They Will Have to Die Now by James Verini

Author:James Verini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

2

Reverence for General Abdulwahab didn’t stop at his troops. On his rounds on the front lines, the general met and spoke with ordinary Iraqis who braved fire to rush into the street to hug and kiss him. He was the one field commander everyone knew not just by name but by face, a celebrity. Fighting on the east side of Mosul hadn’t finished yet when talk began of his being appointed military governor of the city once the battle was over. Billboards showing Abdulwahab carrying a child went up at intersections. ‘Mosul’s savior,’ they read.

For Moslawis, the general was a kind of reincarnation of another local hero. In 1743, the Persian conqueror Nader Shah, fresh from savaging the Mughals, set his sites on Mosul. A civil defense force was assembled by a Moslawi tribal leader known as Haj Husayn. The story goes that Husayn trained every man, woman, and child to shoot a bow and arrow. The battle against Shah would be a fight of right against wrong, a jihad, Husayn told them, a word that didn’t dissuade Christian and Jewish Moslawis from pitching in. For eight days and nights, the vicious Shah—the Alexander of the East, as he was known—bombarded the city. When Mosul was enflamed, Moslawis organized fire brigades. They said mass prayers. They held out. Finally Haj Husayn dispatched his holiest warriors, the Fedayeen, to meet the Persian general, a reputed giant, on the battlefield. Husayn asked them to wear their armor but they said ‘We are martyrs! We will wear nothing but our coffins!’ They repulsed Shah. The resistance to the Persian siege became a kind of founding myth of modern Mosul. It was the story that parents told their children and grandparents their grandchildren during the war with Iran, during the American war, the civil war and, now, the war to expel the Islamic State. Now some Moslawis called Abdulwahab a latter-day Haj Husayn.

The general had come to Abu Omar’s street in Zahra. Abu Omar was still wearing a long beard. ‘When Abdulwahab al-Saadi saw me, he said “Let’s shave that beard for you,’’ ’ Abu Omar told me. ‘So he brought the razor and shaved it for me. They also brought cigarettes for me to smoke. I showed the general all of the Islamic State houses around mine.’ How much of this was true I couldn’t say, but it was more evidence of the general’s popularity.

When I visited Abu Omar at the Khazer camp, he was always eager for news from the front lines, though he usually knew more than I did. He kept in touch with friends still in the city by phone, kept a radio on all day, and though it was winter now, and the camp was frigid at night, he sold a space heater to buy a television. It was the first time he’d been able to watch the news in a year. But he’d bought the television more for Omar, Aya, and Amina than for himself, he said. There was nothing else for them to do in the camp.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.