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War Against ISIS – An Iranian on the Ground – Salar Abdoh
171 Plays1 year ago
Ep 034 – Fiction. There aren't many books that give the perspective of the fight against ISIS from an Iranian perspective. Salar Abdoh joins me to discuss his extraordinary new novel, "Out of Mesopotamia."
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Transcript
The Threat of ISIS
00:00:00
Speaker
They were just going, they were going all out to sort of kill everybody, obliterate everybody in their path. So it was, it was an existential threat to my beloveds, to my loved ones, to my family. It wasn't a war that belonged elsewhere and I was going to cover as a journalist. And
00:00:28
Speaker
When we're talking about war and combat, distances are really important. In a place like Afghanistan, distances might be near, but because of the geography, that nearness actually can be quite far. It's difficult to get from A to B in many instances.
00:00:55
Speaker
In the case of ISIS in Iraq, they were literally on the border. As the crow flies from Tehran to bag that, for instance, it's not that far. It's not even from Boston to Washington, D.C. That's not a large distance.
Introducing Salar Abdo
00:01:32
Speaker
Hi, everyone. This is AJ Woodhams, host of the War Books podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today is a big day for the show, an episode I am super excited for, because today I have Salar Abdo talking about his most recent novel, Out of Mesopotamia. Salar was born in Iran and splits his time between Tehran and New York City. He's the author of the novels Tehran at Twilight,
00:02:02
Speaker
The Poet Game and Opium, and he is the editor of Tehran Noor. He teaches in the MFA program at the City College of New York, the MFA program that I went to. His latest novel we're talking about today out of Mesopotamia, but he also has another one on the way out this November called In a Nearby Country Called Love. Salar, how are you doing today? It's a pleasure to be with you, AJ.
00:02:29
Speaker
my former graduate students, a fantastic writer whose thing says I worked on whom I saw win one of the big awards at City College writing at the end of the year. So it's a special pleasure of all the interviews I've done to be on this particular show with you. Thank you so much for saying that. The pleasure is all mine. So, you know, you were my mentor, my friend,
00:02:59
Speaker
one of my favorite writers. And I actually, I told you about, we were having coffee and I told you about this podcast and this show before I had even started it. And I really wanted to, I really wanted to ask you on like as back then, but I was like, no, he's just gonna, he'll pity me. He'll come on, but like, you know, there's, there's, you know, I don't want to ask too much of him. And so now we're like 30 episodes in and here you are on my show. So thank you.
00:03:26
Speaker
Thank you. It's lovely and it's lovely to work with you. And also I want everyone to know that you're also the creator of my website. Yeah, there's many talents coming from the Warbucks Podcast Studio, one of which is building websites. So yeah, so check out solarabdo.com too. All you people out there. So yeah, so your book,
00:03:55
Speaker
out of Mesopotamia, which I really loved, and talked to several people. I just had Phil Clay on the show. He also is talking to me about how much he really loved your book. He's gotten a lot of praise. One of the questions that I like authors to start out answering is, in your own words, could you just tell us, what is your book about?
Plot and Themes of 'Out of Mesopotamia'
00:04:20
Speaker
Sure. First of all, I'll quickly, because you mentioned Phil Clay,
00:04:26
Speaker
He's also one of my favorite authors. I consider him a friend. And I'm glad he came on your show. And I'll take it from there. And Musa Patania is basically about a man who finds himself, a journalist who
00:04:50
Speaker
who gets sucked in to the situation of combat and war and sort of crosses that line of being a journalist. He's no longer a journalist. He has to pick up a gun, actually. And then at the same time, he's living these other lives back home as an occasional writer
00:05:12
Speaker
art, art writer, theater writer, cinema writer. And how, so the book is really about war and combat, but more importantly, how war and combat manifests itself in the 21st century. When the whole geography of the Middle East started to change right around 2014, because
00:05:40
Speaker
The entity called ISIS started to occupy large swaths of Syria during their civil war. And then they, like in juggernaut, they came into northern Iraq and very, very fast, very quickly. They were at the gates of Baghdad and moving south.
00:06:07
Speaker
At that time, I'm always sort of engaged with, for many years now, with war documentarians and war photographers. And just the neighborhood of the Middle East is so caught up in war in one way or another, whether it's to the east of Iran, in Afghanistan, or to the west in Iraq, and also other places. I've always sort of been involved in combat related
00:06:36
Speaker
things in one way or another. And in 2014, I was with a war documentarian friend and colleague of mine, and we were in southern Iraq
00:06:53
Speaker
And at that time, there was a real fear of ISIS simply taking over all of Mesopotamia. And it's hard for somebody who has not been there and doesn't know that geography to understand the gravity of the situation and how that would have changed the entire situation of the world.
Personal Experiences in Iraq
00:07:20
Speaker
But, you know, there were pockets of ISIS as far south as the lakes around Karbala, which is quite a bit south. And there was no real opposition to them. The Iraqi army was in absolute disarray. And the Shiite militias had not been formed yet to stand their ground.
00:07:50
Speaker
And so in the middle of this chaos, I found myself in southern Iraq. And there were several factors at this point. One was I started, I realized that this is really a fight for survival because the ISIS terminology and their way of thinking about many groups, including
00:08:19
Speaker
the Persians, the Iranians, which is where my home is much of the time alongside the United States, was they were just going, they were going all out to sort of kill everybody, obliterate everybody in their path. So it was, it was an existential threat.
