“I wish to give my life for Iraq and become a martyr,” he told me, smiling, sitting alone on the curb. Next to him was a tent set-up by volunteer medics, tending wounded protesters frantically shipped-in by knackered tuk-tuks throughout the evening. Instead of obsessing on his medical or engineering school application, the soot-covered thin boy who scored an average grade of 94 in high-school fled home to join flocks of livid youth at Baghdad’s Tahrir square, hell-bent on toppling the government.
This was a year ago, at the end of October 2019. It was a bloody night. No breeze blew from the Tigris. Tear gas, blended with sweat and smoke, swept away. The square buzzed with chants, music and shrieks of grief. On the neck of al-Jumhuriya bridge, state executioners deployed stun and gas grenades at the craniums of destitute youth with nothing in hand but the blood-stained tricolor of Iraq.
What happened to that boy?
In 2019, 725 Iraqis attempted suicide, according to the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights. In taking their own lives, they escaped the misery of a life marred by myriad challenges – eventually pushing their anguished peers to protests. Little informed journalists who placed the unarmed protesters at the frontlines of “clashes” with security forces – joining state rhetoric in by portraying protesters as saboteurs – extolled a superficial stability under the rule of Adel Abdul Mahdi, the toppled prime minister who oversaw the bloody crackdown.
