Fatih Abdulsalam Setback of the Century

Annotation

Three months after the US war on Iraq in 2003, I decided to travel to my home town, Mosul in northern Iraq just to embrace my family members and close friends . While I was walking around Mosul streets seeking what has been left of my childhood, a US patrol stopped me to ask : "Where are you from? Why are you here?" Immediately, I burst out into laughter. The soldier turned to a sergeant next to him and wondered: "Is he mad?" Then, he angrily asked, "Why are you laughing?" That laughter soon turned into a philosophical question. "Imagine yourself in my place, what would you answer?. The soldier got more upset while the outrage was raging me. In the evening of the same day, I heard in the news, that a US patrol was hit in an explosion in the same street. The image of the 20-year-old soldier immediately flashed up in my mind to tell me: I wish I had an answer from that soldier to my question. This is how I came to write this book in an attempt to outline a wider scene of the backgrounds that led to wage that war on Iraq.