00:08:42
Speaker
to my beloveds, to my loved ones, to my family. It wasn't a war that belonged elsewhere, and it was going to cover as a journalist. And, you know, when we're talking about war and combat, distances are really important. In a place like Afghanistan,
00:09:10
Speaker
distances might be near, but because of the geography, that nearness actually can be quite far. It's difficult to get from A to B in many instances. But in the case of ISIS in Iraq, they were literally on the
00:09:33
Speaker
On the border, as the crow flies from Tehran to bag that, for instance, it's not that far. It's not even from Boston to Washington, D.C. That's not a large distance. So I became involved in it in a very personal way.
00:09:57
Speaker
But, and then I started to wonder, and I started, you know, being, you know, Teherana Twilight was also about war, in many ways was about war reporting and affixers and things like that. So I knew that world.
00:10:18
Speaker
Not to make a big issue of this or be too critical, but when you're in a situation, when you're inside the cauldron of a war, things are happening. And then you read journalists, reporters reporting on the war. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes you're really disappointed.
00:10:49
Speaker
You kind of, you being in it, you see them as like sort of armchair or Friday or Monday or whatever. Witnesses and you begin to see that a lot of times they don't quite know what they're talking about or they're going after things that they've already made their minds up. So if you go, let's say you've made up your mind on
00:11:18
Speaker
let's say the Shiite militias, that they're evil. It's easy to then find examples of evil being done by certain sub-branches of those militias. And then, you know, you can sort of fashion your report based on that. And because I had become engaged with these militias because they're really
00:11:45
Speaker
were the only thing standing in the way of ISIS at that time before the Iraqi army sort of got its feet together and the Americans started to help. I realized these are human beings. They have families. Some of them are my friends.
Challenges of Reporting War
00:12:02
Speaker
I go to their homes. They have children. They're capable of love. They cry when their brothers in arms die.
00:12:12
Speaker
they grieve, they have mercy, and sometimes they have unbelievable cruelty out of anger or wrath or revenge or whatever. No human beings are not one thing, they're not cardboard. Question, I was going to ask, how does one join up with a Shia militia to do book research? Because you were on the ground with these guys. How does that happen?
00:12:41
Speaker
a reporter out of Beirut who reports for one of the big newspapers in the USA, wrote me and said, you know, Salah, I read your book. I ran into it in Beirut. I read it. You weren't very kind to us reporters. We did want to join up with the Shia militias, but they just wouldn't let us in.
00:13:07
Speaker
Well, you know, for a variety of reasons that I'm not really going to, because not because it's a secret, it's just not that important or interesting. But being from where I was from and the work I've been doing, I had an end with these guys. And everybody else, you know, Western reporters,
00:13:28
Speaker
were hanging out with the Kurds and with other elements that were supported with Western powers. So I had that then first of all, and then also sort of being drawn into these worlds for a number of reasons. I also wanted to be in the places that nobody can get to and nobody can
00:13:59
Speaker
would be allowed into. I wanted to be in those places that nobody else has, like the ends of the earth. And this war, and I talk about it in the book, this was very chaotic.
00:14:18
Speaker
I mean, among these militias, some of them are vastly experienced because they've known one war after another. But many of them are not experienced at all. And the age range is insane. It goes from 15 to 80. And then you find yourself in the middle of this
00:14:41
Speaker
madness in a geography that's very dangerous and also somewhat completely unprofessional in many ways. This is not special forces, whatever, but with a lot of weaponry and a lot of danger.
00:15:04
Speaker
and the combat situations very, very close at times. Just to give, not to make this too long, but just to give like a comparison. Last year, exactly this time, I was in the Ukraine, and I was in all the fronts in the Ukraine, and it was at a time where
00:15:29
Speaker
Everything was at a standstill, and it was just the battles of rockets, right? You know, like there was not that proximity. Even in Bakhmuth, where I was, it was, you know, it was from distance. But in northern Iraq, where I found myself, you know, you could hear, you could hear these guys. And I sort of began that, the book that way, you know, you can hear,
00:15:56
Speaker
the guy who wants to kill you, you know, rousing himself with his Allahu Akbar, God is great. And that you really, the war in Ukraine puts one kind of chill in your bones, but that other war puts another kind of chill in your bones. The qualities are very different. So for all of these reasons, I ended up in Iraq, Syria at that time. So if this, if we were going to put a
00:16:24
Speaker
a label, I guess if you want to call it that, on this conflict that your book is about. I mean, it may be like the war against ISIS or whatever, but ISIS is who the Shia militias are fighting, correct? ISIS were the Shia militias were fighting against ISIS. At some point when
00:16:47
Speaker
the stand against ISIS crystallized other elements were also in play. For instance, these militias were getting sort of indirect American air power support at that time too.
00:17:05
Speaker
and we would see them, and we would run into each other at the convoys and whatever. So it was a real toss-up of all of these forces that are sort of enemies, but for the time being, they're not enemies because there's this other enemy that's very vastly dangerous, but we don't really know how they came about, and all of us, each side has their own theories about how ISIS came about.
00:17:34
Speaker
So it was, it was interesting, but just to summarize it, I was interested in going behind the headlines, like when you read about
00:17:47
Speaker
the war in the Middle East, the civil wars in the Middle East, and the militias, who are these people?
