1 My First War War came to our house on a sunny and cold September morning. I stood on my parents' bed trying to peer out of the window. My mother had her head in the blankets, and my father was propped on one elbow, looking out at the empty patch of land behind our house. What did we expect to see? Tanks and soldiers fighting there? There must have been air-raid sirens, anti-aircraft guns that woke me up and sent me scuttling down to their room, but I don't remember. It was 1980, I was five years old, and the Eight Years War with Iran had just begun. Later, on the roof of our squat brick house in eastern Baghdad, my father, with honey-coloured eyes, black moustache and thick pomaded hair, carried me with one arm and stretched the other to point at a thin white trail that arced in the pale blue sky. With a big smile, he declared "Phantoms, F-4" with the confidence of a hunter who could spot a partridge at a distance in hazy dawn light. From my vantage point resting on his chest, I looked down at my dear uncle standing next to us, his face furrowed with concern and bewilderment. Downstairs, confusion--and people cowering under a white Formica-topped iron table that had been placed under the stairs. Someone was trying to get an old radio to work. For a while they remained there, squeezed into the safety and comfort of that cramped place, then one after the other--grandmother, mother, aunts and cousins--seeing the silliness of their shelter, left and headed to the kitchen, turning the day into a festive family gathering. Only one aunt remained under the table, whimpering. Eight years of war cluttered my memory with images, mixed in with scenes from Russian war films, creating a news reel where reality and fiction seemed equally absurd. There must have been tender memories of childhood, images of uncles and aunts, of feasts with colourful dishes cooked by grandmothers who'd brought their recipes from far distant places . . . All these images were swept away, drowned out by the wails of sirens and the explosions of the Scud missiles that shook the houses. Spring in those years was marked by major infantry offensives, in which human waves of tens of thousands of soldiers crashed against each other. On TV they ran endless loops of a programme called Images from the Battlefront. They showed footage of trenches piled with the mangled and burned corpses. We were told that these were the bodies of Iranian soldiers; mowed down, electrocuted or gassed. The screen filled, the images multiplying: blackened limbs hung from barbed wire, mouths stuffed with dirt, bloated khaki uniforms and helmets scattered along a large field. The pictures were always accompanied by the hoarse voice of the narrator assuring us of imminent victory. After each of these battles, we watched the Leader Necessity on TV, gathering his generals in the gilded hall of one of his many opulent palaces. He took the "Medals of Courage" from a tray carried by his tall bodyguard, who followed respectfully two steps behind. As he pinned them to the generals' chests, you could see them suck in the well-fed bellies that bulged through crisp military uniforms. The medals collected on the bosoms of the generals, and thousands of black banners blossomed throughout the city. They were hung on walls, tied between trees and lamp posts, each announcing--by the name of Allah the most compassionate and most merciful--the martyrdom of an Iraqi man. Collective grief hung over Baghdad during these days. Men raised their hands in a final farewell gesture to wooden coffins draped in Iraqi flags and strapped to the tops of white-and-orange taxis making their way to the cemeteries outside the city, followed usually by a minibus or a van packed with women dressed in black, weeping and smacking their faces in mourning. At night, my father crouched next to the old chrome-coloured radio, straining his ear through the jamming static, trying to listen to foreign stations--an act punishable by seven years in prison--to find out what was going on. "Come to the flavour, come to Marlboros . . . fighting in Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut . . . Iran rejects a peace offer . . ." The snippets of conversation we heard from returning soldiers told us more--artillery shelling in Basra, trenches, and families displaced in the fighting. The dead in that war, all conscript soldiers forced to march to the front, were divided into "martyrs" and "deserters." One set died "gloriously," and were exalted; the other hunted, summarily executed and despised even in death. We saw the deserters transferred into buses with metal grilles on the windows, hands cuffed to the bars of the seats in front of them, scared eyes in their shaven heads. There was the story of the man who killed his own son, for desertion, and was rewarded with a Medal of Courage by the Leader himself. On TV and in school, we were told that this war was a continuation of the first battle of Qadisiyyah, when the Muslim Arabs defeated the Sassanid Empire in 636. Thirteen and a half centuries later, and under the wise command of the Leader Necessity, we the inheritors of the legacy of the Muslim conquerors were defeating the wicked Persians in the Second Qadisiyyah, or the Qadisiyyah of Saddam. The Iranians/Persians were the mortal