The call came at 10am: “They’re here!”. We ran down the stairs from the top of
the Baghdad hotel where The Times has its office. The minibus was weaving
its way through the chicane of blast walls that protect the building. I was
taut with anticipation. Could the occupants of this vehicle really live up
to their extraordinary billing? The father got out first – an old man in
long Arab robes and headdress.
His three sons followed. One by one they climbed out of the van’s side-door.
And then it happened. Instead of standing upright, they each flopped down on
all fours and walked towards us – back legs straight, bottoms high in the
air, padding across the tarmac on their hands and feet like bears.
The photographer, our Iraqi bodyguards and I watched in amazement. We had been
told to expect this, but still we were stunned. Four million years after
humans learnt to walk on two feet we were watching men reverting to a
primeval gait. We were witnessing a phenomenon so rare that there was, until
three years ago, no known case anywhere in the world.
This story really started in 2004 with the discovery of a family with five
quadrupedal children living in a remote village in southern Turkey.
The Times published a feature, and the BBC aired a documentary made with the
help of Professor Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist at the
London School of Economics. Last year, an Arabic satellite television
channel, al-Arabia, screened that documentary, and by chance it was seen by
a young researcher named Amjad Jabbr Majeed, who works at the University of
Babylon in al-Hilla, 100km (62 miles) south of Baghdad.
Majeed knew of another family of hand-walkers who lived in a poor farming
village 10km from al-Hilla. He tracked down Humphrey on the internet, and
e-mailed him pictures of the Iraqi hand-walkers taken on his mobile phone.
“I could hardly believe my eyes. This Iraqi case seemed almost a carbon copy
of the Turkish one,” Humphrey says. But war-torn Iraq was a very different
proposition from Turkey. A visit was out of the question.
Humphrey pumped Majeed for information. He had him make a longer film of the
hand-walkers and describe their physical characteristics. He asked for blood
samples to determine whether their condition was genetic. Majeed obtained
the samples with a doctor’s help, and exported them from his chaotic country
by the simple expedient of putting the blood on filter papers, the filter
papers inside greetings cards, and posting them to Dr Stefan Mundlos, a
leading genetics researcher in Germany who had been collaborating in the
study of the Turkish family.
Earlier this year Humphrey contacted The Times, the only British newspaper
with a Baghdad bureau, to see if we could help further. For Westerners to
drive to al-Hilla would be suicidal: it is in the middle of the so-called
triangle of death. We were politely rebuffed when we asked the US military
if we could embed with its troops in Hilla and be escorted to the village.
We finally settled for the next best option.
Majeed rented a minibus and brought the hand-walkers to Baghdad where, for
three hours one recent morning, we talked and took pictures. The father and
his sons hope that these will enable someone somewhere to find a remedy – a
remedy that would alleviate a deep sadness that they conceal with humour and
good-natured banter.
When I ask the three brothers – Ali, 41, Abbas, 36, and Qusay, 34 - what they
want most in life they all give the same poignant answer: to walk and get
married. Qusay, the joker of the three, blushes as he confesses that he once
dreamt that he was walking and got married and slept with his wife. “I felt
very happy,” he says. They have normal sexual impulses, their father says,
but he protests with mock seriousness: “Where can I find wives for you?
Shall I import them from abroad? Shall I bring them from another planet?”
Later the father, Hussein Ulaywi, 70, tells me: “I always keep a smile on my
face. I tell jokes. I’m very sad I can’t find wives for them but I turn even
the worst moments into funny ones. We couldn’t live without this attitude.”
Ulaywi is a humble man, a former school cleaner who farms a little land in
the village of al-Nakhella. He married his first cousin, Hassna, and they
have had ten children – five boys and five girls – whom they raised in a
tiny two-roomed house. Three sons and the eldest daughter, Ahlaam, 44, are
hand-walkers. Ulaywi’s youngest daughter has Down’s syndrome.
Another daughter died of heart failure. His four other children developed
normally, though one is sterile.
He says that the four hand-walkers never crawled on their knees like normal
babies. From infancy they used what Humphrey calls the “bear crawl” with
their legs held straight. He realised when Ahlaam was three that something
was wrong but kept breeding because, he says, “I dreamt of having a son, a
normal son.” Ali came next, then a healthy girl, then Abbas and Qusay before
he fulfilled his ambition.
Ulaywi tried to teach his children to walk on two legs, using crutches and
other supports, but without success. He went to many doctors and hospitals,
including the best in Baghdad, but they sent him away saying the problem was
congenital, or the result of inbreeding, or simply the will of Allah.
