{"id":187258,"date":"2019-04-24T06:28:39","date_gmt":"2019-04-24T06:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=187258"},"modified":"2019-04-26T07:37:04","modified_gmt":"2019-04-26T07:37:04","slug":"after-isis-iraqs-wounded-and-grief-stricken-tell-a-disturbing-tale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=187258","title":{"rendered":"After ISIS, Iraq\u2019s wounded and grief-stricken tell a disturbing tale"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Fisk \u2013 The Independent April 17, 2019<\/h1>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Taamy Wahab Mohamed al-Yasaari. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

The moment the 54-year-old walks up to the car, it is obvious something is terribly wrong. The way he drags\u00a0his feet, then stamps\u00a0them on the ground and marches\u00a0forward like a toy soldier, head lowered; then the way he looks\u00a0up at you from beneath dark brows, in both greeting and concern. Taamy Wahab Mohamed al-Yasaari should have returned from the Isis battlefront to a land fit for heroes.<\/span><\/p>\n

For the Shia Muslims of southern Iraq, he counts among the heroes. When I ask him when he was wounded, he looks and stares at the wall in a distressed way, dark eyes framed by thick black hair but white beard. \u201cSeveral times I was wounded,\u201d al-Yasaari says. And you can tell that the bullets and shrapnel have framed a diary in his mind. \u201cOn 28 April 2015 at Bayji, on 3 July 2015, again at Bayji, on 5 May 2016 on the Makhoul mountains near Tikrit, then on 3 July 2017 at Khalidiya in Anbar province.\u201d It was the last wound which did for him.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI was leading a company of the Ali Akbar\u00a0brigade into an attack on the enemy, and an Isis sniper shot me in the head. His bullet hit me in the back of the brain.\u201d And here al-Yasaari puts his left hand to the back of his head. \u201cI lost part of my skull and words are very difficult for me now. My memories are very difficult. I regret nothing. I followed the fatwa\u00a0of our leader [ayatollah Ali al-Sistani]. Look, here are my wounds.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And the staring eyes of al-Yasaari look at me as he rolls up his trousers to show scars and great searing cuts across his legs. There is a terrible mark on his calf, as if someone has sawed away at the flesh. He had paid the price of following Sistani\u2019s fatwa\u00a0\u2013 to fight a \u201cdefensive war\u201d against Isis after the Islamist capture of Mosul in 2014 \u2013 and it is clear that today he thinks of little else.<\/span><\/p>\n

He is still dressed in military uniform, constantly stretching his legs in pain, and in the little \u201cdiwaniya\u201d reception room of his home on the outskirts of Kerbala there is a display of coloured photographs of a smiling, younger al-Yasaari, arms round friends at the war front, one of the pictures showing him firing a rocket-propelled grenade. He keeps looking at a camera video of the same scene. He lives in his own war museum.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI thought I was dead,\u201d he says. \u201cSo did my comrades. The back of my head was blown away. They called my brother Jassem, and said to him,\u00a0\u2018Your brother has been martyred\u2019. Jassem asked them,\u00a0\u2018Are you sure?\u2019 They said,\u00a0\u2018What do you expect us to say \u2013 he was shot in the head!\u2019 I was left for dead but two hours later\u00a0they noticed my pulse. Jassem was asking if he could come and get me but they said the fighting was too bad.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEventually, they got me onto a helicopter and to the Kadimiyeh hospital [in Baghdad]. Then they took me to a Kerbala hospital where an Indian and Iraqi doctor told me that I had to sign an indemnity for an operation \u2013 because there was only a 1\u00a0per cent chance of success. The bones at the back of my brain had to be taken out and replaced with titanium. There were no more bones behind my brain. I signed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Incredibly, al-Yasaari asked to return to the battle until another holy fatwa\u00a0was given to leave, because \u201cI had to be with my comrades, even if I have to clean the lavatories to be with them\u201d. He was not granted his wish, but instead driven to his tiny house with its palm tree in the drive, receiving financial help from the Imam Hussein Holy Shrine group, a Shia organisation, as well as a pittance from the government. Suddenly, he stands up and begins stomping up and down the little room, a toy soldier again. \u201cHe does not change,\u201d one of his relatives says.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Daesh [Isis] were all brainwashed \u2013 all of them,\u201d he shouts. \u201cSaudis, Chechens, Turks, yes, there were Iraqis too. Their Islamist beliefs are corrupted by something that comes from the time before Islam \u2013 from the time of the \u2018jahaliya\u2019, the time of \u2018ignorance\u2019 before the Prophet. They want to push us back to that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Al-Yasaari knew who his enemies were. And his friends. But \u2013 and this is a common theme in the Shia\u00a0south of Iraq \u2013 does his government care enough for him? The men of the Shia\u00a0militias who helped to rescue the Iraqi government army as Isis advanced on Baghdad complain bitterly that their government cares little for them, that the most many families of \u201cmartyrs\u201d received is a patch of land far away from the rivers of Iraq where nothing would grow.<\/span><\/p>\n