Motivations of Fighters
00:17:54
Speaker
Because you read in the newspaper on CNN or whatever, there's just a belief. And you think, oh, these people, they must come out of the caves, or they must be
00:18:07
Speaker
absolutely brutal. And I was interested, besides writing about war itself and the characters, because it's not only a war book about war. He is in and out of combat. He goes home. He does other things. But I wanted to give a face, a real face, an interiority to these people and also also write about why people
00:18:33
Speaker
go to war voluntarily and why they are voluntarily even trying to get martyred. Yeah. Well, let's talk about some of these people. First, you just mentioned the main character of your book. You alluded to him, Sala. What kind of person is Sala in your book? What kind of character is Sala?
00:18:58
Speaker
Saleh, as you can see, I didn't bother to change his name too much from my name. My name, my first name is a pure Persian name and Saleh is an Arabic name.
00:19:11
Speaker
And my Arab friends often call me Salah because it's hard for them to roll my name in Arabic language too often. So I just chose that. When I first started all this, my idea was to write actually a nonfiction book about the civil wars in the Middle East.
00:19:37
Speaker
I had many balls in the air at that time. I was teaching in New York. I was working on screenplays in Tehran. I was writing art reviews in Tehran.
00:19:59
Speaker
I was writing essays about the wars. I was publishing my books. So I was, you know, I was jack of several trades. And this was course for me to travel a lot. And, you know, I have an essay where I talk about
00:20:21
Speaker
And this was typical. It was not like a rare, unique occasion where I would be in a forward trench in northern Iraq. I would catch a plane from Iraqi Kurdistan, Erbil, and arrive at John F. Kennedy Airport immediately.
00:20:50
Speaker
take a cab, go to the City College of New York to get there in time to teach my graduate course in fiction workshop, you know. And that, you know, these multiplicity of worlds that I was living in, or for instance, you know, I would be in a forward trench. I would, you know, I would go with a convoy back to back that catch a plane to Tehran.
00:21:18
Speaker
all within a few hours. And Tehran is quite a cosmopolitan city, actually. There's a big cafe culture. So I would go from a forward trench to one of the hipster cafes in Tehran where my writer friends who had no idea what's going on in the Middle East, and they don't care at all. And I found myself
00:21:48
Speaker
Sort of, first of all, I found myself quite angry a lot of the times, angry at the whole world and my friends who didn't care. And I started to think about some of, for instance, American war riders of the past, especially the Vietnam vets. And I started to feel what it felt like. I'd read about it. Theoretically, I knew it, but now I really felt how it feels to come from
00:22:16
Speaker
you know, a place like that and be with people who are absolutely oblivious about what's going on around the corner from them, not thousands of miles away. And I started to understand what American soldiers feel who come from these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And, you know, they come back to a country that
00:22:39
Speaker
On the surface, you know, supports them and all those ribbons and stuff, but the country really is clueless about what these guys have been through. And it's interesting that some of my most closest readers and supporters of out of Mesopotamia have turned out in these past few years to be actually American vets. People like Phil Klein and other people who've read this book. But so I started with nonfiction, but
00:23:09
Speaker
in my mind, but I realized that my life was too chaotic. I would say somewhat insane. And I just could not fit that insanity into the straitjacket of nonfiction. It just wasn't possible because
00:23:30
Speaker
As tragic as war can be and all of that, it can be also absolutely absurd and very funny. Okay, you're in very crazy situations. And I thought, okay, I'll put it all into a fiction book and that would allow me also to
00:23:54
Speaker
treat all of the characters I have, and Sala himself, in the ways that are not too far removed from my own life. And yet I can take one step away and just sort of bring it all together. Yeah, well, speaking of kind of the absurdity of what goes on in your book,
00:24:19
Speaker
A big theme is martyrdom, which I think is probably where we see the most absurdity. Talk about, well, one, I'm actually, I'm curious about the role that martyrdom plays within Iranian society. So I'm curious about that, but then talk a little bit about martyrdom in your book and why you wrote it, the way you did. Martyrdom is very interesting.
00:24:50
Speaker
As we talk right this day to day, I believe they're the two biggest days of Shiite ceremonies in the world of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. Shi'ism, the Shi'is branch of Islam gets its very raison de kler, its very reason for being
00:25:19
Speaker
via the channel of martyrdom. Sheism begins with the martyrdom of Emma, the same, 1400 odd years ago. And I won't get into the specifics of that. That's just the whole other thing. So it's a part of the culture. It's a part of the culture of
00:25:43
Speaker
becoming a martyr and sort of putting that on a pedestal. It doesn't mean that everybody in places like Iran and other countries where there's a big Shiite minority or majority that, you know, everyone is sitting around waiting to be martyred. But it is certainly within my milieu of intellectuals in Iran, they want to have nothing to do with that.
00:26:12
Speaker
But it is a big part of the culture, and it always has been. And when I began to make my journeys to the geographies of war in Iraq and Syria, and I was with the Arab,
00:26:39
Speaker
contingents most of the time, but I would run into pockets of Iranian volunteers too. The Iranian volunteers, I mean, the reports by some of the most important newspapers in America will tell you that
00:27:04
Speaker
The Islamic Republic of Iran was just busing these people over there, blah, blah, paying them. But I was there, I saw with my own eyes. A lot of these guys were not getting paid the cent to be there. They were selling the shirts off their back to come to these geographies and fight for what they call the holy places, right?
