling to the floor. A faint smile passes over her face. It's her smile of defiance.
Meanwhile, negotiations continue between the governor of Basra and the British consul-general for everyone's release, as five more British tanks rumble towards the compound. Siddique has impassioned discussions with Colonel Sewan, head of the DIA section of the Jamiat, whom she has dealt with on several occasions before. He finally agrees to release all the hostages - but at their own risk, with no transport away from the Jamiat. When one of the British tanks finally smashes through one corner of the compound, they're left to make a mad dash through underground sewers and open ditches to reach the rendezvous point. From there the tank quickly rolls on to a Hezbollah safe house, where the two SAS officers have been moved and just abandoned by their captors. The tank arrives in the nick of time. The two soldiers are stripped to their underwear - a sure sign they were about to be beheaded. Everyone in the tank is euphoric.
On Her Majesty's service ... after being awarded the Queen's Commendation for Valuable Service award. Photo: courtesy of Rabia Siddique
Back at base, after nine hours of being held hostage, Siddique is dismissed with a cup of tea and a hug by her commander, Brigadier John Lorimer, while the men are thoroughly debriefed. Adrenaline still pumping through her veins, she can't sleep. Do they think a woman's story is not as important as a man's? she asks herself. If she's not debriefed, how will they know that, early in the hostage crisis, she talked a couple of other British soldiers - in the Jamiat with her - out of trying to bust their way out, a sure suicide mission? She was a participant, not a bystander, in the crisis.
Siddique will be further incensed when her name is left off official reports and she will not be invited to participate in an inquiry into the Jamiat incident, requested by Whitehall. While Major Woodham will go on to receive a Military Cross for his bravery, Siddique's understated bravery will become invisible. It will all eventually drive her to take a dramatic course of action against the British Army, one that will draw newspaper headlines across the world.
But all this hasn't happened yet. Siddique's posting to Basra still has months to run, during which time the security situation in Iraq sharply deteriorates. Improvised explosive devices, those deadly roadside bombs gifted by the Iranians to their radical Shiite brethren, are killing one soldier in her unit a day. The furies of religious radicalism unleashed by the war create daily horrors: liquor stores and churches are being burnt, homosexuals and other minorities slaughtered. Middle-class Sunnis and Christians begin to flee the country in their tens of thousands. As more and more buildings get reduced to rubble, Basra itself seems to be crumbling back into the desert.
Forward march ... Siddique with her husband Anthony and triplet sons, born in 2008. Photo: Frances Andrijich
Maybe Siddique isn't cut out to be an army lifer after all, she reflects during those last miserable months. For the second time in her life, she feels trapped and powerless - and she hates it. The last time she felt like this was when she was a nine-year-old girl growing up in suburban Perth, when the old man next door would wait until her parents went out. When she'd hear that frightful clink of the swing gate joining their two backyards.
He began with harmless hugs, soon advanced to fondling and groping, until he was slipping his hands beneath the young girl's clothes to penetrate her. She called him "Poppa" - he was a trusted retired neighbour who helped out her father by doing gardening and handyman work around their whitewashed brick home in Downey Drive, Manning - back then, in 1980, a suburb of hard work and modest dreams. To pay the bills, her Indian father worked at Pizza Hut and as a security guard, and her white Protestant Australian mother in a travel agency, which meant young Rabia was often left alone in the house to take care of her two-year-old brother, Adam.
"Poppa destroyed my childhood - up until then, I was a naive, trusting little girl," Siddique recalls glumly. We're sitting in a cafe in Perth's Mercure Hotel and Siddique is twirling a strand of salt and pepper squid from her plate as she unspools the story of the old creep's chilling manipulations. "He warned me never to tell Mum or Dad, and that as long as we had our 'special time' together, he wouldn't need to touch my brother."
At first cowed by the old man's threats, and fearful of a family blow-up, the little girl remained silent, until the day came that she could take it no more, and rang her mother at work in a torrent of tears. "I remember saying, 'Mummy, I want to go to the police.' Even then I had a sense of injustice; I understood what I needed to do." She recalls whispered conversations between her parents, her father speaking to Poppa and his wife - and then padlocking the gate between the two properties. While the abuse ceased, it didn't stop the little girl from feeling a creeping rage that this man had got away with his actions without punishment.
"I felt abandoned," she says. "It was the first time I learnt that it was pretty much up to me to look after myself. Poppa didn't have to live with the consequences of his actions, whereas I was living with them daily." The culture of silence at the time, and perhaps the fear that the police would treat a non-Anglo child differently, kept her parents from going to the authorities. Back then, all the young Rabia wanted was to "fit in, to have a name like 'Caroline Jones', and to have white skin". Her deep sense of injustice was also forged by what she saw her Indian father go through: frequently snubbed for promotions, he would have a heart attack by the time she was 13.
