Bloody legacy

In cafés at night, Iraqis were glued to their television screens. Their istikanat of cardamom tea cold, forgotten beneath the undulating smoke of the night’s thousandth cigarette.

In living rooms, mothers’ hands were raised in prayer. In Mosul, Basra and the faraway corners of exile, Iraqis’ hearts raced to Moroccans’ chants as Walid Regragui’s Atlas Lions forayed into hitherto uncharted World Cup territories and conquered them in style.

Spain, Portugal and Belgium were undone by Morocco, and France by Tunisia. The “scrappy” Saudis, as The New York Times’ lexicon defines them, scored one of the tournament’s finest goals against a bewildered Argentina, now crowned world champion over France.

This is how we will remember the World Cup: Palestine flags in the stands and Arab and North African triumphs on the pitch.

Alas, a few hundred, a few thousand of those who would have cheered were missing.

Their eyes would have glittered as Sofyan Amrabat chased Kylian Mbappe down the left flank, winning the ball with an immaculate tackle that left the wonder kid writhing behind, before orchestrating the play for another raid in Les Bleus’ territory.

Those missing are the children of Fallujah.

They are asleep now. The football field where they would have emulated Achraf Hakimi and Yassine Bounou on chilly winter afternoons is their resting place. Their mothers are not going to worry about their mud-stained tracksuits tomorrow. They are not wearing them.

Today, the field is known as the Martyrs’ Cemetery. It is where residents of the once besieged city buried the women and children massacred in repeated United States assaults to repress a raging rebellion in the early years of occupation. In Iraq, even playgrounds are now sites for mourning. The war entailed showering Fallujah in depleted uranium and white phosphorus.

But US savagery didn’t end there. Twenty years and incalculable birth defects later, the US navy is naming one of its warships the USS Fallujah.

In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, the late Walter Benjamin wrote: “Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.” In this procession, wrote the revolutionary German philosopher, “The spoils are carried along.”

This is how the US Empire continues its war against Iraqis. Fallujah’s name, bleached in white phosphorus implanted in mothers’ wombs for generations, is a spoil of war, too. “Under extraordinary odds,” reads a US Empire statement explaining the decision to name a warship after Fallujah, “the Marines prevailed against a determined enemy who enjoyed all the advantages of defending in an urban area.”

Through this historical revisionism, the US has launched another assault on our dead. Benjamin had warned us: “Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” The enemy has won.

Excerpted: ‘US empire’s legacy: Fallujah and football played in a graveyard’. Courtesy: Aljazeera.com