The latest film adaptation of the Sixties novel helps us understand the contemporary Middle East and its ecology.

“Based on Herbert’s 1965 science fiction classic, “Dune” is a tale of a rising duke, intergalactic power struggles, a precious spice, and lethal spaceworms. The story, which deals with religion, politics, myth, destiny, heritage, environmental decay and colonialism resonates as much with audiences today as it did when the novel was first published.”

( TRT World ) – The latest Hollywood blockbuster “Dune” is a space opera based on Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name. While written in the Sixties, its current release is salient as the film reengages audiences with several core themes of the novel.

The novel is replete with Arabic and Islamic references, which raises the question of whether the novel is orientalist, in addition to the film, given the resurgence of cinematic orientalist tropes post-9/11.

Also, while the novel “Dune” won a slew of science fiction (sci-fi) awards, it could also be considered one of the first cli-fi novels, or climate fiction novels. Herbert’s work was prescient given its examination of the ecology of a desert planet that essentially stands in for the Middle East. 

Finally, the novel is relevant due to its trope of resistance and empire. “Dune” is essentially a political thought experiment, examining how charismatic leadership can lead to the defeat of stronger states and empires, salient to US foreign policy, whether it is the Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh or the Afghan Taliban.

Techno-Orientalism

In a previous article for this publication, I used Edward Said to examine “Slavery, the “robot,” and Orientalism in science fiction.” I categorise Orientalism as a system of communication that essentialises the East with a series of ‘E’s. The West sees the ‘East’ as Exotic, Erotic, and the Enemy.

For example, in the “Star Wars” franchise, there are Middle East-inspired elements with the Sufi orders reflected in Obi Wan and the Jedi. Orientalist flourishes include the Enemy, the barbaric Sand People and the Erotic, the indolent Jabba the Hut, who smokes a nargile and maintains a harem, which includes princes Leia.

“Dune”, like “Star Wars”, is about a band of rebels who bring down an empire. The protagonists of Lucas’ space opera consist of a rebel alliance brought together from far ranging planets and galactic groups, like Admiral Ackbar, the squid-like commander from the Mon Calamari, to the Ewoks. In Herbert’s work, the rebels are the Fremen, who practice a futuristic form of Islam, seeking to free their desert planet Arrakis and bring down a down an intergalactic empire led by the Padishah Shaddam.

“Dune,” Digital, Dall-E 3, 2024.

The references to the Middle East are not flourishes to exoticise the narrative. The Arrakis depicted in the novel and latest film are not exotic, but enigmatic. There is little that is erotic in “Dune”. The Fremen are not the enemy; you root for them as the protagonists. 

The Fremen are led by a messianic figure, Paul Atreides, who engages in a “jihad” against the empire, but Herbert used this term in the sixties well before the notion become associated with terrorism post-9/11.

It is unusual to have the Muslims as good guys. The only other science fiction franchise that does the same is the “Pitch Black” franchise beginning in the mid-Nineties, also examining a futuristic, intergalactic Islam. The protagonist Riddick, played by Vin Diesel, seeks to save another character, simply referred to as “al-Imam” on his way to complete the hajj in New Mecca on the planet Tangiers-3.

I would argue that the prevalence of a futuristic Islam in both sci-fi stories makes neither orientalist. In both cases Islam is not exotic but banal, interwoven in interplanetary daily life.

Finally, all orientalist films essentialise the Middle East as a desert landscape replete with camels and minarets. The desert in “Dune” does not serve as a mere exotic background but makes an ecological argument. The dunes symbolise the vulnerability and precariousness of human life. The heat and sand, Mother Nature if you will, overwhelms this future civilisation and its technology. The theme of insecurity and the quest for water pervade the narrative. In the face of this powerlessness, the Fremen represent a fight for agency by learning to adapt to the desert, not exploit it. 

