Grand mosques are humbling experiences, like grand churches. They are bullies. It is the little mosques, rather, that warm a traveler’s soul. The small, makeshift excuses that are merely functional, marked with the sweat of refugees and the destitute, reeking of shoelessness and longing.

Jasim and I sat in one at an outer ring of the mechanics’ quarter of Sadr City. Ahead of us was a graveyard of cars as far as the eye could see. Across the road a man and his two assistants were busy converting an old, decrepit tractor into a homemade Hashd armored vehicle to be sent north. The trifling faded-blue dome of the mosque was pockmarked with bullet holes and words. Men with missing feet, legs, hands, arms, eyes, and ears sat around praying or quietly talking. Once in a while people showed up with offerings of food for them. They were veterans, these incapacitated men, having fought in recent wars or old wars—now with no one to care for them except the folks in the mechanics’ quarter.

Beforehand, we’d stopped at Jasim’s home nearby and taken his little boy and girl out for ice cream. Their innocence was like fresh air. I thought of how during long stretches at the sater, you no longer remembered there’s a world of children in the back somewhere. Unlike Iran, Iraq was a country swarming with kids, in every street and alleyway, yet you’d forget they existed at all. Just as you tended to forget that half the world were women. You ached for them distantly and not in a sexual way. They were your mothers and sisters and beloveds and they were not here. Not one. The setting of the men of the Hashd turned desire inward until it was extinguished. You bottled it up and threw away the key until the next time you were, say, in Baghdad or Amman. And then, in an instant, just the mere sight of an ankle could throw your world into disarray. You remembered who you were. You were not a ghost.

I said to Jasim, “Your children will flourish and you will live. Stop worrying.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Like I said, the time for revenge is over. So you did a little work for the Americans back in the day. A lot of people did. If anybody wanted to get you for that, they would have by now. Someone’s playing a stupid joke on you. They want you to feel some heat. It’s your job to try to figure out why.”