The Peacekeeper

Producer & International Distributor eBookPro Publishing www.ebook-pro.com The Peacekeeper Maor Kohn Copyright © 2022 Maor Kohn All rights reserved; No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information retrieval system, without the permission, in writing, of the author. Translation: Leeor Doron Contact: [email protected] ISBN Contents Part A 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. Part B 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Part C 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Epilogue 2020 Part A 1. 1983 Ameer Baghdadi was born into a very violent reality. In 1983, Iraq was in ruins due to the ongoing war with Iran. As the number of casualties kept rising, the exhausted gravediggers had no choice but to throw the bodies into mass graves, which were open pits, at the entrance to the cemetery. The hospitals were constantly bombarded and flooded with wounded people. The doctors and nurses were overwhelmed and had to forsake many of their patients. Many begged for their lives or tried bribing whomever they could in order to get some assistance. Some threatened the hospital’s staff while others resorted to violence, yet nothing helped. The hospitals were overcrowded with bleeding patients lying helplessly on the floor, as there were no free beds. The morphine ran out, so surgeries had to be performed while patients were fully awake, whether they had to pull out bullets or amputate crushed limbs. The Iran – Iraq war was in full rage for the third year. The city of Basra was the frontier. Many had already fled the city to Baghdad or further north to Tikrit, Kirkuk, or Erbil. War was even raging inside the refugee camps, as different ethnic and religious groups clashed with one another. Basrah was a ghost town, struggling to breathe under the constant mustard gas bombardment and the heavy smoke clouds that had arisen among the tanks and grinding jeep tires. The hunger spread to every home, and even the water from the Shatt al-Arab River, which is formed by the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, was poisoned. In the nineth month of her pregnancy, Lamis, Ameer’s mother, decided to give birth at home despite her husband’s objection. Ameer was her fifth child, so she felt confident giving birth on her own. Lamis was a statistics teacher at Basra University before the war started, so she could calculate her chances of getting a bed in one of the city’s hospitals. She was well prepared for the delivery day and felt no fear about what was to come. Lamis’s decision was affirmed when her contractions started the same day the city was darkened, and traffic was banned. Every glimmer of light quickly turned into a bomb target by the Iranians and their local Iraqi collaborators. In the moldy bathroom, lit only by faint candlelight, assisted by boiled, filtered dunghill waters, Lamis birthed Ameer in 40 minutes. When she finished, her husband wrapped the baby in the only clean cloth left in the house and extinguished the candles, fearing their light may twinkle between the cracks of the cardboard covering the window, exposing their location. Lamis collapsed, exhausted from the birth, she lay on the floor, unable to hug or breastfeed her son. She woke up two days later with a burning fever. The struggle of her sickness and postpartum depression inspired her to name him Ameer. A prince. Her prince. Basra, the beleaguered city, continued to be a war epicenter in the following years. The city was constantly bombarded and torn apart from the inside as street fights between Shiite and Sunni groups escalated. Ameer’s family considered escaping many times, either to the north of Iraq, or out of the country. But the north was engaged in battles with the Kurds, and the surrounding countries had started closing refugee entries. There was nowhere to run, and the money, their lifeline, was running out. Ameer’s family was traditional Sunni. They lived in the neighborhood of al-Farsi, bordering a Shiite neighborhood from the east. When Ameer was allowed to go out to play in the street, he met his only friend, Munir, who was Shiite. The families opposed the relationship in the beginning, but the war softened their hearts toward the innocent children’s friendship. Seeing the two playing with the ruined city in the background was almost surreal – as if dangers would threaten yet never touch them. When Ameer turned six, the war was coming into its final year. That same summer, just a few weeks before the peace agreement signing, Ameer and Munir went to the river to sail the wooden rafts they had built from pieces of broken doors. They walked along the river’s bank, down the stream, to the old harbor. The air was stuffy and smoky, and they noticed plumes of black smoke here and there. Yet, it was silent. The stream was gentle, so the kids dipped their feet in the murky waters. Soon, they were competing with their rafts, seeing who would cross the bridge first. As they looked toward the finish line, Munir noticed a hand poking out of the bush. Only as they stepped closer, were they able to identify what they saw. In the bush, on the banks of the river, was a body of a young boy. The body was laid in a weird position; it was all swollen, the stench was horrible, and large, black flies were hovering above it. They ran toward it, terrified. At first, they tried to wake him up. They were only six years old, experiencing death in all its enormity for the first time. Their innocence ended that day. The dead boy’s attire was strange. His head, which rested on