Science fiction and empire

The revolt in Arrakis seeks to bring down an intergalactic empire, led by the Padishah Shaddam. While Shaddam does sound like Saddam, the future Iraqi president was relatively obscure when Herbert wrote the novel. However, the title Padishah refers to the highest rank in the Ottoman or Persian empires.

Sci-fi has had a long history of dealing with empire and resistance. One of the first sci-fi pioneers, HG Wells published “War of the Worlds” in 1898 as a commentary on the British extermination of the local population of Tasmania, Australia.

Arrakis could very well be a reference to Iraq. The Spacing Guild in “Dune”, a cartel that controls the production of the Spice that is necessary for space travel is certainly influenced by petroleum and OPEC, which was founded in Baghdad in 1960 (albeit the brainchild of a Venezuelan oil minister). 

In this case “Dune” would fit other sci-fi and cli-fi narratives where Iraq emerges as an imaginative space challenging the 2003 invasion. The film “Avatar” critiqued the rise of mercenary companies, where the planet Pandora stands in for Iraq and Unobtainium, like the Spice, is a reference to oil.  

The 2004 reboot of “Battlestar Galactica” portrayed the villains, the robotic Cylons as Americans, and the humans resisting them as the insurgents, forcing TV audiences, particularly in the US, to see the conflict from an Iraqi perspective.

While sci-fi as a genre is escapist in nature, it simultaneously brings our current reality into greater focus. It reveals our current technophobias and anxieties over the convergence between scientific advance and what it means to be human. 

Close to 50 years separate the novel “Dune” and the film. The themes of ecological precariousness, rapacious resource extraction, and resistance to occupation are as relevant now as they were when the novel was first published. In this case “Dune”, a work of science fiction, is also a political fact.

Both were 22-year-olds. Their deaths in 2023 serve as a reminder on International Women’s Day that the tragedies of femicide and gender-based violence (GBV) will continue into 2024. “Honor killings” need to be recognized as problems that are not only confined to the global south and developing world.

 While governments often react to direct violence, this problem will not end unless both state and society recognize endemic structural and cultural violence that enable femicide. The failure to act on these problems becomes a form of “necropolitics,” where the states allow women to succumb to the fate of femicide.

Direct Violence

Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung’s Triangle of Violence begins with “direct violence,” which often gets the most attention.

The father of Tiba Al-Ali projected direct violence against his daughter by strangling her. The last thing Tiba saw was the eyes of her father before she died.

Turetta projected direct violence against Giulia, a video camera capturing him beating her, and then later stabbing her 20 times to the neck and head. The last thing Giulia saw was the eyes of her ex-partner.

Tiba chose to defy her father.  Giulia chose to leave Filippo and she was graduating before him, which he could not accept.

Structural Violence

Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe defines “necropolitics” as how political actors allow certain demographics to die. When states fail to prevent femicide that is a form of necropolitics, or what Galtung would call “structural violence.”

Ali’s murder is part of the rise of GBV due to a revival of tribal culture that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein encouraged after the 1991 Gulf War to maintain domestic order, as his security forces were diminished. Iraq’s gendered insecurity continued unabated as the security sector collapsed after the 2003 invasion.  The US touted post-Saddam Iraq as a model state that would inspire a wave of democratization in the region. Yet Articles 41 and 409 of the Iraqi Penal Code, to this day, permits males to “punish” female members of a household. Those codes are a form of structural violence and necropolitics, enabling “honor killings.” It allows “practices of patriarchy” at the state level.

Women’s rights in Iraq • FRANCE 24 English Video

Structural violence and state patriarchy is evident by the security sector failing to address this issue, as the police allegedly knew beforehand that Al-Ali’s life was at risk and failed to take action.

Let us turn to Europe. Surprisingly, the Italian state engages in necropolitics by not legally recognizing “femicide” as a separate crime. Cecchettin’s sister, Elena, referred to this problem when said, “Femicide is a murder committed by the state because the state doesn’t protect us.” The state’s failure in this case to prevent direct violence is itself a form of violence. In the absence of the state Elena refers to the need for Italian civil society and NGOs to step in: “We need to fund anti-violence centres and give the possibility to those who need to ask for help.”

