Superlative
Senior Member
- Mar 13, 2007
- 1,382
- 109
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PERHAPS no fact is more revealing about Iraqs history than this: The Iraqis have a word that means to utterly defeat and humiliate someone by dragging his corpse through the streets.
The word is sahel, and it helps explain much of what I have seen in three and a half years of covering the war.
It is a word unique to Iraq, my friend Razzaq explained over tea one afternoon on my final tour. Throughout Iraqs history, he said, power has changed hands only through extreme violence, when a leader was vanquished absolutely, and his destruction was put on display for all to see.
Most famously it happened to a former prime minister, Nuri al-Said, who tried to flee after a military coup in 1958 by scurrying through eastern Baghdad dressed as a woman. He was shot dead. His body was disinterred and hacked apart, the bits dragged through the streets. In later years, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party crushed their enemies with the same brand of brutality.
Other Arabs say, You are the country of sahel, Razzaq said. It has always been that way in Iraq.
But in this war, the moment of sahel has been elusive. No faction not the Shiite Arabs or Sunni Arabs or Kurds has been able to secure absolute power, and that has only sharpened the hunger for it.
Listen to Iraqis engaged in the fight, and you realize they are far from exhausted by the war. Many say this is only the beginning.
President Bush, on the other hand, has escalated the American military involvement here on the assumption that the Iraqi factions have tired of armed conflict and are ready to reach a grand accord. Certainly there are Iraqis who have grown weary. But they are not the ones at the countrys helm; many are among some two million who have fled, helping leave the way open for extremists to take control of their homeland.
Weve changed nothing, said Fakhri al-Qaisi, a Sunni Arab dentist turned hard-line politician who has three bullets lodged in his torso from a recent assassination attempt. Its dark. There will be more blood...............
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/weekinreview/03wong.html?ref=world
The word is sahel, and it helps explain much of what I have seen in three and a half years of covering the war.
It is a word unique to Iraq, my friend Razzaq explained over tea one afternoon on my final tour. Throughout Iraqs history, he said, power has changed hands only through extreme violence, when a leader was vanquished absolutely, and his destruction was put on display for all to see.
Most famously it happened to a former prime minister, Nuri al-Said, who tried to flee after a military coup in 1958 by scurrying through eastern Baghdad dressed as a woman. He was shot dead. His body was disinterred and hacked apart, the bits dragged through the streets. In later years, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party crushed their enemies with the same brand of brutality.
Other Arabs say, You are the country of sahel, Razzaq said. It has always been that way in Iraq.
But in this war, the moment of sahel has been elusive. No faction not the Shiite Arabs or Sunni Arabs or Kurds has been able to secure absolute power, and that has only sharpened the hunger for it.
Listen to Iraqis engaged in the fight, and you realize they are far from exhausted by the war. Many say this is only the beginning.
President Bush, on the other hand, has escalated the American military involvement here on the assumption that the Iraqi factions have tired of armed conflict and are ready to reach a grand accord. Certainly there are Iraqis who have grown weary. But they are not the ones at the countrys helm; many are among some two million who have fled, helping leave the way open for extremists to take control of their homeland.
Weve changed nothing, said Fakhri al-Qaisi, a Sunni Arab dentist turned hard-line politician who has three bullets lodged in his torso from a recent assassination attempt. Its dark. There will be more blood...............
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/weekinreview/03wong.html?ref=world
