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This is a remarkable story. It is gut-wrenching, essential, and astonishing. It's a war story. A love story. A page-turner of vast moral dimensions. An eloquent and haunting act of witness to horrors beyond grimmest fiction, and a thing of towering beauty. More importantly, it is a story that must be told, and a richly textured view into an overlooked conflict and misunderstood region. 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.
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.
The numbers involved are staggering:
—All told, it claimed 700,000 lives—200,000 Iraqis, and 500,000 Iranians.
—Young men of military service age—eighteen and above in Iraq, fifteen and above in Iran—died in the greatest numbers.
—80,000 Iranian child soldiers were killed, mostly between the ages of sixteen and seventeen.
—The two countries spent a combined 1.1 trillion dollars fighting the war.
Rarely does this kind of reportage succeed so power- fully as literature. More rarely still does such searingly brilliant literature—fit to stand beside Remarque, Hemingway, and O'Brien—emerge from behind "enemy" lines.
But Zahed, a child, and Najah, a young restaurateur, are rare men—not just survivors, but masterful, wondrously gifted storytellers. Written with award-winning journalist Meredith May, this is literature of a very high order, set down with passion, urgency, and consummate skill. This story is an affirmation that, in the end, it is our humanity that transcends politics and borders and saves us all.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 28, 2017 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781682450123
- File size: 3552 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781682450123
- File size: 3552 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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January 15, 2017
The story of an Iraqi and an Iranian who became "as close as real brothers, with blended families and shared histories."During the horrific Battle of Khorramshahr in 1982, part of the Iran-Iraq War, Haftlang, at the age of 13, was serving as an Iranian soldier when he decided to spare the life of Iraqi soldier Aboud. Here, with the assistance of former San Francisco Chronicle features writer May, the two former enemy soldiers relate their brutal saga, which features an unexpected resolution. Readers learn about Haftlang's brutal childhood in Iran and Aboud's relatively prosperous existence as a restaurant/bakery manager in Iraq. After the bloody battlefield encounter in which the severely wounded Aboud would have died without the inexplicably compassionate decision by Haftlang, the combatants certainly never expected to meet again. During the extended conflict led by Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini, Haftlang and Aboud both ended up as prisoners of war. Much of the book offers graphic details about the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by the Iranians and vice versa. Certainly, some readers will find the details of torture nauseating and may need to skip ahead, but the story is worth persevering. After Haftlang and Aboud were allowed to return to their homelands following years of captivity, they discovered that their families and friends had assumed they were dead. Each man eventually found a way to immigrate to Canada, where, during a chance encounter at the Vancouver Association for the Survivors of Torture in 2001, they realized their connection on the battlefield two decades earlier. They formed a friendship transcending nationality, language differences, and age, and their tale, which alternates throughout the book, is quite remarkable. Despite the unrelenting passages of human suffering, the authors offer a fascinating--and ultimately uplifting--exploration of cultures unknown to many readers.COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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