After the murder, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said she would increase funds to women’s shelters and anti-violence centers. However, Meloni was also part of the problem, since her misogynistic right-wing politics and “Brothers of Italy”(Fratelli d’Italia) party enabled gendered cultural violence in Italy.   

Cultural Violence

After the murder in Iraq, a twitter user, Ali Bey, wrote that women should “behave or face the same fate as Tiba Al-Ali,” along with a series of other voices in the Iraqi cybersphere condoning, if not celebrating the murder. These outbursts are examples of cultural violence or societal patriarchy that enables such crimes.

Elena links the murder of her younger sister to the patriarchal culture of violence that pervades Italy, a form of cultural necropolitics, which normalises the toxic behaviour of men like Turetta and eventually commits femicide. She said “Turetta is often described as a monster, but he’s not a monster.”  She then addresses cultural elements: “A monster is an exception, a person who’s outside society, a person for whom society doesn’t need to take responsibility. But there’s a responsibility. Monsters aren’t sick, they’re healthy sons of the patriarchy and rape culture.” 

Meloni promised promised a new educational campaign in schools to eradicate “the toxic culture of violence” in the country. While Meloni had condemned sexual violence in the past, it was usually when a migrant committed GBV, to support the anti-immigrant politics of her party.

In 2023 I conducted two digital autopsies on Tiba’s YouTube account and Giulia’s Instagram account. Both were beautiful souls that made the earth a better place. Tiba’s vibrant videos described her new life in Istanbul, to pursue her education. Guilia loved her mom, had a collection of beer bottle tops, and apparently had a fear of going to the hospital alone, but overcame her fear.  That fear apparently had to do with the fact that she was taking care of her mom who eventually died of cancer.

The triangle of violence and necropolitics offers a nuanced means of analyzing the agents of patriarchy.  But a simple linguistic exercise can also achieve this goal, using patriarchy as a verb instead of an abstract noun. We must each ask ourselves “Who or what has patriarched me or others in the past, present, and future?” and “Who or what have I patriarched?” Difficult questions, yes, but by bringing them into focus we can begin to identify the active agents and institutions that have patriarched and continue to patriarch in Iraq, Italy and the world.  On this International Women’s Day, Iraq and Italy have failed to ensure gendered security.

“On 24 February 2022, while travelling to Lebanon to visit his great-aunt Maria in Lebanon, Ibrahim al-Marashi’s thoughts were with his friend Maria in Ukraine on the first day of the Russian invasion.”

By Ibrahim Al-Marashi | –

( The New Arab ) – As my plane descends into Istanbul airport, from the window I scan the horizon towards the direction of Ukraine, now a warzone. It is 24 February 2022.

While I travel to Zahle in Lebanon to meet one Maria, to bring her medicine and money to keep her alive, I perform the fatiha prayer for another Maria, my friend in Kyiv, to be protected and kept alive.

I make a nidhr, a promise to Sayyida Khawla, the deceased daughter of our revered Imam Hussein that I will visit her shrine in the neighbouring Lebanese town of Baalbek, if Ukrainian Maria survives.

The Maria I am visiting is my grandmother’s older sister, whose family were refugees after World War I, leaving Mardin, in today’s Turkey, to Lebanon. While I was on the plane moving east, I knew Maria in Kyiv was a refugee in the making, and that she would eventually flee to the west.

This tale of two Marias is one of the greater Mediterranean, the sea in the “Middle of the Earth,” flowing into the Black and Red Seas and the terrain surrounding them.

“While I travel to Zahle in Lebanon to meet one Maria, to bring her medicine and money to keep her alive, I perform the fatiha prayer for another Maria, my friend in Kyiv, to be protected and kept alive”

These lands and waters which have witnessed waves of refugees, due to conflicts which compel and coerce. A history of displacement over distance, from antiquity’s Sea Peoples to Syrian refugees.