Dressed in neatly tailored black pants and shirt, the now 42-year-old Siddique exudes the look of a woman who's led a comfortable, middle-class life. But as she tells her story, her words are at odds with her pinned-down appearance. When she was about 14 or 15, with the family fortunes on the upswing, she was sent to Penrhos College, a private girls school in Perth. Her father was astonished that the daughter of a Muslim migrant could become school captain of a Uniting Church school - not that he ever indoctrinated her with Islam. "I was never made to go to the mosque as some of my friends were made to go to church," she says.
Speak to those who went to Penrhos with Siddique and they'll use words like "memorable", "focused" and "spookily poised" to describe her as a teenager. Speak to a couple of close friends about her today and the word "poised" pops up again, as well as "resilient" and "composed". What it all seems to add up to is this: there aren't too many people with Rabia Siddique's composure, especially when put to the test in the ugly game of war. But, of course, there's more to her than that. Her first marriage failed, she admits, because she found it too "safe".
"He was a lovely man, but he was all about having a peaceful life. He wasn't someone who would fight for a cause. I found out through that relationship that predictability doesn't suit me."
No surprise, then, that this feisty young woman clashed with the other significant male in her life, her father, especially while studying law at the University of Western Australia and savouring the freedoms of campus life. "My dad saw me grow into a confident woman, and because I was honest to a fault, I wasn't going to pretend to be someone I wasn't. Some of my friends were leading much wilder lives than me, but pretended to be all conservative when they went home."
After graduating, Siddique spent nearly two years at legal aid in Perth before becoming one of Australia's youngest federal prosecutors with the Director of Public Prosecutions. "I was a young woman on a mission; I wanted to save the world. I'd watched what was happening in Kosovo and dreamed of prosecuting war criminals. It wasn't about earning a big salary."
Hungry for bigger adventures, in 1997 she moved to the UK with her first husband, whom she'd been with since she was 19. The then 26-year-old landed a position as a solicitor specialising in public liability, but her marriage was on the rocks. "We'd drifted apart; I could see the end coming shortly after we arrived in the UK," she shrugs.
What Siddique didn't see coming was the sudden and surreal event that was September 11, 2001. She was in a shuttle bus between Gatwick and Heathrow airports, about to catch a flight back to Perth to visit her family, when she heard a news flash about a plane ploughing into the north tower of New York's World Trade Centre. "What was that? Turn up the radio!" she and her co-passengers demanded. By the time the bus reached the terminal, the second plane had sliced into the south tower and travellers were glued to TV monitors, watching horrific images now seared into our collective consciousness.
Siddique had only just enlisted in the British Army, which she'd seen as a stepping stone to working in international humanitarian law and the United Nations. The events of September 11 seemed to make her career move seem all the more prescient ("I'd developed a strong sense of destiny"). As her flight back to Perth was delayed for hours and then re-routed around the Middle East (the entire continental US was a no-fly zone), she had plenty of time to plot her future course. She would make herself indispensable to the army, take a crash course in Arabic, and brush up on the Five Pillars of Islam. But she also recalls something else. "I was looking around the plane, checking out any suspicious Middle Easterners," she says with a chuckle.
It was unfathomable to her father why she'd joined the army in the first place. "Darling, what in the hell are you doing?" he asked shortly after she arrived in Perth. And indeed, if she had reservations about George W. Bush's "War on Terror", she was mortified when he and the White House hawks announced the invasion of Iraq on flimsy evidence about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. "It was evident from the outset that Iraq was about a lot of things, but not the events of September 11," she notes.
So how did Siddique reconcile her opposition to the war with her participation in it? "I was a commissioned officer by the time Iraq was invaded, so I didn't have the luxury of participating in all the mass demonstrations against it. I was just lucky that I wasn't deployed to Iraq in 2003 during the invasion period, but in 2005, when the main role for our forces was trying to re-establish the rule of law. I'd joined the army to do good." Nonetheless, upon her arrival in Basra, she was horrified by what she saw. "To see the ruins of grand buildings and palaces - Saddam was big on building palaces - the poverty and lawlessness, was almost unbearable. Saddam was no angel and many were executed under his rule, but it was still a fairly secular culture, women went to university, and there wasn't a huge amount of ethnic tension."
If Siddique took inspiration from any one individual during her time in Basra, it was a woman in her mid-20s called Nour, a translator for the American journalist Steven Vincent. She'd meet Nour secretly outside the rear gate at Basra airport with security guards in tow. In two years, Nour had watched Basra turn from a bustling city of open-air cafes, hair salons and bars into a bedraggled and bloody war zone. "We're now forced to wear the hijab," she said sorrowfully. "I used to wear make-up and paint my nails." Nour supplied Siddique with priceless insider information, such as the fact the governor of Basra was a Shiite radical sympathiser. But what happened to Nour and Vincent just a month before the Jamiat crisis would go on to haunt Siddique forever.
The tide of sectarian slaughter between Shiites and Sunnis unleashed by the war meant that reconstruction efforts were constantly throttled, says Siddique. "What ordinary people on the street were telling us was that if you want to help us, sort out the police force because you've recruited a corrupt bunch of thugs."
