Afterwards, he managed a falafel restaurant for two years, but at age twenty-eight was called back when the Iran-Iraq War broke out in 1980. Najah Aboud was brought up in a middle-class Iraqi family and was conscripted at eighteen, serving eight years in the army. He is now raising two children with his wife in North Vancouver, British Columbia, where he owns an auto repair shop. He eventually became a merchant sailor and traveled worldwide. After capture by the Iraqi army, he spent nearly two and half years as a POW. Zahed Haftlang was just thirteen when he joined Iran’s Basij paramilitary, where he spent six years fighting in the war. This story is an affirmation that, in the end, it is our humanity that transcends politics and borders and saves us all. Written with award-winning journalist Meredith May, this is literature of a very high order, set down with passion, urgency, and consummate skill. More rarely still does such searingly brilliant literature-fit to stand beside Remarque, Hemingway, and O’Brien-emerge from behind “enemy” lines.īut Zahed, a child, and Najah, a young restaurateur, are rare men-not just survivors, but masterful, wondrously gifted storytellers. Rarely does this kind of reportage succeed so power- fully as literature. The two countries spent a combined 1.1 trillion dollars fighting the war. 80,000 Iranian child soldiers were killed, mostly between the ages of sixteen and seventeen. Young men of military service age-eighteen and above in Iraq, fifteen and above in Iran-died in the greatest numbers. Little has been written of the Iran-Iraq war, which was among the most brutal conflicts of the twentieth century, one fought with chemical weapons, ballistic missiles, and cadres of child soldiers. This is the great untold story of the children and young men whose lives were sacrificed at the whim of vicious dictators and pointless, barbaric wars.
More importantly, it is a story that must be told, and a richly textured view into an overlooked conflict and misunderstood region. An eloquent and haunting act of witness to horrors beyond grimmest fiction, and a thing of towering beauty. It is gut-wrenching, essential, and astonishing. It was an act that decades later would save his own life. Instead, the boy committed an astonishing act of mercy. Khorramshahr, Iran, May 1982-It was the bloodiest battle of one of the most brutal wars of the twentieth century, and Najah, a twenty-nine-year-old wounded Iraqi conscript, was face to face with a thirteen-year-old Iranian child soldier who was ordered to kill him.
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