On Thursday, 24 February 2022, both Maria Marchenko and I are preparing for trips to or away from an airport.

At 5am Maria Marchenko is jolted from her sleep. A barrage of ballistic missiles bombarded Kyiv airport, close to where she lives. Airports around the capital city were targeted that day to prevent Ukrainian planes from taking off, while Moscow sought to secure them as staging grounds for the assault on the capital.

At the same time, it is 6am in Madrid. I am packing for my trip to Lebanon in a few hours to visit Maria Shakir, delivering her the pain reliever Panadol and US dollars, both in short supply there due to an economic crisis.

Istanbul, where I am making my transit, is relatively close to the war zone and I wonder if flights might be cancelled. That would devastate Lebanese Maria. She is 98 and hasn’t seen me in 13 years.

While I’m packing my bag the morning of my flight because I am a procrastinator, Maria hadn’t packed because she did not believe that war would erupt. She thought if she did pack her bag in advance for such a scenario, war would then inevitably occur.

I had prepared my Madrid apartment for Maria, her mother and father in case they needed to flee here. I had arranged fresh linens for them, turning my apartment into a haven to accommodate three potential refugees.

During the morning of the 24th both Maria and I pack warm clothing. There is a winter storm in Zahle, in the high mountains of Lebanon. Maria will be going to a bomb shelter, well below the ground in a freezing metro station.

We collect our documents, laptops, and chargers. Maria packs something I have no need to: photos of family and friends, to preserve their memories unsure if she would see them again.

I shut the teal window blinds on my balcony. On top of the entrance to the convent in front of my house, a dove representing the Holy Spirit flies above the representation of Mary. For her namesake in Ukraine, it is not a dove that flies above her head, but rather enemy aircraft.

 

 

Driving to the airport, I dial Maria in vain. The first leg of my journey is to Istanbul, a four-hour journey where I won’t be able to make calls. At this point, I am not sure if the telecommunication lines have been hit, or even if Maria is still alive.

As I am about to board the plane and turn off my phone, she picks up. When I ask about her, she holds back her tears. Her parents live in Okhtyrka, in the Sumy region, 30 miles from the border and now the front lines. Nonetheless, she declares her wish for peace, with no malice or cynicism in her voice. I remind her that they have a home in Madrid.

I place my KN-94 mask snuggly on. And a surgical mask on top of that. I am so grateful the seat next to me is empty. I have yet to catch Covid and feared how I would fare with this virus in Lebanon, having heard stories about the abysmal conditions of health care as a result of the economic crisis. My grandfather survived a pandemic by moving to Lebanon in the late 1940s. I do not want to repeat history.

For the next four hours I will be dodging viruses. I fret that this plane will also have to dodge missiles as we approach Istanbul airport, close to the Black Sea, where warships are bombarding Ukraine with cruise missiles, according to the news.

Istanbul airport is unusually empty. I look at the screen for the gate to my connecting flight to Lebanon, noticing a list of cancelled flights that were destined for Ukraine and Russia.

I turn on my phone. No messages from Ukrainian Maria, but Lebanese Maria sends me pictures of the dishes she has prepared for my arrival via Whatsapp – hummus with olive oil and sesame seeds and falafel.

She is 98-years old yet knows how to send gifs and emojis. When I confirm I am boarding the plane, she sends a gif of a woman from the Sixties with a bra that fires sparks, like bullets. When I leave her a voice message that the flight to Lebanon is scheduled to leave on time, she sends me an animated image of Jesus Christ.

Five hours later, drenched and exhausted, I arrived at a first-floor apartment in Zahle. Maria is elated. I collapse on her sofa. She hugs me, and screams “tu’burni” or “you will bury me,” which is a term of endearment, but I dread the thought of her passing. She is so short that even sitting on the sofa our eyeline is equal.