Eventually he resigned himself to their condition.
“I think it’s a blessing, because whatever Allah wants to do with us is for
the best,” the old man says as he kneads his prayer beads. “My wife says I
have to be thankful because it is God’s will . . . People in the village say
my sons are my route to paradise because they are a test from Allah.” When
the three brothers were young, other boys in the village mocked, beat and
threw stones at them. But as they grew stronger and more agile they fought
back and eventually forced the other kids to respect them. “When the
villagers realised they were harmless they started to really love them and
look after them,” their father says. The brothers never received an
education, however. All three are a little slow mentally and slur their
speech, and each was sent home after just a few days at the village school.
The brothers walk on all fours in identical fashion. They all say that walking
upright hurts their lower backs, and that they lack balance.
They put their weight on the heavily calloused heels of their palms.
They sometimes topple over when sitting. They find stairs hard, and have to go
down backwards. But in other ways the siblings are quite different.
Qusay is the most sociable, and likes to sit in the village café talking. He
jokes about swimming in the hotel pool. He directs affectionate jibes at his
oldest brother: “Don’t talk to Ali. He’s got a duck’s brain.” He is also the
best on two legs. He walks stiffly, with his legs splayed out, but can cover
50 yards or more. He says he practises regularly with a stick and still
believes that one day he will be able to walk normally. “You wish!” his
brothers laugh.
But Qusay is also the heaviest of the trio, and the least good on all fours.
The three brothers recently embarked on a 60km pilgrimage from their village
to the holy city of Karbala. Qusay managed 40km, but, incredibly, Ali and
Abbas completed the entire journey in 30 hours.
Abbas is the romantic. He likes music, watches movies, raises pigeons and
tends a small garden. He says he would love to go shopping, or help to build
an extra room for the family house, but he can hardly walk a step without
falling over. “I wonder how it feels to walk,” he says sadly. “I feel I want
to stand up and start walking, but I can’t. I really want to get married but
where can I find a wife?” Ali is cross-eyed and skinny, but the fastest on
all fours. He boasts that he can catch a running child. He can walk only a
few yards on his legs, however. Ahlaam, the eldest daughter, did not come to
Baghdad and is apparently too overweight to move around much, even on all
fours.
At one point Ulaywi catches Abbas while he is walking on all fours and pulls
the back of his pants down. He points to a hard lump covered by calloused
skin at the very base of his spine. The brothers have other peculiarities.
All three have very stubby little fingers, and the second smallest toe on
Qusay’s left foot is deformed.
The hand-walkers are a financial burden for Ulaywi. They cannot work, and they
have frightened off suitors for at least one of his healthy daughters –
“Anyone who wants to propose to them changes their minds when they see their
brothers. They think their own children in the future may have the same
problem.” He says he has asked the Government, and the Shia religious
authorities in the holy city of Najaf, for support, but with no success.
But while Ulaywi does not exploit his children’s singularity – he did not ask
The Times for money – it appears that he does derive some income from them.
Ali and Abbas both take themselves off to al-Hilla by bus where they either
beg or are given money – it is not clear which. They say they get £5 to
£7.50 in a day. Qusay says he does not go with them because he is ashamed to
beg. Their father says he tries to stop them but they go anyway.
By this stage it seems obvious that the problem is congenital, but over lunch
Ulaywi astonishes us again. He claims that there are two other families in
his village, neither with any familial connection to his own, with offspring
that hand-walk. I ask Majeed. He knows one of the families. The oldest son
is a hand-walker and cannot talk, he says. Of the four other siblings, two
are healthy and two have learning difficulties.
After lunch the brothers happily cooperate while we take pictures of them
standing upright, trying to walk, and laughing as they topple over.
We film them walking down the road behind the hotel on all fours. It is
midday, the temperature is well over 100F (38C), and the tarmac is
scorching, but they do not complain.
We worry about crossing the line and making a freak-show of the brothers. But
when the session is over and it is time for them to leave, their father
takes me aside. “First I ask God, and then I ask you, to help us,” he says.
“I am an old man now. I cannot care for them any more – maybe today, but not
tomorrow. I wish somebody could help them to be normal. Perhaps somebody
could bring them out of Iraq for medical help. I would be grateful to
anybody who can help.” With that he draws me close to his bristly chin and
kisses me three times on the cheeks, Arab-style.
