The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 are a declaration of war destined to change the face of the planet forever as humanity is entering the new Millennium, dazzled by the chimeras of a pushed globalization and the triumph of the liberal model. Even that declaration of war is global, so much so that it requires an equally global response, the first real test of strength that is independent of the purely economic-financial mechanisms that dominated the end of the twentieth century. An earthquake of such magnitude as to question the strength of the international community. About ten years after the end of the Cold War, the United States is rediscovering the role of world political leader in this new effort against the “bad guys” of the planet. But the US is no longer the same, neither is the world. The space-time coordinates that regulate earthly life are calculated with very different units of measurement, much more dynamic and fluid. It is the challenge within the challenge.
A couple of months before 11 September 2001, Francesco Semprini decides to go to New York to study and pursue his “American dream”. He lives live the tragic events of that mild Tuesday in late summer, before which he does not fall back by reversing towards Italy and returning to his Rome. Rather, he decides to stay in the United States, developing the conviction of becoming a modern storyteller. His path and that of America first proceed in parallel, overlapping and intertwining in a double thread over the last twenty years.
“Twenty. The New American Century: twenty years of war and peace in the chronicles of an Italian journalist “is the narrative of the America of the 21st century and its planetary projection, twenty years of war and peace chronicles observed through the eyes of an Italian journalist and told in the double role of citizen and observer. A sequence of shots and dispatches that trace the main events of the last two decades, amplified in the different dimensions of multimedia. Pure stories that leave the reader the space to judge by giving them appropriate tools for criticism. And with the sacred awareness of a narrative mainly live, without filters or privileges except that of the opportunity to have always remained as close as possible to the facts.
The book has a preface by Federico Rampini and an afterword by Alberto Simoni.
We publish a passage from the volume.
Dispatches from the front: The martyr city and the fighters of Christ
Northern Iraq, June 2014
The madness of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi takes shape day after day in a ruthless way even in northern Iraq, in Sinjar, the martyr city. Nestled in the mountains on the border with Syria, this is where the Yazidis live, a religious minority inspired by Zoroastrianism, a people of 700,000 souls, ethnically close to the Kurds and settled mainly in the province of Niniveh, around Lalish, to the north. east of Mosul, their main sacred place which houses the tomb of Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir. Every day they look up waiting for the American helicopters, the “angels of heaven” that launch aid, to provide for their survival. Angels like the seven angels they adore and who sometimes incarnate into men, the most important of which is Tawsi Melek or Melek Taus, the “Peacock Angel”.
Sunni Islam has condemned them for centuries as “devil worshipers”, since the other name of Melek Taus, Shaytan, is the same that the Koran uses to indicate Satan. They have always been persecuted: the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, the fearsome Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, known as the butcher, killed many during the American occupation, and subsequently, on August 14, 2007, a series of kamikaze attacks in Sinjar caused the deaths of over 700 people, most of them Yazidis. On September 3 of the same year, American forces killed the person responsible for that gesture, Abu Mohammed al-Afri. The advance of the Islamic State led at least 40,000 Yazidis to abandon the cities of Zumar and Sinjar. Sunni extremists killed about 500 men in the first days of occupation alone, and kidnapped an equivalent number of women to make slaves of the Caliph. Marzio Babille, head of Unicef in Iraq, knows them well, who defied the threat of Isis and was the first to lead an aid convoy to Sinjar in the very first days of July 2014, isolated after the offensive in early summer.
That Yazidi is another cruelty that adds to those committed by the men of the Caliph in the Sunni belly of a drifting Iraq. In Auja, Saddam Hussein’s native village south of Tikrit, the mausoleum of the former Rais was also targeted and damaged during the clashes, but his body was moved to an unspecified location before the fighting. In support of the activities of the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Shiite premier, Nuri al-Maliki, guarantees the coverage of the airspace in the conflict zones. But the “warriors who face death” are exhausted by such prolonged and bloody clashes, so much so that fighters from Syria and Turkey arrive in support of them. Kurdish forces put aside the rivalries between the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the Democratic Union Party representing the Syrian Kurds (PYD) and the Turkish Kurds of the Workers’ Party (PKK), which has characterized their relations over the months passed with repercussions also on the military stability of the formations committed against the Islamists. The goal is to create a united front to which the Christian fighters gathered under the acronym “Sutoro” adhere, who also include European volunteers among their ranks, in order to create a barrage of forces against the jihadists ready to launch the offensive against East.