While she prepares the food, I recline on the sofa, made out of a wooden frame, yet the cushions are made with thick grey blankets, stamped with the logo of “UNHCR,” the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, while a stuffed teddy bear and cheetah rest behind me.

 

I am too embarrassed to ask whether her or a resourceful furniture maker had reappropriated them from the nearby camps housing Syrian refugees.

She brings out her folded table and I eat right there.

“My Maria in Zahle frets when she learns that the grain supply from Ukraine will be interrupted, increasing the price of bread in Lebanon. It’s fortunate I have arrived with US dollars to help her adjust to this crisis”

While I am in the most comfortable setting, my second home, Ukrainian Maria’s second home is underneath the earth, a cold, underground bomb shelter. While I have a sumptuous Lebanese feast, Maria in Kyiv occasionally comes up for air, to find soup during the ephemeral lull of security, until the sirens call her back.

I asked Maria in Zahle to turn on the TV so I can find news about Maria in Kyiv. My Maria in Zahle frets when she learns that the grain supply from Ukraine will be interrupted, increasing the price of bread in Lebanon. It’s fortunate I have arrived with US dollars to help her adjust to this crisis.

On top of the TV set, on the wooden bookshelf, there are three separate depictions of the Virgin Mary and a drawn image of Jesus holding his hand to his heart, while what seems like laser rays of red and blue are coming out of his chest.

During the late 1940s, my grandfather contracted tuberculosis, the Covid-19 of its time. He had to leave his home, Najaf, in the dusty Iraqi desert to recover in the clean mountain air of Zahle. He probably bemoaned his fate, but there he met my grandmother, a Christian refugee from Mardin.

If it were not for refugees and pandemics my mother would not be born, and I would not exist.

I often question why God let my grandmother die at such a young age, when my mom was barely five years old. For most of my life I did not know Maria Shakir even existed. It was only as an adult I travelled to Zahle trying to find my grandmother’s family, eventually finding Maria.

Maria and my entire grandmother’s family are Syriac Orthodox Christian. The country of Lebanon tore itself apart because its Muslims and Christians could not see what unites them, and instead focused on the narcissism of small differences, plunging the country into a civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1991.

Yet this Shi’a Muslim flew across the Mediterranean to help his Christian great-aunt, bringing her money, medicine, and his love.

 

But in Ukraine that same day, the invaders that day could only focus on hate, in their minds, dark, vacuous caverns where only enmity and evil exist, and another set of small differences. Maria in Ukraine became another victim in this cycle.

On the other wall by the TV was an image of Mar Elias Shakir III etched in silver. The Patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox church. Maria’s uncle. My great-uncle. I make another nidhr to him: “If you help Maria, she is Orthodox like you, get out of Ukraine safely, I will visit your shrine in Kerala, India.”

During dinner, when I tell my great-aunt Maria about my visit to the shrine of Sayyida Khawla, she informs me that Our Lady of Bechouat, the site of a Marian apparition, is only ten minutes away from Baalbek.

She tells me this, not to pay a visit as a pilgrim. In fact, rarely do our religious differences ever come up in conversation. My aunt Maria also worships another religion: gastronomy.

She tells me that a woman in Bechouat has a café next to the Marian shrine and where I could eat saj, a Lebanese flat bread cooked on an open circular grill, complemented with thyme or cheese. Of course, her saj is not as good as Maria’s, she reminds me, but I should try it still since I will need to eat lunch.

On Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, I arrive at the Sayyida Khawla shrine. I approach the shrine, with a gilded minaret and dome, interspersed with turquoise ceramic tiles and white Arabic calligraphy. I pass a pointed arch and enter the main hall, and look up at the dome, a pattern of the top in the shape of a star, a representation of heaven in perfect geometrical symmetry.

Not a single space is unadorned, illuminated with beams of light, with walls and ceilings made up of alternating panels of gold and silver, shimmering, shining, sparkling, with crystals glittering, glimmering, mesmerising.

