Out of Mesopotamia
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
About Salar Abdoh
About Akashic Books
Copyrights & Credits
This book owes a debt of gratitude to Ibrahim Ahmad—
editor, friend, interlocutor. And it is dedicated to the
noble people of the Land Between the Two Rivers.
To see both blended in one flood,
The mother’s milk, the children’s blood . . .
—Richard Crashaw, “Upon the Infant Martyrs” (1646)
1
Nasif held an index finger to his lips, hushing himself and me. I didn’t see this but felt it, because he did it often, especially when the Afghans of his company got excited. The men who wanted to kill us were glued to the ground somewhere out there. Nasif was a sure shot and I was as good as blind in the dark. Like a lot of people there, his was a nom de guerre—for reasons of security, they said, though I was certain it was of no consequence what false name a soldier used. In fact, we had to call him not just Nasif, but Abu Nasif. But I’ll make it simple here, as there were entire armies of men in the battlefields of Mesopotamia who were called Abu-something. This purely Arabic designation, Abu—father—did not suit the majority of them, though; they were too young to be fathers. So when they died, which was often, the title turned into a butterfly, transitory, and it went on to perch on somebody else who was new to the war and still breathing.
Usually not for long.
Together, Nasif and I made a questionable night watch. But those specters, I was sure, were out there, digital contours inside Nasif’s neck-breaking night vision gadget in the vast Syrian blackness. I’d only seen them in daytime, as body parts or dead. At nights I’d hear them. Until now I had done everything to come farther west. Begged mostly. Because I wanted to report on the fight at its fiercest. But my half blindness made me a liability. Not a huge one, because honestly this war was on the side of clumsy. And now I just wanted to go back east again, back to Iraq, where it was safe. This safeness was relative. It only meant that over there you knew who your enemy was. Here, in Syria, it was different. Here lurked true evil.
I sat back. Nasif, who had been ghostly silent for the last hour, had an affected Afghan accent. Sometimes when we were alone he would forget and shift into his regular Persian of the northeast of Iran. There was a noticeable difference. Yet I didn’t bother calling him out on his act. He did it because the Revolutionary Guards, who were in charge of all logistics and combat operations, were not so keen on just any Iranian getting up to come way out here. There had to be some form of control. Our Afghan mercenaries they could control. There was a command structure. Regular military accountability. There were paychecks and leaves. With Iranians it was different. Pay for combat was the last thing these guys came here for. Mostly they came because they wanted martyrdom. I will try to convey what this means: this fucking hunger for martyrdom that grips a man, or woman, and won’t let them go. I will fail entirely at explaining it, of course, because in the end it’s the one thing that is unexplainable. But I’ll try anyway. Because I’ve seen it, tasted it from a safe but close enough distance.