It is precisely the “fighters of Christ” operating in northern Iraq that we are going to look for in Ankawa to complete our journey in this anti-jihadist Woodstock. We meet Sabah, who frantically dials phone numbers in an attempt to track down the retreating “brothers” after the latest Caliphate offensive. “What did I tell you? It is a sad day for Christians ”. Sabah Mikhail Barkho Korkis Al Deriki is the head of the HBA, the national union of “Beith Wahren”, “The home of the two rivers”, Tigris and Euphrates, or Mesopotamia. It is a training with a religious (Christian) and an ethnic (Chaldean-Assyrian-Syriac) connotation. A party active in Iraq and headed by the MUB, the “Beith Wahren Council”, which operates under various acronyms through political and military units in Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. And it has points of support in Europe, particularly in Switzerland, where the leaders of the various teams meet periodically to discuss and develop policies and strategies of what are defined as “Christian Fighter”.
“If at the time of the Crusades the Christians had not raised their sword, Islam could have devoured Europe, but then our people decided to defend themselves with weapons”, he tells me using the translation of Don Dani, a Salesian priest who studies at the Crocetta in Turin. The Christian people of the Middle East are the people of martyrdom, we have paid for 2,000 years with our blood – he continues -. And the biggest problem is that this blood is not honored by the rest of the world ”. Sabah’s warrior soul is written in his DNA, his grandfather saw with his own eyes the family being slaughtered in the genocide of Christians by the Turks in 1915 and took refuge in Iraq where he started a new life. He, a university professor, was persecuted by Saddam and those who came after, and says he also feels betrayed by the Americans: “They broke our backs.” So he moved to Jaraman, the Syrian “Little Iraq”, then to Sidney, Australia.
“But I realized that the cause of my people comes before my family – he says -. I returned and I decided to resume the fight ”. The project represented by the initials HBA was born in the 1980s, in the Turkish city of Tor Abdin, and matured in Europe by Syrian exiles who then went underground in the Iraqi mountains. In 2000 the official foundation of the party took place which today has a few thousand supporters and a hundred active militants, more than half under the age of thirty (one third are women). They are present in particular in Qaraqosh and Bertelle, “but we fled from there because of Isis”, he explains. Nothing even the “Civil Guard”, the military arm of the party, could do. But it is not an escape, rather of a retreat in view of the counter-offensive, waiting to regroup the ranks and receive help from the “Sutoro” (security in Syriac), the militias that belong to the “Syrian Syrian Union”, the Syrian soul of the Sabah Party.
There are 300 fighters who fight against Isis and Al Nusra in mixed formations with the Kurds of the Pyd, expression of the PKK in Syria, and have a provisional government in Al Hasakah. Among these are also volunteers from Europe, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, in particular a 25-year-old sergeant of the Swiss army from Locarno, Johan Cosar, a proud warrior and extraordinary leader. I ask some of them if they consider themselves guardians of Christianity and guardians of a faith. “Some bishops call us monks of the people, and this seems more suitable to me”. I insist, what do the monks of the people want? “To form an autonomous government, alongside the Kurdish one and the Baghad executive, where our language is recognized and the life of Christians can be lived in peace”.
“Twenty. The New American Century: Twenty Years of War and Peace in the Chronicles of an Italian Journalist », by Francesco Semprini, preface by Federico Rampini, afterword by Alberto Simoni, 448 pages, price 17 euros, Signs Publishing. Edition enriched with illustrations by Stefano Mazzotti and multimedia contents usable with smartphone or tablet (QR Code). The volume is also an audio book with the passages read by Francesco Semprini.
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