All armies expect to return from victory to be greeted as heroes. The British failure to keep that promise to the veterans of the First World War led to massive social upheaval. The families of the dead expect that their men will be forever honoured.<\/span><\/p>\n

Abbas Saadi lost his 23-year old son Maher on 7 July 2015, at the same battle of Bayji where Al-Yasaari was wounded for the second time four days earlier. \u201cI received a call from him 15 minutes before he was killed,\u201d Abbas Saadi says. \u201cWe talked a lot on the phone. I said I missed him. He was a waiter in a local restaurant before he joined the \u2018Hashd\u00a0al-Shaabi\u2019 [the \u2018Popular Army\u2019]. Every time he came home on leave, he said he was sorry he had not been martyred on the battlefield.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

If you do not know the Shia\u00a0history of martyrdom, of the Imams Ali and Hussein and of Abbas on the eight century fields around where the golden shrines of Kerbala and Najaf now stand, it is tempting to dismiss such remarks. What First World War soldier returned on leave to express his hope for death?\u00a0But many returned willingly to the trenches, and their gravestones spoke \u2013 though we might not believe it \u2013 of \u201cgiving their lives\u201d. So I ask Abbas Saadi about Maher with some trepidation: was it worth it?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not regretting his death \u2013 because he was following the fatwa,\u201d he replies\u00a0slowly. \u201cWe don\u2019t feel sorry. The fatwa\u00a0was for all Iraqis.\u201d I thought of the word \u201cduty\u201d \u2013 in the British military sense \u2013 although Maher\u2019s death was curiously prosaic. \u201cThere was a lull in the battle and he went to get some food. He was bringing a watermelon when an Isis sniper shot him in the chest, just to the left of his heart. He was pronounced dead after 10\u00a0minutes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And Abbas Saadi bewailed his lack of funds. The government, he says, has\u00a0done little to compensate him for his son. \u201cThey were supposed to give us a piece of land,\u201d he says. \u201cBut the one we got was in the desert, there was nothing there, just sand. The Iranians look after their martyrs\u2019 families [from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war]. The holy shrine people look after us. But when we are in Baghdad and go to government offices and produce the papers showing our loss, they just tell us to put it back in our pocket.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This is said in a slow, disturbing way. And the message is clear. If Iraq is to be unified, all who fought against its Islamist enemies must be respected \u2013 by Sunnis and Shias alike \u2013 especially since those enemies were Sunnis. But politics runs faster than memory, and Iraq is not yet a land fit for all its heroes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Politics runs faster than memory, and Iraq is not yet a land fit for all its heroes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28,95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Iraq","category-beheadings-by-muslim-militants"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=187258"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":187262,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187258\/revisions\/187262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=187258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=187258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=187258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}