Frankenstein in Baghdad

by Ahmed Saadawi

It was the largest explosion that had ever taken place in Bataween.

A week before the explosion Faraj had made another successful deal. With Elishva. She had finally given in and accepted his offer to buy her old house—because

It was the twenty-ninth anniversary of the installation of His Holiness Mar Dinkha IV as patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East.

Who?

But Abu Salim didn’t do anything. He had woken up from his doze to the sound of megaphones ordering the

“And I want the playing cards you were using to search for me. And I want those hands of yours as well.”

Some claimed it was part of the wall of Abbasid Baghdad and was the most important discovery in Islamic archaeology in Baghdad for many decades. Others ventured to speak, rather boldly,

“Nothing in me lasts long, other than my desire to keep going. I kill in order to keep going.”

spokesman for the U.S. State Department said he was an ingenious man whose aim was to undermine the American project in Iraq. But what project might that be? As far as Brigadier Majid was concerned, the monster itself was their project. It was the Americans who were behind this monster.

The last document he sent me was about the junior astrologer’s confession that he was responsible for killing his superior on a Baghdad street by controlling the Criminal Who Has No Name by remote suggestion and making the criminal cut off the old astrologer’s hands to fit them onto his own body.

the end, that’s what happened. I had an incomplete seventeen-chapter version of the story in my hands when I was arrested and sent for questioning in front of a panel of Iraqi and American officers.

I read it quickly, and was terrified. They were moving toward rearresting me. I had a feeling they would treat me differently this time.

On the way I remembered my fake identity card. I took it out of my pocket and threw it out the taxi window. I assumed that, as in the case of the Frankenstein they had been trying to arrest, the people pursuing me would never see me again.

Mahmoud thought back to his theory about the three kinds of justice,

It was anarchy out there; there was no logic behind what was happening.

I swear by the life of my mother, who was killed by terrorists in Ramadi on the highway to Jordan,

Yes, you will be Prime Minister Mahmoud al-Sawadi.

4 On February 21, 2006, the supreme security commanders in Baghdad announced they had finally arrested the dangerous criminal that official reports called Criminal X, and that the public called the Whatsitsname, along with many other names.

They projected a large picture of him on a big screen and announced his name: Hadi Hassani Aidros, a resident of Bataween and commonly known as Hadi al-Attag, the junk dealer.

Nobody could believe that this frightening criminal had been living among them, but what the government said must be true.