“Rarely do our religious differences ever come up in conversation. My aunt Maria also worships another religion: gastronomy”

I approach the above ground tomb. Khawla was another person displaced by conflict, a refugee of sorts, more akin to a prisoner of war. Khawla was the daughter of Imam Hussein and great granddaughter of Prophet Muhammad. Hussein, the prophet’s son-in-law, and most of his family were massacred in Karbala, in today’s Iraq, in 681 by a political rival, Yazid, based in Damascus.

During a long and arduous journey, the few members of Hussein’s surviving family were taken as prisoners of war across the desert from what is Iraq to Damascus. Khawla died in Baalbek. Zayn al-Abidin, Hussein’s only surviving son, and Khawla’s brother, planted a small branch to mark her grave. Over the years, that branch turned into a massive cypress tree, which is in the middle of the shrine, making it 1,400-years-old.

I sit on a carpet of alternating floral designs of red, black, and white, in front of her tomb. Technically Khawla is like my Khala Maria, my great-aunt, albeit older by more than a millennium and a half.

 

I pray. For the health of my family, that my sister gives birth to a healthy baby, and that I get some message from Maria in Ukraine that she is safe.

Afterwards, I am on my way to Our Lady of Bechouat, the site of a Marian apparition, because maybe there Ukrainian Maria’s text will also appear.

The church has a bell tower, an exact resemblance to the minaret of the Shi’a shrine, but the entire complex is constructed of monochromatic, soft beige stones, in comparison with the explosion of colour in Sayyida Khawla. While the Shi’a shrine has a single tree, this complex is covered in sprawling olive trees.

It was here that in 1741, a wooden Byzantine icon of the Virgin was discovered in a cave and a church was built above it. Bechouat then became a pilgrimage site after a miracle occurred there for a paralyzed Christian man. The Marian apparition, however, occurred later, in front of the eyes of a Muslim child. Since then, I learned it has become a site of pilgrimage for both Christians and Muslims.

It’s fitting it became a site sacred to both Christians and Muslims. In the structure housing the statue, there is a painting of the Virgin Mary, standing on top of a crescent moon.

The crescent moon, along with a star, is a symbol associated with Islam. However, it was originally a Christian symbol representing the Virgin. The crescent moon had long been a symbol of fertility in the Middle East from pagan times, and the star stood in for Mary. It was only in 1453, when the Ottoman Muslims conquered Constantinople, that they appropriated the flag.

“It’s fitting it became a site sacred to both Christians and Muslims”

Within the span of a few hours in this narrow sliver of land known as the Bekaa Valley, settled by Phoenicians and Romans, known for its hashish, I visited two sites dedicated not just to Christianity and Islam, but the divine feminine: Our Lady of Baalbek, Khawla, and Our Lady of Bechouat, Mary.

The Lebanese often boast about how they can ski in the mountains and be able to go to the beach and dip into the water within the span of an hour. I was more impressed that within the span of an hour I could visit these two shrines, one Shi’a and the other Catholic.

In the span of an hour I could pray for protection, asking one holy Maria to protect both my Syriac Orthodox great-aunt Maria and my Ukrainian Orthodox Maria.

A few days later Ukrainian Maria eventually arrived in Parma, Italy, to stay with her aunt. Her parents remained in Okhtyrka, defending their home.

 

Maria was safe. And now I had to fulfil a promise before the year ended that I would travel to India, to visit the shrine of my great-uncle, and thank him for the favour.

Ibrahim Al-Marashi is an associate professor of history at California State University San Marcos. He is co-author of Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History and The Modern History of Iraq.

Follow him on Twitter: @ialmarashi

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff, or the author’s employer, or Informed Comment.

Reprinted from The New Arab with the author’s permission.

