My identity

by Wamith Al-Kassab (Iraq)

We are living in a world that technology has turned into a small village. We can see what happen in the world through news on hour by hour broadcast or by Googling the web or sometimes by news alerts to our mobiles. In the past few years Iraq had become a leading news star. We had wars, bombs, elections, changes, trials, happy stories, sad stories, survival stories; we are a 24 hour reality TV.

Through all this we as Iraqis found many people identifying us from their point of view, sometimes we are freedom fighters, other times victims of terror. We walk one day to find we had become ethnicities, Arabs, Sunni and Shiaa, Kurds and Turkmen, Catholic and Protestant, mixed ethnicities and many other kinds and groups till I lost count.

From my personal experience I found that since I open my eyes on life in Iraq that there are 2 kinds of people who live in it. They are divided as H.G Wells in his novel time machine divided the people in the future to peaceful, harmless, powerless pretty people who live under the sun named Eloes, and to powerful, monstrous, feeding on the poor Eloes, and live under the ground named Morloks.

In my country the majority of people are good and fear god, they want to live and let live, but their destiny is always in the hands of few groups who had the habit of only serving the interest of their selves and their allies at the expense of life and death of the rest.

They came in different shapes sometimes they are the role of 1 man stat other as armed groups and militia cutting your neck in the name of god. But god is innocent from them and know very well that they are serving the will of the people who pay them.

They forced us through the years to carry several identities one day we are a nation in war fighting a war after war for all the honest anti-imperialism people in the world, and today we are a piece of chess in a big strategies game between god only knows who.

But if H.G. Wells decide that the Eloes will accept their fate as lambs for the Morlok slaughter house, my people have not, they stood many times and face the tyranny even if they were reward by execution and torture and nameless craves, and today they walk every day from sleep to face the madness of their lives with hope and a smile and a prayer that god’s angels save them and their loved ones.

Many were hanged, shot, and killed in mysterious ways in Iraq during the past 30 years, and since 2003 we had lost thousands in different ways of death and millions as refugees and migrants, every step we take forward we are pushed 2 backward, the world can identify us based on our ethnicity or on our geographical areas or on our political views and our attitude towards USA and the last regime, most of the time they are nothing more than numbers in the news briefs, a digit of more than 600 thousand Iraqis who died since 2003, or another digit of 4 millions Iraqi refugees all over the world, and two million internally displaced.

But the reality is that the normal people don’t do that, they identify themselves’ according to their suffering and their losses in the battle to survive, as victims to politics and geography and bad luck. They identify themselves as people in need for the least kind of resources so they can have any kind of primitive human security. They identify themselves by their brave pilgrimage to safe grounds were they can worship with no fear, and live in peace, and not be cursed by earth wealth. And they identify themselves by their patience and how they stand against injustice from all, and their endless waiting for better tomorrow and the day when they will be only one kind with no Morloks on earth or beneath it any more.