Fate of Arab volunteers still unknown after end of hostilities

‘If my son is dead, I want to know for sure. I want to know that someone prayed over him when he was buried’

Daily Star staff

Fawziah Khodr is still waiting for her son to return from Iraq.
She has already been to Syria, where she spoke to dozens of “Arab volunteer” survivors who told her they haven’t seen him.
Last week, she tried to cross the Syrian border into Iraq but couldn’t because she doesn’t have a passport and because the border was closed. She now has a passport the cost of which she could hardly afford, and is impatiently waiting for the border to open.

The truth is, Omar Khodr will not return home, and his mother will never find him even if she reaches Iraq. He was killed in battle, as verified by his cousin who watched him die.
When Fawziah first heard the news she believed, but when a local sheikh claiming spiritual powers visited her at her home and told her he had journeyed in spirit to all the graves in Iraq, and that he couldn’t find her son anywhere, Fawziah didn’t know what to think any more.

“If my son is dead, I want to know for sure. I want to know that someone prayed over him when he was buried, I want to know he is not being tortured, that he wasn’t taken hostage and that he is not wounded in some hospital … I want to tell him I forgive him though he lied to me. I forgive him … I pray for him all the time and I want him to know that,” she said as she cried in the backyard of her small house in a remote village in the mountains of North Lebanon.

“I am not saying anything against religion, I am a believer, but he is my son, he is my son, and I can’t help it,” she shouted, when her devastated husband told her with a broken voice, to “stop, and to remember that our son died fighting in the name of God.”
“I am not sad. My son chose this road, and now he is dead. I am proud of him,” Abu Omar said with tears welling up in
his eyes.

“If only I knew he was going, I would have stopped him, I wouldn’t have let him, I would have locked him in, I would have begged him … but I didn’t know,” Fawziah went on.
But according to his friends, nothing could have stopped Omar from going. Like many of the Arab volunteers who went to Iraq, he was determined to fight in fulfillment of jihad or the duty on all Muslims to fight back infidels when they are attacked.
There are still no official numbers on how many people answered the call from Lebanon, or how many were killed for that matter. Figures vary from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand.
According to Maan Bashour, the president of the Gathering of Popular Committees and Leagues, the only official authority that can determine the number of volunteers to Iraq is the Iraqi embassy, which was shut down in the aftermath of the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime. However, Bashour said he believes the number to range “in the hundreds and not in the thousands.”
What makes it difficult to determine a figure is that many volunteers didn’t have passports and crossed borders illegally after “bribing” their way for information on unguarded sections of the borders.

The fact remains that since the end of Iraqi war, dozens of Lebanese have returned and they speak of “hundreds of thousands of Arab volunteers” fighting in different parts of Iraq.
Ahmed Saghir, 19, the cousin who witnessed the death of Khodr, said there had been treason by some Iraqis and that “Arabs” were left alone with few weapons to fight against the invading American tanks.

“The Iraqis were the first to flee. They didn’t fight. They left us alone and some were even tipping off the Americans on our whereabouts,” Saghir said.

Weeks after returning to Lebanon, Saghir still finds it difficult to talk of the death of his cousin in what he named “the battle of the bridge,” near Baghdad’s international airport.

Saghir said they were in the same bunker when Khodr jumped out to throw a grenade at a tank. According to Saghir, Khodr was instantly hit.

“I saw him falling on a wire and struggling for a little while before falling into another bunker,” he said. He said he couldn’t check on his cousin for a couple of hours because of intense bombing. “He was already dead when I reached him,” he said. Saghir stayed with him in the same bunker for another six hours before he could escape.

Looking back at it his experience, Saghir said he doesn’t regret having gone to war and that he would do it again, “for the sake of the Arab nation.”

“Not going was not an option. How could we not go when we all saw those pictures of kids dying?,” he asked.

Yes, he misses his cousin, who was also his friend and mentor, but then he is happy that he died believing that the war could be won, Saghir said.

Omar Sabra, another surviving volunteer, agreed with Sagheer, saying: “I was 100 percent sure I wanted to go, I thought it would be jihad, and that is the duty of every Muslim.”

Names in the above story have been changed at the request of those involved

Some jihadis are just more reticent than others. P.T. Barnum's dictum would have to be revised in the "Arab" world- over there, suckers are being born every second.

“The Iraqis were the first to flee. They didn’t fight. They left us alone and some were even tipping off the Americans on our whereabouts,” Saghir said.

he would do it again, “for the sake of the Arab nation.”

Nitwit.

There never has been and never will be "an Arab nation."

Cripes, you can't even erect a Lebanese nation or an Iranian nation without turning it into a despotic and murderous hellhole.

Fawziah Khodr is still waiting for her son to return from Iraq.

I feel sorry for her, but when you stick you nose into other peoples business, things happen.

“Not going was not an option. How could we not go when we all saw those pictures of kids dying?,” he asked.

Perhaps a better question is why was the terror of Saddam ignored by the Arab world? Why was "not doing something about that not an option."

Perhaps Omar's mother, while looking for her son's body, could assist the countless Iraqi families looking for their dead relatives killed by Saddam. Better yet if the cousin of the late Omar would help dig up dead Iraqis for their families, and he might understand why they wouldn't fight for Saddam. But then, that would be presuming that cousin Saghir is capable of rational analysis, adding 1+1=2 for instance, and rationality cannot be expected of so-called Jihadies.

The dead jihadists equalled " ... a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand."

Not to rub salt in the mother's grief, but this is a good, good thing. These hundreds of Islamic fanaticists are now dead, dead, dead, and henceforth shall no longer trouble us. And the hundreds or thousands that escaped back to their non-Iraq homes have had their spirits crushed.

I hope they question their faith. At the very least, I hope it pains them to their bones that "Allah" does not hear them.

Sagheer, saying: “I was 100 percent sure I wanted to go, I thought it would be jihad, and that is the duty of every Muslim.”

The religion of peace.

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