PeteFree.comJane Araf’s Short Account of Journalist Yasser Faisal’s Death in Syria’s Civil War — Says Something Profound about Fate and the Frequent Irrelevance of Courage and Human Will — You May Not Agree with Her Implied Conclusion, but Then — You Probably Haven’t Lived It, Have You?
© 2013 Peter Free
14 December 2013
Citation
Jane Araf, A fate met in a battle still unfolding, Al Jazeera English (09 December 2013)
A piece of exquisite writing — again from Al Jazeera . . .
. . . whose editors apparently do not believe in the butt-warm pap that the American media consistently oozes:
In the last photo we have of him alive, Yasser looks up into the horizon as if contemplating a bright future ahead of him. Behind him, on a red dirt road, is an abandoned Syrian village and endless sky.
He'd left Baghdad at the end of November on a flight to Turkey with a new camera, new clothes and boundless confidence. If he'd told his family or friends he was crossing over into Syria they would have tried to stop him.
Once across the Turkish border, a Syrian journalist took him into Idlib province and warned him not to go any further.
"I told him this is not like Iraq – this is a whole other story," says Muhanad Dhugeim who took the photos of Yasser before they parted ways.
"He said he could handle it."
Yasser was buried in Fallujah, the city he loved, next to Shiekh Khalid al-Jumaily, a leader of the protest movement who was assassinated in Fallujah two weeks ago.
A sign at the cemetery reads that 1,200 bodies from the battles of Fallujah in 2004, still unidentified, are buried there. Yasser survived those battles and all the ones that followed.
They believe in fate here. Yasser travelled to meet his in a battle still unfolding.
© 2013 Jane Araf, A fate met in a battle still unfolding, Al Jazeera English (09 December 2013) (extracts)
The moral? — Insha’Allah
As God wills.
Regarding battle, it is difficult not to see this as true. Unless we are stay wrapped in ego and self-protective denial.