Frankenstein in Baghdad

by Ahmed Saadawi

“It would have been a disaster. Many of those working in the printing business are waiting for the security situation to improve and hoping the worst doesn’t happen. Don’t forget that this year there’ll be unprecedented elections. There’ll be lots of work on election posters and leaflets.”

How do u feel about current state of bagdad? Current state,

Andalus Square.

Where?

In every crime there was one victim, and the victim had usually been strangled. Accounts

these figures hovering over the bridge were ghosts that lived in people’s bodies. They slept and rested in those bodies without the people being aware of them, or they could wake up and break free for a little and wander around outside the people’s bodies but only when the people were frightened. According to the astrologers, these ghosts were called tawabie al-khouf, the “familiars of fear.”

think my great-grandfather or my great-great-grandfather was a Sabean who converted to Islam for the woman he loved. My father wrote all this down in his diaries,

“It’s a big problem. We’re not real Arabs.”

Why?

what his father had written and tried to piece it together with scraps of information that had been suppressed forever, in an attempt to understand things,

Like the body

Honestly, I think everyone was responsible in one way or another. I’d go further and say that all the security incidents and the tragedies we’re seeing stem from one thing—fear.

The groups that have given shelter and support to al-Qaeda have done so because they are frightened of another group, and this other group has created and mobilized militias to protect itself from al-Qaeda. It has created a death machine working in the other direction because it’s afraid of the Other. And we’re going to see more and more death because of fear. The government and the occupation forces have to eliminate fear. They must put a stop to it if they really want this cycle of killing to end.”

He picked up the remote for the air-conditioning and set the thermostat to seventy-five degrees.

Farhenheit?

“You’re responsible for the death of the guard at the hotel, Hasib Mohamed Jaafar,” the Whatsitsname said. “If you hadn’t been walking past the hotel—the guard wouldn’t have come out to the gate.

The Whatsitsname turned to him and admitted he was confused, because the soul of Hasib Mohamed Jaafar was demanding revenge,

But Hadi adhered to a more imaginative formula—that the Whatsitsname was made up of the body parts of people who had been killed, plus the soul of another victim, and had been given the name of yet another victim. He was a composite of victims seeking to avenge their deaths so they could rest in peace. He was created to obtain revenge on their behalf.

Daniel, or the Whatsitsname, was just a means by which they went to their deaths, which was a fate that appealed to them at every serious drinking session they had, including the one they had had that night.

Orouba Hotel, gunfire broke out. That was nothing exceptional or strange about that, but the shooting sounded as if it was nearby.

The Whatsitsname was discovering new things every day, he told Hadi. He had found out, for example, that each piece of dead flesh that made up his body fell off if he didn’t avenge the person it came from within a certain amount of time.

“What’s worse is that people have been giving me a bad reputation. They’re accusing me of committing crimes, but what they don’t understand is that I’m the only justice there is in this country.” Hadi suddenly remembered Mahmoud’s digital recorder.

Is it?

What they all had in common, Mahmoud soon noticed, was that they were ugly.

Does beauty stand prominant?

There Mahmoud ran into Hadi smoking a shisha in his usual seat next to the front window. Mahmoud sat down with Hadi and ordered a shisha and a cup

Shisha popular

He had read Mahmoud’s article twice and thought it contained information that shouldn’t have been disclosed without approval from the Tracking and Pursuit Department, but what could he do about the freedom of the press that had suddenly descended on the country?

New freedom?

Mahmoud Riyadh Mohamed al-Sawadi,”

Long name

They have turned me into a criminal and a monster, and in this way they have equated me with those I seek to exact revenge on. This is a grave injustice. In fact there is a moral and humanitarian obligation to back me, to bring about justice in this world, which has been totally ravaged by greed, ambition, megalomania, and insatiable bloodlust.

It’s an area that’s become a battleground between three forces: the Iraqi National Guard and the American army on one side, and the Sunni militias and the Shiite militias as the second and third sides.

We try to avoid meeting one another, although we are moving around in search of one another.

