The Abominable Year 2011
I can’t tell you how but I somehow felt it from the very beginning. A strange feeling has set in for some time telling me something terrible is going to happen. No, I didn’t really bother much about the turn of the millennium as some people did. After all it was nothing but a human calendar and I have never really bothered about what 2012 might hold. But what I am going to say might sound unbelievable. Yes, I am speaking of my very personal apprehension of the current year 2011 which is still half way to go. When it started it marked the beginning of two catastrophes afflicting my poor family in just a little more than three and a half months.

To begin with my mother died on the 22 of January 2011. Well, you might say this was nothing but a natural death when people reach the old age of 75 or 80. True, this is how I saw it and comforted myself. But then just after a little more than three and a half months I got the devastating and impossible news that my brother Salam, the third in order of birth, was killed in the streets of Baghdad on his way to work on the morning of 10 May 2011. A bomb which was apparently stuck somewhere on or in his car in his house the night before by unknown people, was brought to explosion possibly with a mobile control system which turned him into coal on the spot. Apart from a few bones nothing was left of him. My youngest brother who works for the same company was handed in a plastic bag with some of his bones in it.

Salam lived in Baghdad with his wife like most members of my family since they moved there when my father, an unimportant primary school teacher, was transferred by the government on the grounds of being a Kurd with political affiliation to a party. My father is still alive but he lives in his dream world and has lost touch completely with the real world for some time now. Salam managed in spite of the difficult situation in a country corrupt from top to toe and afflicted with nonstop daily killings of innocent people to reach the relatively high position of the GM (General Manager) of the Iraqi State Cement company in 2005. But I know he knew it was not an easy job in a dangerous place without any security for somebody without any political, tribal or religious backing.

The whole family was suddenly thrown into a state of agitation, distress and powerlessness; there is no way to find out who was behind his assassination and you cannot even ask a government to start investigations on murder it is most likely involved in. No, you can only rely on your own to bring the culprit to justice which doesn’t exist. The last resort is to take revenge, a horrible deed indeed which most of us oppose. But how can we accept this most brutal murder and leave the culprit continue stealing and murdering.

I wonder what would happen next to my family. Whose turn is it now to leave this world? What difference does it make anyway to die now or later? I haven’t talked about it so far and I don’t need any condolence. But my mind leaves me no peace. I am paralyzed. Life has lost all its content when my brother’s life candle was abruptly put out.
Dr. Jamshid Ibrahim
Bremen 5 June 2011

This text is dedicated to my dear brother Salam Abdullah Ibrahim who was burned to death by a bomb stuck to his car.