enemies, the regime declared; they were the thread that ran through all our Babylonian, Assyrian and Arab Muslim metamorphoses. Not only the war but our whole history was explained in the same straightforward linear narrative of phantasmagoria. It ran like this: first God created Adam and Eve in Eden, which was in the south of Iraq, then after a period of confused early humans, the Sumerians emerged, again in the south of Iraq. The Sumerians begat the Babylonians, who begat the mighty Assyrians and eventually metamorphosed into Arabs in a swift natural progression of history. The Arabs became Muslims and went on to conquer the world, defeating the wicked Sassanid Empire in the aforementioned battle of Qadisiyyah, which brought Islam and civilisation to the backward lands of the Persians. After many glorious centuries of unity, evil invaders--Mongols, Turks, more wicked Persians and British imperialists--conspired against us. We had to endure centuries of darkness and oppression, until the Glorious Revolution, led by the Leader Necessity, Saddam Hussein, liberated us and showed us the path to emancipation, progress and victory. Murals decorating official buildings illustrated that history, with the austere bearded profile of an Assyrian king at one end, and the portrait of Saddam at the other, and in between there was a collage of Saladin, Arab warriors and tribal rebels, with a couple of workers and farmers thrown in as a nod to the socialist myth of the Baath Party. The Leader was the embodiment of our national narrative, tall, moustached; eating watermelons with farmers. Wearing dark sunglasses, smoking cigars and with a pistol tucked in his waistband, he struck the quintessential pose of a Third World dictator channelling Che Guevara and Yasser Arafat. The Leader Necessity title was first mentioned in the writings of Michel Aflaq, a Syrian writer and paramount Arab nationalist, who co-founded the Baath Party. Aflaq, inspired by the writings of German ideologues of the nineteenth century, wrote about the historical emergence of a long-awaited Leader Necessity who shall unify the nation and march on the path of victory and glory. Some say Saddam's press secretary was the first to bestow the title on the Leader, others say the Leader himself chose it; in any case, the Leader, a Historic Necessity, was born. At school, we stood to attention as the Iraqi flag was raised. I looked with envy at those whose fathers had been killed in the war because they were allowed to wear military uniforms and carry their late father's insignia on their shoulders. The stern teacher, with her blonde-dyed hair, wore an army uniform and fired a volley of dummy bullets over our heads. We strained hard not to flinch as they echoed across the schoolyard. We sang and goose-stepped to the old Levantine song "The Daughter of the Merchant Had Almond Eyes," which had become "We Are the Baathists, March to the Sounds of Cannons and Bombs." In art class, we drew jet fighters, tanks and stick soldiers emblazoned with the Iraqi flag attacking and destroying Iranian jet fighters, tanks and stick soldiers. ---- The imagery and rhetoric of the state and the Baath Party in those days were that of revolution, radical socialism and Pan-Arab nationalism. None of it meant anything beyond folklore and pageantry. The Leader Necessity, the supreme leader, the ultimate manifestation of the state, and the arbiter of its ideology, had long since emptied the Baath Party of any meaning beyond the implementation of his personal will. Sycophantic party apparatchiks--easily spotted by the style of their moustaches and the short-sleeved safari shirts or military uniforms--parroted ad nauseam the idiosyncratic, incomprehensibly blabbering speeches of the Leader. They were present in every institution and worked to control the masses through denunciations, intimidation and the rounding up of men, who were subsequently forced to "volunteer" in the fight at the front. There was also a formidable array of security services answerable directly to the Leader, which used exemplary violence to quash any dissenting voices and to guarantee obedience. Pictures of the omniscient Leader Necessity decorated each classroom and every public building. Murals stood watching over us, and walls were lined with his sayings. Every evening an hour of TV broadcast was devoted to "poetry in the love of the Leader," or to his pearls of wisdom, accompanied by soft music. One of the cartoons aired on Iraqi TV at that time was a Japanese anime series called Grendizer. The hero, Duke Fleed--read: Saddam Hussein--battled the evil King Vega--read: Imam Khomeini--in defence of planet Earth--read: Iraq. Waves of invading UFO flying saucers bombing cities and civilians represented the evil Iranian jet fighters. I took the good vs. evil analogy even further when listening to nuns in our primary school speak of the Lord our Saviour: I came to believe that Saddam was either God or Jesus, or maybe both of them. In reality, Saddam--whose titles included the Great Historic Leader, Allah's gift to Iraq, the Saviour, the Inspirer, the Victorious, the Honest, the Creative, the Wise, the Teacher and the Pioneer, the Beloved of the People, the Consciousness of the Nation, Father of all Iraqis and the Tent of all the Arabs--was far