But the Americans, besides their arsenal of advanced military hardware, possessed a formidable army of djinn, which was able to destroy the djinn that this magician and his assistants had mobilized.

“The second most important of my assistants is the Sophist, as he calls himself.

“The third most important person is the one I call the Enemy—because he’s an officer in the counterterrorism

King Faisal I.

“Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds—ethnicities, tribes, races, and social classes—I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citizen, he thinks.

Hmmm

I keep my head down because of the constant crossfire. I’m the only person walking down long streets where even stray cats and dogs dare not venture. In the short interludes of silence between the bursts of gunfire, which grow more and more intense as midnight approaches, there is nothing but the sound of my footsteps.

There’s a man from al-Qaeda living in a house in Abu Ghraib, on the edges of the capital, and a Venezuelan officer who’s a mercenary with a security company operating in Baghdad. Once I’ve taken revenge on them, everything will be over. Except that things haven’t been moving to a close in the way I had assumed they would.

a criminal who was supplying many of the armed gangs with dynamite and other explosives regardless of their ideological or political background.

Wat backgrouds Could u have?

“The two of them continued to argue while the others watched what was happening below. Apparently two groups were about to clash in broad daylight. It was risky to stay on the roof and look through the openings in the parapet wall because you might be killed by a stray bullet. But curiosity got the better of everyone. “I spread the piece of cloth on the roof and lay down, naked in the sun. Sticky

I needed a complete overhaul. In fact—and this was a conclusion that took me by surprise—I needed new spare parts. “Down below,

head to Abu Ghraib. There my mission will come to an end: I’ll kill the al-Qaeda leader, then leave this horrible world of yours.’ “As evening fell, I dozed off. When I opened my eyes, I found the three madmen bent over me.

Strange faces appeared around me, and I forgot what I had been planning to do in the morning. Putting on a Marines cap, I hurried out of the building and headed east, where the gang that had carried out the execution had last been

“I killed the Venezuelan mercenary in charge of the security company responsible for recruiting suicide bombers who had killed many civilians, including the guard at the Sadeer Novotel, Hasib Mohamed Jaafar. I killed the al-Qaeda leader who lived in Abu Ghraib and who was responsible for the massive

Shows you just how spread oit this web is

“My list of people to seek revenge on grew longer as my old body parts fell off and my assistants added parts from my new victims, until one night I realized that under these circumstances I would face an open-ended list of targets that would never end.

Grim question, but assuming he had a piece of you, who would you seek revenge upon? Venegance

“Time was my enemy,

Like him, they believed I was Iraqi citizen number one.

“I was careful about the pieces of flesh that were used to repair my body. I made sure my assistants didn’t bring any flesh that was illegitimate—in other words, the flesh of criminals—but who’s to say how criminal someone is?

We all are or could be

Each of us has a measure of criminality,’ the Magician said, smoking a shisha pipe he had prepared for himself. ‘Someone who’s been killed through no fault of his own might be innocent today, but he might have been a criminal ten years ago, when he threw his wife out onto the street, or put his aging mother in an old people’s home, or disconnected the water or electricity to a house with a sick child, who died as a result, and so on.’

“I went back to looking through the telescope, but my mind was elsewhere. I had serious suspicions that when they last patched me up they had used body parts from a criminal.

Maybe without knowing it, they had used parts from a terrorist. Maybe that was why I wasn’t in a good mood and felt confused and flustered.

“When I had a chance to talk to the Magician in private, he told me unequivocally that half my body was now made up of the body parts of criminals. “‘How did that happen?’

‘Was the body of the saint really holy?’ he asked.

That evening I was amazed how many young gunmen bowed down to me in the street.

As for the followers of the young madman, the Iraqi citizens, there were now more than a hundred and fifty of them, and they were thinking of taking part in the upcoming elections.

I used the revolver because the unconventional means of killing with which I started my campaign no longer worked.

Is this metaphoric? the gradual growth of violence

vengeance on? “The Sophist would say I’ve realized the Magician’s vision and turned into a criminal who kills innocent people. He’d say the Magician has

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