Wounded Tigris

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

A modern journey through the mesopotamia and its ancient history.

🎨 Impressions

As noted in The Alchemy of Air impressions, the evilness of ISIS is so petty and profound that I cannot describe it properly.

It is the boring pettishnes of these regimes that is so nagging and disgusting.

The amount of pollution as well as the river dams where described in a very sober tone, I hope the future is brighter.

I was also funny, that one of the officers encoutered by the team had gone to school with Baghdadhi (Leader of ISIS)

✍️ My Top Quotes

• Mesopotamia, or ‘the Land Between Two Rivers’.

• Our friend Ameer confided that he sometimes had sleepless nights about what the future held for his five-year-old son, Mo. ‘I’ve brought him into a hell,’ he told us. ‘How do I justify that to him?’

• The fame of these two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, is such that we need not describe them. Ibn Jubayr, Travels, 1184

• He told us that for the next forty miles, through Diyarbakır and Bismil, the Turkish state had downgraded the Tigris from a river to a stream. ‘If it was a river, it would need to be protected, and there are international regulations,’ he said. But the reduced flow coming from the dams gave the government scope to change the designation, and on a stream there are fewer restrictions. That removed legal protection against mining and building on the banks, said Bişar.

• A portrait of Atatürk hung on the wall, and when I asked about it the owner shrugged and said, ‘He wasn’t nearly as bad as what came later.’

• The town had met nine of the ten criteria for inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Only one is needed, but a submission can only be made by the government, and Turkey refused to.

• It had been a busy morning, Said told us. A Russian military patrol had come through Ein Dewar and kids had thrown rocks at it. Then the Americans came through and children cheered.

• It was well known, he said, that east of the Euphrates had American influence, and the rest had Russian, but both patrolled in the north-east, and often encountered one another on minor roads. The Americans were still popular, despite Donald Trump’s actions in 2019.

• In our short exchange, Mohammed used the word motherfucker six times.

• The Euphrates provides over 80 per cent of the fresh water in Syria, and unsurprisingly Syrians pay closer attention to it than the Tigris.

• The corrupt elite, like the man we’d met the night before, did what they liked, and everything worked on a system of wasta, or connections.

• Popular Mobilisation Forces, or Hashd al-Shaabi in Arabic. This umbrella group of militias had been formed in 2014 in a desperate response to the speed with which ISIS was overrunning the country.I

• It had all been razed by Da’esh, Ibrahim said.II He remembered when they arrived. It was 6 August 2014. ‘They came in pickups. It was about two months after they’d taken over Mosul,’ he recalled. He had fled, along with most other workers, and the dam was taken quickly. ‘We knew they wouldn’t let Christians live,’ said the man on the pew. ‘Anyone who stayed, hid. Our brothers kept them hidden.’ He gestured to Ibrahim as representative of Muslims who protected them.

• Various reports made by American and European companies, as well as a public warning from the US Embassy in Iraq, suggest that roughly six million people are at threat if the dam was to breach. In a worst-case scenario, a tsunami wave eighty-five feet high would crash over the earth-fill embankment, reaching the city of Mosul in an hour and forty minutes. Anyone within a three and a half mile radius of the river would be washed away. Further south, the majority of Iraq’s wheat fields would be flooded as the wave engulfed Shirqat, Tikrit and Samarra, before arriving sixteen-feet high in Baghdad within four days. Between half a million and a million and a half people could die, and many times more than that displaced.

• Mosul Dam had the potential to fail rather suddenly, and it was entirely the product of ego and poor planning and a broken system.

• Six million people were displaced in Iraq by ISIS, and in this area there had been heavy damage by coalition airstrikes attempting to remove militants holed up in civilian homes.

• In Iraq, tribes are organised patriarchally and hierarchically, and every individual in the country is a member of one. Each tribe, or ‘ashira, claims a shared patrilineal ancestry, and that common bloodline creates a bond of solidarity with other members. There are around 150 tribes in Iraq, and their structure generally comprises extended families at the most basic level, which are organised as houses, or sub-clans, and then categorised more broadly into clans. Each clan has a sheikh to lead them, and related clans are led by a general sheikh.

• ‘I knew a man from Gayara once,’ he said. ‘It was 2004, and he decided he needed to make Hajj, so he went to Damascus to get the flight. When he got there, the plane to Mecca was cancelled. So he went to the coast, to the nightclubs in Latakia. In one of the clubs he met another Iraqi, who was shocked to see him. Why are you here, he asked the Iraqi? I’m waiting for the flight to Mecca, the man told him. I’ll get rid of all my sins there anyway, so I’m just stocking up!’ The soldiers doubled over at this.

• ISIS ran a lucrative trafficking industry, with looted artefacts, jewellery and more making their way from Iraq and Syria through Turkey or Lebanon to Europe to be sold on to Western buyers. Salem didn’t want to say more on this but later, in Shirqat, a man who didn’t want to be named told us the trafficking continues, and the same people are still involved.

• ‘We get our news from Facebook,’ he said. ‘I ask my son to look each day and tell me what’s happening.’ There had been no delegation and no survey.