00:27:29
Speaker
because Isis was basically going around and blowing up every Christian or Shiite or Yazidi or whatever holy side and, you know, abusing those people. So these people, and I became, you know, I was fascinated, you know, what causes a young man, and sometimes not so young,
00:27:55
Speaker
to just get up, you know, leave everything, sell everything, and come to, you know, come to Baghdad, end up in a place like Samara or something, and wait to wait for a convoy to accept him, for a militia to accept him to go to battle, and most probably die. I mean, I, it's just that's a,
00:28:24
Speaker
That's spellbinding. You cannot compare it to anything else that happens in life. And I started to spend a lot of time with these men. And these are all people who they're there for no other reason than they're seeking martyrdom.
00:28:48
Speaker
I talk about it in the book and like the recent short story that I also have talks about it too. I would say a great majority of them went there for to actually, you know, fight to keep that entity called ISIS from doing all the things it was doing. If they were murdered in the,
00:29:17
Speaker
in the in the act so be it if they weren't fine and then there were others
00:29:26
Speaker
And this happens, I've seen it in other situations, similar situations. Who were there? Who were there? They just wanted to gain a bit of glory, come back and say, I went there, did that, and then use that, get some mileage out of it. You had all kinds, right? And I became interested in that too.
00:29:48
Speaker
Who is a genuine would-be martyr? Who is acting? And who is a real fighter? And who is a coward even? And that in itself became a study that began to fascinate me.
American Forces and Local Militias
00:30:06
Speaker
And the ways it manifested itself in everyday life. How you conduct yourself in a forward trench
00:30:19
Speaker
where your enemy basically does not care at all if they die or not. So they're sort of into the whole martyrdom thing as well, via a different channel, right? But, you know, imagine you're sitting in a forward trench and this Toyota van filled to the till with ammo.
00:30:49
Speaker
with the incendiaries is coming at you full force. It's that there's nothing more scary in existence because those things are not easy to hit. They might seem easy if you're watching it on video from, you know, on television or something. And also, even if it were easy to hit, which is not,
00:31:17
Speaker
to stand your ground and to actually take that aim, knowing that even if it's not a Toyota van or whatever, or it's just one of these guys gets into the trench. This was a very, in many ways, some of these wars of the Middle East, like the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, some of them are very, their heart back to World War I,
00:31:48
Speaker
of one of these guys managed to throw themselves into what they call the cycle of the Arabs, called this forward trench. Forty guys are blown up. You have no chance. You have no chance. So who is Zina? Who is who in this group of people? Who is Zina?
00:32:17
Speaker
Who walks the walk and talks the talk, you know? And that, you know, for a writer, you know, these are the material that not just for novels, any novel, right? You want to know what makes these guys tick.
00:32:31
Speaker
Yeah. Well, when you were just talking, I was reminded just like thinking about ISIS and like the types of people. It is important to note that, you know, I guess they too were seeking martyrdom in a lot of situations. So you've got a whole battlefield of people who are just trying to become martyrs. I remember talking to an Iraqi friend when ISIS invaded Iraq from Syria and we were talking about how like the Iraqi army collapsed.
00:33:01
Speaker
an Iraqi friend is like, you don't understand. These guys talking about ISIS, they want to die. They're running right at you in the hope of becoming martyrs and blowing something up. He's like, I don't blame the Iraqi army at all. It was a very complicated episode of history.
00:33:26
Speaker
I think it's important to keep in mind kind of how suicidal that ISIS often was. Absolutely. So this is what, this was the scenario. The Iraqi army collapsed immediately. It was an absolute disarray.
00:33:43
Speaker
The only group of people who could face these guys head on were the Shiite militias. There was nobody else. So when Ayatollah Sistani, the grand Ayatollah, or actually the entire Shiite war, not just Iraq, gave his fatwa then,
00:34:07
Speaker
and against this. At that point, when he gave that fatwa, all these Shiite men across Iraq, you know, at that point, they had their marching orders. And the person who sort of did the management of this, because, you know, war, combat is all about logistics. You know, he might have all the
00:34:37
Speaker
passion in the world to fight or be a martyr, but if you don't have logistics, if you don't have water, if you don't have food, if you don't have gasoline to get from A to B, the person who did this was Hassan Soleimani, the supreme commander of the Iranian forces and the commander of the special ports force of Iran.
00:35:05
Speaker
who was assassinated in Baghdad by American drones in 2020. So he was the person who actually brought it. And I was there. I saw it.
00:35:18
Speaker
in 2014, when all of this was just starting, I would talk to the Iraqis, and they would say, basically, the Iraqi army had collapsed. They would say, Ask them so they money will take care of it. That was the general. That was the general. And he took care of it. But it was a close call.
00:35:42
Speaker
I think it was a close call. You know, no matter what people think about if so and so is a good person or an evil person. I mean, I've read or heard general patriots that are extremely capable. American general who called us and sold our money, something like the personification of evil, like whatever, whatever anybody,
00:36:09
Speaker
thinks of this person or that person, I was there to see that without his management of the situation and the people he worked with, it would have been a very, very bad Middle East.
00:36:28
Speaker
And so the Americans and other forces, Shia forces, were sort of working with each other. And then, of course, when as soon as that thing was over, that episode in history was over, and Mr. Trump became
00:36:53
Speaker
as terrorists. So, you know, the irony of it all and what people do, what governments do, based on what suits them, what's convenient at the time. Yeah. I marked a paragraph or two in your book that I was wondering if you wouldn't mind reading. Blanks seem to be going around today. Everyone drank their tea and said God's name too many times.