After her deployment to Iraq was up, Siddique returned to her cottage in Wiltshire with a freight of emotional baggage, but the heaviest of all was a sense of betrayal by the army. As far as she was concerned, equality means equality, and she'd been cruelly short-changed by army brass.
"You're not yourself. You have to tell me what's going on ..." The words of Siddique's second husband rang in her ears shortly after her return to England, but it took several more weeks for her to confide in him. An officer in the Royal Air Force - they were married just a year before Siddique's deployment to Iraq - Anthony Green was appalled at the way his wife had been treated by the army and suggested she lodge a formal complaint.
Ironically, Siddique's next posting was to a new employment law branch set up to promote equality and diversity in the armed forces. She was even invited to be its poster girl as a shining example of the new equal-opportunity armed forces: her face was soon smiling back from thousands of recruitment posters. While Siddique had never suffered sexual harassment in the army, she was acutely aware of its double standards.
So when she learnt that James Woodham had been awarded the Military Cross for his "cool head and calm leadership" during the crisis in the Jamiat that day, she was happy for him - but resentful her own actions had been so swiftly forgotten. Yes, she was given a Queen's Commendation for Valuable Service shortly afterwards, but this wasn't for her actions in the Jamiat; it was for the human rights work she'd done earlier. If Major Woodham's actions in the Jamiat warranted an award for bravery, then her name at the very least should have been noted in the operational report.
Eventually, in May, 2007, Siddique submitted a formal grievance with the Army Board - even after she was warned it would threaten her career. It was around this time she went through the heartbreak of an ectopic pregnancy, and the loss of her baby, while her husband had a section of his thigh removed because of a particularly aggressive skin cancer. Not that any of this reduced her resolve to challenge the British Army, which kept postponing a hearing. "Delaying tactics are all about wearing you down, which is why the army kept requesting more and more documents. I could have crumbled, but I'm pretty resilient."
Which came in handy when stories of the impending court case were leaked to the press. "The media tried to paint me as a medal hunter," she fumes. "I couldn't care less about medals. I'm an Aussie and being decorated by the Queen isn't something that excites me. All I wanted was to be acknowledged for the true part I played in the Jamiat incident, which would have counted towards my promotion prospects. To be ignored like that was insulting; it could have been so easily fixed when I first raised the oversight." Nor was she after easy money, she insists: if she wanted to line her pockets, she could have taken a medical retirement and claimed a life pension. Although a damages figure of £625,000 was being bandied about in the press, Siddique, in an email exchange with Good Weekend, insists she was paid only a fraction of that amount. "The figure you quote ... was concocted and leaked by the UK Ministry of Defence a week before the case was heard by the Tribunal ," she writes.
Perhaps because of the media circus surrounding the trial, the Ministry of Defence decided to settle out of court. In court documents, James Woodham disputes standing behind Siddique when the insurgent held a gun to their heads, or diving to the floor and yelling out. A couple of the other soldiers seemed to downplay her role in the hostage negotiations, although neither denied she was talking with the judges. The Chief of the General Staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, applauded her role as a legal adviser in the stand-off and noted the army could learn "appropriate lessons" from its treatment of her. A year or so before the case, Woodham sent an email to Siddique, saying he felt embarrassed for being singled out as hero, as it was truly a "team effort" and he only played a small part. "I have no issue with James," says Siddique quietly.
"Peek-a-boo, peek-a-boo", teases photographer Frances Andrijich playfully from behind her camera during Good Weekend's photo shoot of Siddique with her three boys and husband.
The four-year-olds promptly break into fits of hysterics. Falling pregnant with triplets after a punishing round of IVF treatment was Siddique's catalyst for returning to Perth to live. Even though she is beyond busy - she's still holding down a full-time job as a senior government barrister - she says life is much easier here than in Britain. "The world is becoming very dangerous. This is a better place for our kids to grow up in".
She is still haunted by her time in Iraq - and inspired by some of the people she knew there. A month before she was held hostage at the Jamiat, Steven Vincent and her friend Nour were gunned down by Shiite insurgents in broad daylight. Vincent died on the spot, while Nour lay in a gutter with bullet wounds to her back for hours until she was rescued and hospitalised. Vincent's widow later sponsored Nour's migration to the US, where she now lives.
"Brave women like Nour, with the support of a few brave men, can bring about change in the Middle East," declares Siddique. "Being passive is about the worst thing a woman can do."
Rabia Siddique's book Equal Justice is out next week. Extracts from the book will be published in The Sun-Herald on September 22.
Twitter: @GregCallaghan1
Lead-in photograph (and this page, main) by Frances Andrijich. Hair and make-up by Yvette Gray. Styling by Betty Tran. Rabia wears pearl studs and gold diamond pathways necklet by Linneys. Shot at Midland Railway Workshops, Midland, WA.
Like Good Weekend on Facebook to get regular updates on upcoming stories and events. 
