The protester, a 27-year-old Iraqi man, frantically flicked his lighter in the night, hoping to spark the gasoline-soaked rag protruding from the bottle in his hands. His entire life has led to this moment. He was born in 1991, the year the American military obliterated the Iraqi Army in Kuwait, sending the remnants staggering back through the deserts of southern Iraq frustrated, hurt, and above all, angry. Many of those soldiers rose up against Saddam Hussein in the days after the Gulf War ended; the uprising (first in the south, around Basra, and then in the Kurdish north) would be brutally suppressed before the end of the year, with approximately 100,000 killed. The following decade saw a strict United Nations embargo on Iraq. The man, then a boy, grew up hungry, without healthcare, without pencils for the textbooks he also couldn’t have (pencils have lead that “can be used” in nuclear weapons, so they were prohibited import items), without an economic future. When he was 13, America returned and deposed his government. His formative teenage years were spent in the midst of one of the most brutal civil wars the world has seen in decades, with sectarian murders a daily occurrence.
Still, he kept his head down. Basra was relatively stable for most of the time known to Americans as “the insurgency”, and when Iraq was once again ripped apart by the rise of Daesh, the city was never threatened by the terror group. But Basra has a problem. Basra lies at the end of the line, so to speak, of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, and thus is very reliant on people further upriver not doing things like building giant dams. Alas, this is exactly what the Iranians and, to a greater extent the Turks, have done. So now, Basra is reliant on water from elsewhere for drinking. And for the last few months, the water coming from Iran, itself facing shortages of the precious liquid, has been less than ideal. In fact, 20,000 or more people have been hospitalized due to the toxins in the water. Some of the young man’s friends went to a protest one evening in late August, angry about the lack of attention to their plight by the constantly-squabbling, ever-corrupt government in Baghdad. But some of his friends didn’t come home the next morning. And many others woke up in the hospital, shot with live ammunition by security forces.
The straw broke the proverbial camel’s back, and now he stands, Molotov cocktail at the ready, just outside the Iranian consulate building of Basra. And as he lets the Molotov fly through the air, seemingly in slow motion, he has no idea what forces have been building for this moment; he cannot possibly be asked to care about some separatist leader from a coal mining town in east Ukraine being blown up; Syria is another country, and why would his actions threaten the Israelis? And, most importantly, he cannot be expected to predict the actions of an American president thousands of miles away and infinitely more distant socially. Yet he stands at a crossroads the likes of which are seldom seen in history.
Want to know more? Stay tuned!