00:37:23
Speaker
The Americans were always the object of derision in these conversations, their occasional air support for us questionable at best. On the surface, we were fighting on the same side for a change, and against an enemy that wanted the Earth itself to be gone. Over at places like Palmyra and Syria and Mosul, down the road from us, the enemy had gone on orgies of destruction of all things ancient.
00:37:50
Speaker
afterward gloating in their sick cruelty over priceless historical stones that could not fight or talk back. No wonder then that in the mock-up and up and down all the satyrs of the war we quietly saw ourselves as the soldiers of civilization, even if no one else believed us or gave a ship.
00:38:12
Speaker
It was not something that was talked about, but it was there in the air of every minor battle and in the newscasts out of Iraq, too. This was Nineveh, after all, the ancient capital of the Assyrians, the Nineveh of the Bible and the vast 2,700-year-old.
00:38:31
Speaker
Stone Tablet Library had once held. We were certain we were fighting with something bigger than just Mesopotamia, and we were eating the bullets that the Americans, who despised our skin and our faces and our weapons, should have been eating right alongside us.
Global Perceptions of America
00:38:50
Speaker
The Americans saw us as rodents, and we saw them as a hollow Goliath.
00:38:56
Speaker
They laughed at our poetry and queer dancing in the middle of war while we wept and held wakes after their friendly fires that killed our buddies. I wondered if anything, anything at all, could ever bridge these suspicions. I wondered if the so-called friendly fire that had killed the three Magi had not only been the Americans but also thoroughly calculated.
00:39:25
Speaker
Still, even if we were to find out the truth about the murder of our boys, what then, what could we do with that information? Not much, but gradually come to think of them, the Americans, as entities beyond the realm of touch or comprehension. Now and then, we would run into their convoys on the trunk roads of Iraq. We'd pass one another like ghosts in the afternoon.
00:39:53
Speaker
their equipment and vehicles had the feel of high walls with no human beings visible from our vantage. They were extraterrestrials to us here, but not quite here. And sometimes I ask myself if we too were not just as invisible to them. Thank you for reading that. I wanted you to
00:40:19
Speaker
First, I love that passage because it's so interesting to me to hear what the perspective is in a war zone when it comes to Americans, especially in a situation where it's so incredibly murky who is on whose side, because you've got the Shia militias who are fighting ISIS, you've got the Americans who are fighting ISIS, but the Shia militias and the Americans
00:40:49
Speaker
Obviously, they're not allies in the traditional sense. They're not the best of mates, no. They're not the best of mates, no. Well, talk about then, from your experiences on the field, talk a little bit about this kind of weird relationship between the Americans on the battlefield and the Shia militias. Well, the twain never actually came together, right? The Americans
00:41:17
Speaker
the Americans and advisors did work with the regular Iraqi army, especially with some of the so-called special operations forces. So it was sort of a distant lack of trust, right? But at the same time, what's interesting about America is that
00:41:44
Speaker
And I've seen it so many times in so many places that there is a love and hate, right? A lot of these guys, given the opportunity, they would jump at the opportunity to come here to be in America. But at the same time, there is that sense that
00:42:09
Speaker
There is this empathy that has no real understanding of what anything is, the stakes, the situations. I mean, in my new book, A Nearby Country Called Love, I have a passage with this Afghan refugee to Iran, and I've met many of these guys, and he talks about how an American
00:42:37
Speaker
The vehicle in Kabul runs over his son and somebody jumps out of the convoy and for his loss gives him a hundred bucks. There are many reasons why people in the world think one way or another about Americans.
00:43:02
Speaker
So I can't tell you if it was just raw hatred or pretend raw hatred because you see that a lot too. I ran into people.
00:43:15
Speaker
over there who, I don't know, they had, they had come from Canada, the Canadian citizenship, you know, some Iraqi guy from Canada can look at his sons and to just fight ISIS and then go back to Canada and harp in and harp out. You know, like, it was very, it's very, and also, you know, I hung out with the Kurdish, you know, they should have survived, you know, with the Kurds.
00:43:44
Speaker
and the Shiites and the Kurds do not like each other at all. And Ar-Ahan got the Kurds. And even within them, there are different factions, right? There are factions that are supported by Iran. There are factions that are absolutely despised in Iranians. But America is just
00:44:05
Speaker
is this force. It's like, you know, I think of it as this science fiction films, right? It's something that's out there. And I think in the passage I read, probably it gives the feeling better than anything I can come up with off the cuff, is that, you know, you would see them. You would see the Americans.
00:44:29
Speaker
It's as if they're there and they're not quite there, right? You know, the convoy passing in the afternoon. You couldn't even see, like, personnel in these convoys. They're high up, right? And I start feeling, I think, in the world in general, there's a lot of misunderstanding about Americans.
Cultural Duality: Iran and America
00:44:54
Speaker
There's a knee jerk American,
00:44:58
Speaker
a hatred event but it's done in order to again get mileage amongst your own video perhaps but at the end of the day when it comes right down to it for all the mistakes there's a lot of generosity
00:45:19
Speaker
And he talks, Saleh talks about the generosity of the Americans and their occasional stinginess. Like you don't quite, you know, Saleh and then later in the novel when that Frenchman comes and they talk about Americans, even the Frenchman doesn't quite know what to make of Americans even though, you know, his family is there.