Navy Lt. Kylan Jones-Huffman was killed in Iraq in August 2003. His story is one of many untold episodes in the terrible history of human conflict

By Ibrahim Al-Marashi |

( San Francisco Chronicle ) – If someone had asked the students at my Monterey high school which one of us would be the first to go to Iraq, everyone would have probably said me. After all, my parents were the ones who emigrated from Iraq in the 1970s to escape Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship. We were just waiting for a safer time to visit our relatives and make pilgrimages to Iraq’s many shrines.

But Kylan Jones-Huffman, a student I ran track with, ended up being the first. He would lose his life there in August 2003 as an intelligence officer temporarily assigned to the I Marine Expeditionary Force during the Iraq War.

Kylan was a well-liked, well-read student — a “jock-nerd” if you will. We didn’t speak much but he was always kind to me and even stood up for me when other students picked on me for being Iraqi and Muslim. He was a year ahead of me in school and we lost touch after he graduated. But from his obituary, I saw how his life had paralleled mine. During his undergraduate years at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., he studied Arabic and Persian just as I had at UCLA. He, too, had wanted to become a university history professor. In early 2003, he’d been accepted to a doctorate program at George Washington University and presumably would have started that fall. Meanwhile, I would go on to graduate a year later from my own doctorate program in history.

Kylan was also a budding poet. He was a member of an online haiku group in which he shared his poems while abroad. The last one he ever wrote:

uncomfortable — / body armor shifting/ on the car seat

My old classmate would lose his life in that same body armor in the scorching heat of Al-Hilla, about 60 miles south of Baghdad, not far from where my family is from. He was there to brief arriving Polish and Spanish troops on Iraqi cultural sensitivities and differences. While sitting in the passenger seat of a Humvee stuck in traffic, a gunman approached and opened fire.

His final poem — more poignant words, I could not imagine. Art reflecting reality.

I picture Kylan, sitting uncomfortably, sweating under his body armor in the last moments of his life. His killing was one of the first acts of an insurgency that grew from the official end of combat that President George W. Bush had declared on May 1, 2003. That insurgency against the U.S. occupation of Iraq would last until 2011 when U.S. forces finally left the country. Kylan was the 64th fatality out of an eventual 4,424.

But he, like everyone else who lost their life, was more than a statistic.

It would take 20 years for America to have any sort of meaningful reckoning on why our country went to war and the repercussions for the nation, the region and American foreign policy. However, as a historian who spent much of the past 20 years studying the aftermath of the invasion, what’s always been missing from these conversations is the human element — the individuals, both Iraqi and American, who became victims of the war and occupation. I have written about some of the Iraqi victims in the past, such as the 2006 Mahmudiyya murders, when five U.S. soldiers gang-raped and killed a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, murdered her father, mother and sister, dousing the family in petrol and setting the home on fire to hide the evidence. I also wrote about how in 2007, U.S. private military contractor Blackwater massacred 14 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square in Baghdad. 

Kylan was a victim, too — alongside the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans who died as a result of the invasion. All of their lives were lost due to faulty intelligence in Washington, D.C., used to justify the war. The politicians behind that deadly decision will never be held accountable for their actions.

It’s these same misguided rationales that historians like myself see driving most wars, and the toll on society is always heavy. Kylan’s life is one episode in this greater history of combatants and civilians — untold numbers of people who have died or endured post-traumatic stress disorder. There are victims of gender-based violence during conflict, those maimed by landmines and amputees, many reliant on prosthetics. Landscapes and waterways are poisoned by Agent Orange, depleted uranium or white phosphorus. Animals killed on the frontlines or dying underneath rubble. And eventually, there are always internally displaced people and refugees desperate for any sense of peace and safety.

Over the years, I’ve been working on a course that centers these stories instead of the conventional military history so commonly taught. It’s a course I call “Victims of War.” My hope is that one day I’ll be able to teach it, and I know Kylan will be right there beside me — as the history professor he always wanted to be.

Ibrahim Al-Marashi is an associate professor of history at California State University San Marcos. He is co-author of “Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History and The Modern History of Iraq.”

Reprinted from San Francisco Chronicle with the author’s permission.

Featured photo: “Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash“