
eanwhile, back in Iraq, life was no easier for Najah. His sister Shamira had gone to the Iraqi border base to greet Najah and bring him home. But she couldn’t pick him out from the other men: Gone was her stocky, square-jawed, confident brother, replaced by this skinny, broken, tiny old man. Only his voice was still familiar.
“The Kurds have a saying,” says their brother Jasem, who lives in suburban Richmond: “If you remove a rock from a mountain, you can never return it; it is lost for eternity. The old Najah is lost forever. There is nothing left of him.”
Najah returned to Basra, but his restaurant was gone. His fiancée was gone. Their son was gone. Then Hussein—one of the most paranoid and savage despots the world has ever produced—ordered the execution of all returning prisoners of war. Of the 120 who returned with Najah, only two survived.
Two years later, in 2001, Najah was smuggled to Vancouver, where he joined his father and two brothers, Jasem and Ali, and made a refugee claim. He started a small moving company. He rebuilds old radios, lawnmowers and cameras, which he sells at flea markets on the weekend. But he still struggles under the weight of his nightmarish memories. Eventually, Jasem convinced him to seek counselling at VAST. That’s how, in early 2001, he ended up sitting across from the man who had saved his life.
When Zahed walked through the door, Najah was thumbing through a pile of dusty magazines.
“I saw his face,” Zahed explains. “I thought to myself, ‘He must be Iranian.’ So I asked him: Are you Iranian?”
“No,” Najed replied in Farsi. “I am Iraqi.”
“But you speak Farsi?”
“I was a prisoner of war in Iran.”
“I was a prisoner of war—in Iraq,” Zahed said, laughing. “Where were you captured?”
“Khorramshahr,” Najah replied.
“Where in Khorramshahr?”
“Please,” said Najah. “I don’t want to talk about it. Just leave me be.”
But a few minutes later, Zahed, an irrepressible type, tried again: “I was in the same operation. What happened to your teeth?”
“An Iranian knocked them out with his rifle.”
Zahed suddenly stared at Najah. He moved closer. “Where did this happen?” he asked.
“In the commander’s trench,” said Najah. “I almost died. But a young boy saved me.”
“You were in a bunker.”
“Yes. Did my brother already tell you this story?” Najah’s brother Ali, also a veteran of the war, had spent time at VAST.
“No,” said Zahed. “Keep going.”
“I had a Quran,” Najah began—
“With a photo of a young woman and a boy inside!” Zahed shouted.
“That boy—that boy was me!”
“I tried to kiss your hand—”
“But I kissed your cheek instead!” Zahed interjected.
By then, the men were standing, facing each other, gripping the other by his shoulder, shouting. The receptionist, certain a brawl was about to break out, was about to call police, when, suddenly, the pair embraced.
“You never told me your name,” said Najah, tears streaming down his face.
“I’m Zahed,” he said.
“I’m Najah.”
“He became my saviour, my angel,” says Zahed. “I was so badly damaged from war, I was about to destroy myself. This time, he saved me.” In that moment, his depression lifted. “It was like a rebirth.”
It took four years, but he was eventually able to bring Maryam and Setayesh to Canada. He spent tens of thousands of dollars on phone cards in the intervening years, listening as his daughter took her first steps and spoke her first words.
Today, he and Najah are closer than brothers. They visit every few days. They’re able to draw out stories from each other no one else can—their closeness the result, perhaps, of shared experience. It is Zahed whom Najah phones at 3 a.m., when he wakes from a vivid dream of his son and can’t sleep. Each is the other’s last tie to a lost history, a buried chapter of life.
Though they fought on opposite sides of the war, in many ways, their lives were lived in parallel: Both were imprisoned by the enemy army, and tortured. Each has struggled to move beyond the damage wrought by war, and to establish himself in this wealthy, rainy, foreign city. “We’re like a finger and nail,” says Zahed, “intricately attached.”
That fateful meeting in Vancouver also filled Najah with a renewed sense of hope: “If my angel is still living, maybe my wife and son are, too,” he says. He’s never remarried, never been able to move on. “I can’t give up. I can’t move on until I know what happened to them.”
Najah’s plight is hardly unique. As many as one million Iraqis are missing, a result of three decades of conflict. But Najah plans to return to Iraq this summer to begin searching for his wife and son—a move his family strongly opposes. After all, a Canadian passport will offer little protection from Iraq’s thuggish security police. And his brothers fear his fiancée’s family may hunt him down: The pair were unable to marry before she gave birth, which may have brought them shame.
Only Zahed, who underwent surgery in Burnaby this week to remove a piece of shrapnel from his neck, supports his friend’s quest. “I know what it feels like to lose everything,” he says. “It eats you.” Zahed, who raises his family in a North Vancouver basement apartment, has struggled to find work as a mechanic; his written English is not strong enough to pass the certification exam required to practise. But he’s planning to give his savings to help Najah in his quest. “It’s my greatest wish in life that he find his family.”
For more on the story of Zahed and Najah, go to CBC Radio Ideas' award-winnning documentary, "Enemies and Angels."