00:45:49
Speaker
It really is, it's like an appreciation, but also a turn-off. And I think a lot of the world has that relationship with America, because America just casts such a huge shadow over the world, even today, even when they talk about China and multiplicity of world powers and stuff, but just culturally America.
00:46:16
Speaker
has such a huge shadow, and I see it amongst my own. The intellectuals, the artists, they read, they try to be hip on the latest American authors. They read people, I don't even know who they are. So that just sort of permeates all of our
00:46:42
Speaker
that those geographies, and so what happens is that all of the reactions to the United States are exaggerated or overexaggerated. You know, love is exaggerated, hatred exists exaggerated, and there's quite a bit of acting too, because that acting can actually score points for you. You know, you can be in a situation where if you're short, you know,
00:47:12
Speaker
you're a dislike or despising of America, you will have score points for whatever reason. And you may not quite believe that. So there's all of that. It's very, you know, dealing with America is very, very complicated. They're much more complicated, let's say, than with China or Russia or things like that. There's a much, there's much,
00:47:39
Speaker
far fewer layers than dealing with Americans. Yeah. That's interesting you say that. I'm reminded of when I was right out of college, I went to live in Jordan and there was an Iraqi man, really, really nice guy, friend of a friend who was helping me find an apartment. And every time he would introduce me to somebody,
00:48:03
Speaker
He'd be like, look, I'm an Iraqi and he's an American. Isn't that so funny? And I didn't get it for the longest time. I was like, what is he talking about? And then more like we talked, America invaded and destroyed his country. And to me, in my sheltered Midwestern lifestyle, people had never really thought about Iraqis as the enemy.
00:48:27
Speaker
But in Iraq, Americans were definitely thought of as the enemy. It was such a strange moment for me to have, to put myself in his place. You know exactly the thing I'm talking about. It's a very complicated relationship that people have with America, much more so than I think any other country on earth. I wonder, for you as somebody who lives in both Tehran and New York City,
00:49:00
Speaker
How difficult is that line for you to walk when you're with these Shia militias? Is it complex for you? Absolutely. It's very complex. First of all, you have to sort of bite the bullet, so to speak, and be ready to be absolutely
00:49:30
Speaker
crush or worse, right? Things can happen. Because in these geographies, it's not just about negotiating your American-ness or your Persian-ness, but also within these geographies, there are so many antagonisms and enmities, right? I gave an interview in Tehran last winter, you know, my name, Salar, first name,
00:50:00
Speaker
is a name that many Kurds have, like many Kurds have my name. More Kurds have my name than Persians have my name. So in Iraq, being with Shiite militias, they would often think I'm Kurdish and immediately that would create some sort of a, you know, they would question me and other things happen that I won't get into, but you know. So I was, you know, like I and people like me,
00:50:31
Speaker
walk that fine line all over the time. But particularly between, I think, the United States and Iran, it's been a particularly poignant, acute situation for over four decades now. And I remember when I was a child in Iran,
00:50:54
Speaker
America was such an enormous presence in that country. American military advisors, all of the American arms companies were there. There were American schools. This is obviously pre-1979. Yeah. As a child, I grew up
00:51:20
Speaker
in an ambience where I had contact with him all the time. And then all of that was gone overnight, and it was replaced by this terrible enmity between the two, the hostage crisis and all of that.
00:51:46
Speaker
And I think what happened was the Islamic Republic sort of backed itself into a corner, right? Because America bashing became a point of the revolution, like one of the pillars of the revolution became that long after not many people believed in that anymore.
00:52:11
Speaker
It's like the hijab now. If the hijab is gone, our revolution is finished. The hijab is sort of gone between a lot of women. Everything's fine.
00:52:26
Speaker
That became one of the pillars, like America bashing became a pillar, the flag burning of America. And for people like me, and so after the revolution, so many Persians left, came to America and other countries, Europe, Australia, wherever. And, you know, for those of us who, and many didn't never went back and many go back not very regularly, but I really lived in these places. And for me,
00:52:57
Speaker
It can get sort of lonely because you can feel like you don't belong to either place, but at the same time you deeply belong to both places in many ways.
00:53:13
Speaker
I'm much more comfortable in the United States. I listen to a lot of American music. I know the country western, you know, the classic country western musicians. It's not only my world, but it's my heart, right? And then I go to somewhere like Iran.
00:53:36
Speaker
And I'm driving down the highway, you know, going from one, you know, and I'm listening to, I don't know, to...
00:53:44
Speaker
Hank Williams or something, you know, on these long distances that are very much reminiscent of the Southwest of the United States. And it gets you somewhere, right? It gets you somewhere deep here, and you think, you know, us human beings, it's so easy to actually be brothers and sisters, and it's as easy not to be, right?
00:54:10
Speaker
And then how that translates itself in combat in war is very similar, but it's just all of that is condensed into shorter periods. Like you might know somebody only for a week. And this has happened to me many times. You might be in a situation where you know somebody only for a week in a combat situation, but that person becomes such a huge,
00:54:40
Speaker
reality of your life. You're eating, sleeping, keeping watch, being engaged with the enemy all at the same time. You might not even speak the same language very well.
