Saturday, March 26, 2022

Metamorphic

No war anywhere in the world has brought peace and hope to itself. The great powers of the world always make decisions in their favor, and ordinary people pay the price for their decision by losing everything and their lives. It has been more than forty years since the start of the Iran Iraq war. This imposed war on Iran lasted eight years, and like any other war, it inflicted irreparable damage on the country and the nation of Iran. My mother's family was one of the millions of Iranian families who suffered a lot because of the Iran-Iraq war, and that was the beginning of all the hardships they had to experience after the war happened.



With the start of the war, my mother’s family had to leave their city and take refuge in another place. Khorramshahr is one of the southern cities of Iran, which borders Iraq, and it was the first place to be attacked by the Iraqi president Saddam Hossein. My family was from that city and lived there at that time. My mother explained that she remembers the first missiles hit civilian areas around noon when people were at work and kids were in school for the first day of the school season. Moreover, my mother’s said that she would never forget the day, they were forced to leave their home and move to an unknown future. They experienced a hard time getting to Tehran to settle in my mother’s aunt’s house. However, they arrived in Tehran after two or three days of beginning the war. Many people had difficulty running away from the city. My family was lucky to find a chance to settle somewhere safe.



In addition, this war caused my grandfather to lose one of his legs. After my grandfather took his family to a safe place, he decided back to Khorramshahr to find my great uncle who had not come back since the beginning of the war, and help people, also move his other family members, with his car. At that time, the Ba’athists were a particular group of the Iraqi army forces, and they controlled many areas of Khorramshahr. In the meanwhile, my grandfather was helping people who were trapped in their house and city run away from the enemy. In one of these operations, a mortar hit the area and the fragments of mortar wounded him. Due to the hardships of living with one foot and an artificial leg, my grandfather could not return to his mechanical job for several years and this disability not only weakened his body but also his mental health as well. Therefore, he felt that his disability causes great inconvenience to his family for many years.



Eventually, my family found out that my uncle who was missing for a long time had become a martyr. Like many people, my uncle went to war with the invading enemy to defend his city and country, but he never back home since the first time, Iraq attacked Khorramshahr. due to the chaos in the city and the lack of proper communication ways with each other, my family had no connection with him. However, they thought that he had taken refuge in another city with the rest of the people, but when they didn’t get any news from him for a long time, they became frustrated; besides that, all the family wanted to believe that he was still alive. During those years, my family went everywhere and to every organization to search for him, but unfortunately, they came back disappointed every time. In the end, with the news of his martyrdom, my family and especially my grandmother understood that their child would never return home. My uncle’s martyrdom made my family unable to forget the bitterness of this war.



All the bitter events that my family went through made it impossible for them to ever return to their hometown. Even though they went there a few years after the war ended, they were faced with a city and a house that looked more like ruins. For this reason, they did not last more than a few months and returned to Tehran. Even today, after thirty-four years since the end of the war, people of the region have not yet been able to fully rebuild their lives, and the effects of the devastation of the war are still visible on the face of the city. In my opinion, the war has never made any land successful. War has always brought hardship and irreparable damage to the people of the lands. I have never understood the war of powers and whether gaining power is worth the bloodshed and displacement of millions of humans!! I only hope that one day, humans can be able to find a sense of peace and live the life as they deserve, happy and free.

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