• In Tikrit alone, there may well be over a hundred mansions, built for Saddam, his almost impossibly evil sons and various others close to them, often with swimming pools, lakes, orchards and always – always – gaudy, brash decor.

• Captain Saif mentioned rather casually that he had gone to primary school with Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. This seemed an amazing piece of information to have held on to for so long, especially given how many times I’d heard the story of his gastric bypass. ‘They were a very poor family,’ he said. ‘And very religious. He was a calm, peaceful boy. One time he got hit by a bully, and he just said, do it again, and he stood there. I don’t know what happened.’

• ‘When you have a tree full of fruits, you throw a rock at it,’ he said. ‘This is a saying here. I think Iraq is like that tree. Everyone wants its fruits, and they’re willing to attack it.’

• ‘In Islam, we say teach swimming before writing,’ he told me. ‘Because you can always find someone to read and write for you, but not to swim for you.’

• Be he philosopher or teacher, historian or poet, lawyer or reformer, modern man will find his prototype and counterpart in ancient Sumer. Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians

• It is still a manifestation of the saying: Cairo writes, Beirut prints, Baghdad reads.

• Even now, Salman can’t talk of this time, except perhaps in his sleep. Throughout our journey, I had learned bits and pieces about his experience. He’d had to have an operation on his left eye because of an injury sustained by the beatings. When, during his detention, international organisations and journalists made statements demanding his release, these were read out to him and he was tortured more as a punishment.

• ‘In our methodology, we say that pollution is like terrorism, but even worse,’ said Ali. ‘Terrorism targets a group of people. Pollution targets millions.

• Gilgamesh visits a man called Utanapishtim, who tells him that the god Enlil was irritated by the noise of the world’s populations, so sent a flood to destroy them. Ea, the god of wisdom, gives Utanapishtim instructions on how to build a boat and what to put on it, including every animal in existence. He, and his animals, are the only survivors.III

• The Assyriologist who discovered this, George Smith, was said to have got so excited when he finished the translation that he took off his clothes and danced around his room in the British Museum.

• Everyone in Kut was conservative, he said. No one thought for themselves. His parents supported Sadr, and so did every other person they knew. What did he think of Sadr, asked Emily, knowing the answer. ‘That he’s a fucking moron,’ said Karrar’s friend.

• Irrigation is responsible for almost 80 per cent of water usage in Iraq, and for years experts have been encouraging alternatives to the highly wasteful flooding system. One solution would be the widespread introduction of spray and drip irrigation, which uses just a fraction of the water that flooding does. I asked Jaafar about this, but he dismissed it quickly. It required enormous investment, he said, and the government should be responsible for that. But they had no interest, or no money, he said, and he couldn’t afford it himself.

• He wanted to remember everything that had once made Al-Hay special, he said. ‘What’s been lost?’ asked Emily. ‘People,’ he said bluntly. There had once been a large Jewish population in Al-Hay. By 1947 they had all gone, driven out, but the haji remembered them well and fondly. There was a synagogue in town, and several houses owned by families who now lived in Israel. Those homes were permanently locked up, and the paint was peeling, but nobody broke in or stole anything, he assured us.

• In Baghdad there is a saying: if two fish are fighting in the Tigris, it’s probably the fault of the British.

• Throughout Iraq, I was regularly told of the closeness of the Abrahamic faiths. Though Iraq had eradicated its Jewish population, I often heard people express regret. No one spoke of the pogrom in Baghdad, of course, the pro-Nazi farhud in 1941 during which two hundred Jews were killed, nor of the increasing persecution the community had faced in the lead-up to the creation of the state of Israel. The Iraqi Jewish population, whose history goes back to the sixth century BC in Babylonia and whose number was at least 150,000 in 1948, almost completely disappeared over the course of a couple of years. Most emigrated to Israel, where there is still a large community. People rarely mentioned this. But I had been surprised at how often the Jewish heritage of Iraq was conjured by those we met along the river, and cited as one of the tragic and irreplaceable losses of the country’s history.

• Now the imam said that because of Israeli bombardment of Gaza, which was ongoing, he could not include Jews in the brotherhood of peace.

• Seventy per cent of Iraq’s crude oil comes from Basra, and we were never far from the impact of the industry.

• Only Russia flares more natural gas than Iraq. But Russia, like all the other countries with large volumes of gas released by oil production, is a net exporter. Iraq does the opposite. It both flares off its own supply and simultaneously imports gas from Iran that is burned for power. This is costly not only financially, to the tune of seven billion dollars a year, but also environmentally, and creates a dependency on its neighbour for an essential service. That, of course, is the point, and is one clear demonstration of Iranian influence over Iraq’s political system.

• Iraqis had called Basra ‘the Black City’, and the country produced 75 per cent of the world’s dates.

• In the summer of 2018, at least 118,000 Basrawis were taken to hospital with gastrointestinal illness caused by poisoned water.

• Lined up along the bank, dressed in white dishdashas with red and white scarves, was a band ready to play for a small gathered crowd. The musicians were black Iraqis, part of a population of an estimated one and a half to two million, whose ancestors came from the east coast of Africa as early as the eighth century. At that time Iraq was the centre of the East African slave trade. The majority of black Iraqis live in Basra, and Ameer wanted us to hear some of their music.