00:54:57
Speaker
My Arabic is not that great. But once you bid goodbye, or if one of you dies, it takes the heart out of you. I sometimes think, I just wish Americans, Iranians, whoever, they could just be thrown together in these condensed situations. And that's why,
00:55:26
Speaker
when the devil called up the cobble. This fall, this last time around, happened. We saw so many American vets really going out of their way to get their Afghan brethren with whom, you know, they've worked in special operations and stuff out of there
00:55:51
Speaker
There's something to be said about just being with someone, I don't know, in a trench, or knowing that, in a barrack, you know, two feet away, you know, inside or whatever. And, you know, it changes you. And I think when you don't have that, it's easy to... The things I'm saying are very basic. Everyone knows that. But I think what... If there's anything that's positive, it's strange to say about... Or is that...
00:56:20
Speaker
it reminds you of brotherhood or humanhood, I would call it, that it doesn't matter who you are, where you're from. And that's why, again, I go back to saying that, even though I wrote this book, and it's from the vantage point of this Iranian guy, but the people who read me most
00:56:48
Speaker
graciously and generously have all of them have been American veterans of these specific wars. That's so interesting. What's the Iranian veteran experience? I'm curious about it because you do write about some of the characters in your book who show up on the battlefield. Maybe they fought in the Iran-Iraq War,
00:57:12
Speaker
Maybe they have other experience and other conflicts. But just thinking about vets in Iran today, I'm not sure even how to really ask this question, but what's the veteran experience like today in 2023 in Iran? Recently, somebody sent me a short clip of these guys going into battle in the 1980s.
00:57:42
Speaker
And they quoted this guy, this gentleman, who actually he himself was killed. I think he stepped on the line. He created the best documentary of the Iran-Iraq War, like several hours long. And he quotes him saying that so-and-so in that last name was Avi. He says,
00:58:10
Speaker
You guys should, you soldiers of today, you young men, should pray that you become moderate in this war. And the guy asks the soldier, why did so and so say that? And he said, so and so said that because he said, some of you will come out of this war and go
00:58:40
Speaker
You will use your veteran status to your advantage, to become politicians, to get the best deals in business and what. You will forget everything that happened here and you will become corrupt. Some of you will become, some of you will become, some of you will survive this war.
00:59:09
Speaker
and become just terribly depressed and you won't be able to live with everything that happened today.
Veteran Experiences in Iran and the U.S.
00:59:19
Speaker
And therefore, and then there was a third group and you will be sorry about everything that he did and will question everything. So it's better. And when I look at not just a place like Iran, but America itself, I know veterans here,
00:59:37
Speaker
It's the exact same thing, you know, people come out of these wars, some of them, you know, get a lot of, you know, use the points of their veteran status to enter politics or business or whatever, you know, make a lot of money doing this or that, contract work, consultation. You know, I was thinking about that in Ukraine because I ran into this American vet who was doing nothing but good work.
01:00:07
Speaker
Right. He was just a gentleman. He had just gone there to help. And there were others that I saw. You could tell they were consultants and they were, you know, they were there to make money. And, you know, so he takes all of these kinds. I mean, in Iran, as in the United States, it's the exact same thing. And, you know, I know Iranian vets who were gassed
01:00:36
Speaker
There's nothing, to see a man who was gassed, to see the things they have to go through on a daily basis, it's just really, really pretty horrendous. Yeah, and it should be noted for the audience, the Iran-Iraq War
01:00:58
Speaker
was a terrible, I mean, massive loss of life, chemical weapons were used, mustard gas, VX nerve gas, really just like a terribly brutal conflict that like you were saying in Iran today, a lot of veterans still live with. Exactly. And I have friends who are veterans of that war and some of them are exactly like this person said, some of them are just depressed and
01:01:29
Speaker
not, you know, very healthy in many ways. Some of them, you know, are in government, kidding, but they camp out of their status. And sometimes I want to ask them, you know, when exactly, what was the, what was the exact day that you sold out? You know, what, what was the day you went from being, you know, a soldier fighting for a country to some, yeah. And some of them,
01:01:56
Speaker
There are these two, some of them will tell you that. I have a friend who will say that the day the war ended, our whole
01:02:05
Speaker
you know our whole platoon or whatever we started crying and we didn't want the war to end and our commander said you idiots you know like if if uh if you like war so much let me divide you in two and you can fight each other yeah the thing that always gives me pause about
01:02:33
Speaker
I've seen people write about war or talk about war. And I knew right away they didn't really know what they were talking about. They've never been in those places. And anytime somebody will tell you a person will, people will come out of the exact same situation with the same baggage, they're wrong.
01:02:59
Speaker
You know, I talk about it in Salah, talks about it out of Mesopotamia. You know, in America a lot of people talk about PTSD, and I've seen PTSD in the Middle East. But I've also seen men, as Salah says in the book, I've seen men, nothing touches them. Nothing. Nothing you could do touches them. They're just, and they're not robots. They're not, they're not,
01:03:28
Speaker
devoid of feeling, but it just like, they shrug it off. And that's an interesting phenomenon to me. I don't have an answer why one person acts one way or one person acts another way, but to think about war is that people just come out of it differently.
Emotional Complexities of War
01:03:52
Speaker
The way people come out of any situation differently, right?
