Huaisal Saeed Al Mutar
The Free Press, Mar. 21, 2023
“For all that, for all the chaos America, for all the dislocation, for the grief that will never leave me, I don’t harbor any ill will toward America.”
My eldest brother, Samir al Mutar, was born in August 1980. He was a talented computer engineer who led a company that, to this day, installs and builds internet databases across Iraq.
One day in November 2007, on his way to work with a couple of his friends, he was stopped at an al-Qaeda checkpoint. His friends fled. My brother was never seen again.
That day was the first time I had ever seen my dad cry. I will never forget the sleepless nights that followed, listening to my mom’s sobs while I tried to study for my final high school exams. I knew then that I needed to finish school so that I could one day build a life far away from the danger.
My parents tried everything possible to reach my brother or even meet with his kidnappers. After weeks of trying, the U.S. military showed them a picture of my brother that confirmed he had been killed. We still don’t know exactly what happened to him, and we have never been able to recover his body.
By the time Samir disappeared, I’d become desensitized to death. The war had been raging for four years, and the civil war triggered by the war (and, more proximally, the destruction of a Shia mosque) had been going on for a year. I was used to seeing dead bodies tossed in the street mere feet from where the school taxi picked me up. Many days, I had to step over corpses on my way to school in the Al Khadra district.
So when I heard about my brother, I could barely express any emotion. This still haunts me.
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