more important, and dangerous, than God Almighty. While God rarely strikes the blasphemous with instant fury, using the Leader's name in vain was punishable by long years of torture and imprisonment followed by execution. Nevertheless, people did tell jokes about the Leader, just as they did about God, but these were only whispered among trusted friends and family in hushed voices and with a twinkling of guilty eyes, and only after looking at the phone nervously, since we all believed that the security services used phones as listening devices. He was never mentioned in name but referred to as "HIM." ---- Two or three years after the start of the war, on a late afternoon in winter, I stood with my father among a crowd that had gathered to watch a military parade. Iraqi soldiers in olive-green uniforms and helmets sat on the backs of Russian trucks that filed by slowly. Between the soldiers sat the tired, dishevelled and bound Iranian prisoners of war, their heads bowed, their eyes confused; some were very young, others were haggard, old bearded men. The crowd was cheering, but the soldiers, like their prisoners, were silent with dark and morbid looks on their faces. The light was fading quickly, and the sky was turning a purple-blue as the trucks inched their way along, when an Iraqi soldier with a sad face grabbed my waving hand, closed over it with his own big rough one for a second before letting it go. I opened my hand, and in my small palm rested a large copper bullet with a thin red line. I held on to it like a sacred relic for a long time; little did I know that it was a harbinger of the many wars to come. There were two realities of life during that war. In the background, the war continued after Saddam's gamble to achieve a quick military victory had failed; hundreds of thousands of soldiers slept in trenches or ploughed through the muddy marshes, or were killed or maimed. The other reality was of life in the cities. Apart from Basra and Kurdish villages in the north, right in the middle of battle, for the rest of us, these were the years of prosperity--the years when we went to schools, had jobs; when hospitals functioned and roads were built. These realities collided when uncles and cousins were drafted into the folly of war; eventually, my father himself was taken as a conscript soldier. Mothers and aunts wept, whimpered, and prayed. The two realities came together again when the two countries fired long-range missiles at each other's cities. One afternoon our apartment building shook when a rocket fell close by. My father and I walked a few blocks: a couple of houses had been turned into a mound of brick walls and broken concrete roofs. The last memory of that war was cowering behind a sofa with my mother and my young brother. Explosions of anti-aircraft fire rattled the apartment, in what must have been the last Baghdad air raid of the war. I imagined the Iranian fighter hovering over the streets in front of our building, ready at any moment to come pouncing at us through the window. ---- Many years later, when I finally visited Iran, I went to Behesht-e Zahra, a cemetery the size of a small town on the outskirts of Tehran. In the martyrs' section, most of the dead had been killed in the Holy War, or the "Jangi Muqadas," the Iranian name for our eight years of folly. At the head of each grave stood a small aluminium and glass cabinet containing a few items of the martyr's memorabilia; a small copy of the Quran, pictures of Imam Ali and Hussein, plastic flowers, a bottle of rose water, a piece of blood-soaked cloth, and tiny leather pouches carrying verses from the Quran to be worn like a talisman. There were also photographs of the dead soldiers: some black and white, others in colour, faded, re-touched, taken in studios or by a friend in a park or a bus terminal before heading to the front. Inscribed on the graves were the names of the battles--Ahwaz, Kurdistan, Ailam, Shalamgah--the names of towns and marshes in the south and villages in the Kurdish mountains in the north that delineate the borders between our two countries. I knew these names, they were the names of the spring offensives. In the middle of the sea of pictures of the young and sometimes old men in Behesht-e Zahra, I came across a small plot of earth, surrounded by a metal rail, where an Iranian family with the name Qassim was buried; the father was forty, the mother twenty-seven, the children three, two and one. They were all killed by an Iraqi air force attack on Tehran in our version of the "War of Cities." When both Iraq and Iran fired rockets and sent planes to bomb each other's cities. Later I stood in front of one grave scribbling in my notebook when, raising my head, I saw in the altar-like cabinet the bearded face of the martyr, staring at me. I moved, and he moved with me. I stumbled a few steps back, and my heart pounded hard. I was looking at my own reflection in a mirror. After a million people killed or injured on both sides, the two countries accepted a UN resolution and returned to the same point of departure, minus their losses. But in Iraq, the Leader Necessity believed he had a formidable army now, and that no one in the region was going to stand against him. Excerpted from A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