01:03:57
Speaker
Yeah. Well, what are you hoping that when readers, when they read your book, what are you hoping that readers take away from it? I think, you know, I obviously, I had read many, many of the American war writers of the past and I quote them at some land, whether it's Hemingway or
01:04:24
Speaker
the great Vietnam War writer whose name Tim O'Brien. I quote these people through solace because I want my audience to know that there's a respect there. I think I want the same respect in return. I want an American audience, a Western audience to come
01:04:54
Speaker
to come to this book, able or ready to go into these lives and see them beyond the headlines, beyond the cliches of this, this, or that guy, or this guy, or this. I mean, in the book, I have a woman based on a true person,
01:05:20
Speaker
who goes around cutting off heads of ISIS enemy combatants, right? That person really existed. But I don't condone that. But I try to show through Salah how a person could get to that point. And I think the job of a writer is to show these complexities.
01:05:48
Speaker
If evil is done, if goodness is done, why does, how does that happen? Why does that happen? How does a woman who's, you know, like I've told this story a couple of times before to people, I was in Iraqi Kurdistan and I was talking to a,
01:06:14
Speaker
like the only therapists, Kurdish therapists who existed for this camp, right? And he said, you know, Mr. Saleh, what can I tell a woman who, and they were talking about what ISIS did to them, what can I tell a woman whose husband has been killed?
01:06:45
Speaker
is right in front of her, she herself, right? Like what kind of therapy can I give this person? Is such a thing even possible? And of course the answer to me is no, it's not. There's a point beyond which
01:07:01
Speaker
that level of brutality and suffering, and you see it so much in some of these places, it's just that there's no return point. So I think in this book, one of the things I was trying to say is that there are people who do really, really
01:07:25
Speaker
where they catch this young ISIS guy from North Africa. And Saleh talks about how they kind of brutalize them before they kill them.
01:07:41
Speaker
He doesn't condone that at all, and he actually suffers for it, but then quickly he puts that suffering away and goes on, because revenge is a real thing, it's a real feeling, and if you're in those situations, and again, Saleh talks about it, like we had gotten our butts kicked by these guys, they were like outside of the gates of Samara, and we had to hold them off,
01:08:10
Speaker
We were ashamed, we were beaten, and then once we started to fight back and chase them, the feeling was like we were hunters, and they were praying, and we loved it. And you have to be truthful about that. Sometimes that exhilaration of
01:08:32
Speaker
revenge, you know, you feel it in your bones.
Preview of New Novel
01:08:35
Speaker
And not every single person, soldier feels it. Not every single soldier is proud of it. Most of them are ashamed of it afterwards. But when it happens, it's a reality. And for people who are not there, weren't there, and didn't live through that,
01:08:56
Speaker
to judge these people, whether they're American soldiers or whoever. I think it's kind of unfair. I think it's kind of unfair. Well, Solara, this has been an incredible interview. We didn't get to so much. I had a lot of questions about H, about the interrogator, who I thought was a very fascinating character in your book. We can do a part two next time. What's that? We can do a part two next time. Yeah, we'll have to do a part two.
01:09:27
Speaker
Well, thank you so much again for coming on. If you wouldn't mind just lastly here, you've got a new novel coming out in November. Could you give our audience a little teaser for that novel? Sure. After Adam and myself attended, I thought I need to get away from war for a little while. And I started to, COVID happened and there wasn't much
01:09:57
Speaker
to do. And I started writing this book and I had really become thoughtful and concerned about the situation of women and
01:10:11
Speaker
And people in Iran who do not follow the standard, sexual, whatever, standards that are imposed on them in that country and many other places. And I knew some of these people. And I thought, I have to start, you know, I have to, I owe it to myself and also
01:10:38
Speaker
to the act of writing, I guess, to actually do a little bit of research and find out.
01:10:47
Speaker
more about these lives. And so I spent quite a bit of time in the LGBTQ community with them. I made the connections and they were gracious enough to take me into their lives. It was a very different world than out of Mesopotamia. But at the same time, it had many similarities because I realized that
01:11:14
Speaker
You know, we fight many fights in this life, right? We fight many fights. They're not always the ones that are the most obvious between countries and governments and geographies. But, you know, you have people in Iran and other places who are under the gun every day of their lives. You know, the lives of women. It doesn't mean women are in a state of constant suffering in Iran.
01:11:45
Speaker
They have to do a lot more to get by on a daily basis. Or if you're, let's say, a person of the LGBTQ community, you have to, the psychology and just the complexities. And I wanted to understand that. And I wanted to write about it. And it also came from a personal place because I'd experienced, in my own family,
01:12:15
Speaker
And that's what I did. But most importantly, I wanted to write about all of this is to say I wanted to write it from like a man's point of view, a person like me who sort of
01:12:35
Speaker
comes to this new paradigm we live in in the world where things are changing between, you know, whether it's sexual identity and whatever, and how does a person like me actually deals with that? Basically the novel in one sentence is learning how to be a man, right?
01:12:58
Speaker
And again, the person, he's had military experience this time in other places. So there's a little bit of that. And then once the women's movement began last fall in Iran, when my book was finished and in the process of being prepared for publication before
Conclusion and Gratitude
01:13:26
Speaker
all of that.
01:13:31
Speaker
sort of in the air, and then it just suddenly happened. And so it was an interesting parallel to see how that's taking place. And that will be coming out in November.
01:13:48
Speaker
Great. Well, Solar Abdo, out of Mesopotamia, go pick up a copy, go check it out from your library. What an incredible story. And Solar, thank you, thank you, thank you for joining me here today. Thank you very much. I hope your podcast was great and gathers millions and billions of people. Thank you. Thank you.