Though we were worlds away, our lives were about to become closer than we imagined. For the next week until the last American troops withdrew, I ducked out of dinners with friends early and stayed awake nights to watch, wait, pray for and communicate with Kareem. Contacts among humanitarian groups promised hour by hour that it would be possible to get him on a plane if we could respond with enough speed.
But slowly the hours elapsed and the flight never materialized. We would need to find another way for this Christian to flee. Kareem is a survivor. He survived the murder of his father and brother, the disappearance of his mother, and the suicide bombing outside Abbey Gate that claimed almost lives, 13 of them U. He survived Taliban patrols making rounds at night outside the airport by sleeping in garbage dumpsters and the feeling of despair when the last American plane left Kabul.
Because his story is emblematic of the entire Afghanistan crisis, I often receive questions about the fate of Kareem. Where is Kareem? The sensitive nature of reporting on rescues in Afghanistan makes this a difficult question to answer. I am not at liberty to give the details of his whereabouts, but in every story from Afghanistan I see the fate of so many Kareems unfolding. In the reports of starving and emaciated children, dying of hunger, I see Kareem.
This winter, according to the Wall Street Journal , Afghanistan will face its worst famine in 35 years. Food and Agriculture Organization, says that roughly 23 of the 38 million population are already facing food insecurity so grave they do not know where their next meal will come from. In Jalalabad last week, unconfirmed reports surfaced of a mass grave of Afghans killed for opposition to the Taliban.
After a boy drowned in the canal, the town drained the water to lay his body to rest. If true, this is yet another horrific chapter for so many Kareems. This week, reports surfaced that the Taliban began a house-to-house operation to make examples of all those who did not have a reason to be in any city where flights leave for foreign lands.
In the early evening of April 30, , Kevin went into the mountains just west of Tucson, to a place on Tumamoc Hill. He took a shotgun with him. Tumamoc was adjacent to Sentinel Peak. There he erected a wall of loose rocks from the hill to conceal himself.
On these hills, Spanish sentinels stood watch centuries before and before them Native Americans, the lookouts of ancient peoples whose names and histories are long since lost.
Perhaps the view reminded him of the deserts of Mesopotamia, where he had defined himself against the evil of his day and fought that evil unto exhaustion. Or perhaps the view reminded him of California, of the childhood he never had and the absence of which he never mourned.
In the valley below was the civilization he fought to protect, a world that had already forgotten ISIS. Beyond the city were mountains and desert, much like the place where he found, for a time, identity and meaning.
Some remnant of that desert lay trapped beneath the highways, office parks, and concrete lots. Whatever his own part in the war against the ISIS caliphate, waged in another desert now far away, that fight was over. And here was desert all around but no more frontier, and no place for him in the civilization below.
He had no hope of healing nor of belonging anywhere. He posted his intentions along with a photo of his view on social media. As Tucson police scrambled to figure out where Kevin was and determine whether the armed veteran was a threat to more than himself, the gunnery sergeant cross-referenced the image Kevin posted to geolocate his position outside Tucson.
A call went out on the internet to help a brother Marine in need. He returned home from work that evening and saw on a Marine Corps message board that another Marine in Tucson was contemplating suicide.
He raced in his truck toward the hills. Rivenbark approached the police checkpoint after sundown and was turned away at the entrance to Sentinel Peak, where Doc had already been searching for hours. Rivenbark looked at the peak opposite Sentinel. The officer gave her assent and Rivenbark scrambled up Tumamoc Hill. At one point, he got within thirty yards of Kevin, though he did not know it. He called out in the darkness.
Can you hear me? The search continued. I hope he knew that people who cared about him were looking for him. Doc heard three shots, Rivenbark heard two. There he lay contorted among the rocks in the darkness for two hours before they found the body of Kevin Howard: Marine, convict, Legionnaire, Syriac militiaman, American, orphan. He lived in abandonment, betrayal, trauma, and violence. He died in much the same way, but not entirely alone. Neither Doc nor Rivenbark slept that night. After the shots, they were escorted down by the police and waited for nearly two hours before the police confirmed that Kevin was dead.
After a few sleepless hours, they returned to Tumamoc Hill and searched for the place where Kevin died. When they finally found it, they saw where his deoxygenated blood had blackened the crimson rocks, part of his skull, part of his brain, and a pair of gloves left behind in the night by the police. As they stood there, the sun rose.
Pitiless time marched on. Rivenbark has the bearing of a Marine, tall and stoic, though this conceals the sense of duty and compassion that brought him here two years before. We make our way up. It takes some time to find the spot but we eventually arrive at the stone alcove. We stand for a long time in silence and look alternately at the ground and the valley below.
The silence is broken only by brief words as the men relive that night in Another lengthy silence is broken as Doc begins to weep. Rivenbark wraps an arm around him. If Kevin had known the harm his suicide would cause, might he have gone back down the mountain?
The memory of his courage on the battlefield is tarnished by this final, irrevocable act of violence, against himself, which harmed his closest friend and his brother Marines, even this stranger who searched for him in that darkness, a darkness not of his making.
He pondered it all again now. Part of his skull on the fucking ground. Now nightmares and fellowship bring him back to this place. A few weeks before we met in Arizona, another young American who fought with him in the SDF died of a drug overdose, by no means the first.
He greets me at the iron gate, gaunt and bearded, with camouflage fatigues loose on his thinned frame. He has aged far beyond the four calendar years since I met him and Kevin in Raqqa.
We enter his house and sit in a cool room illumined only by light from the adjoining kitchen and cracks under the door. In the grey light, it feels like Mesopotamia long before conversation takes us back there. When ISIS is a few hundred meters away, you expect the worst. But here when I hear a firecracker, I panic.
The experience of terror combined with a sense of helplessness often traumatizes, setting the fight-flight-freeze response on a hair trigger in everyday life. Doc finds himself today in a third wasteland, not Mesopotamia or the American frontier but that of the traumatized mind. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. It also becomes the only reality in which the person feels alive. Trauma is not a past event for people like Kevin and Doc, nor millions of others.
It resides and recurs constantly in the mind, where terrifying sensations experienced during the traumatic event replay in an endless loop. Neuroscience suggests that the traumatized brain cannot contextualize the experience by placing it safely in the past. So such people remain trapped in a nightmare from which they cannot escape and perhaps do not wish to awaken, for only in high intensity situations or in the process of re-traumatization do they feel fully present.
The traumatic past thus becomes timeless, a hellish present without end. It is a bitter irony that Kevin and Doc sought in the violent wilderness of Mesopotamia a telos that would deliver them from before into the after, only to arrive in a psychological wasteland where time halted and pain was perpetual.
The relived trauma is stripped of a sense of time or forward progression. The sensations and intensity of the traumatic experience are relived over and over, consciously and unconsciously, amid the light of day.
We are conditioned to think of Hell as a place where torments are inflicted, with the absence of time as only a secondary feature. But the cessation of time can itself be the worst affliction, akin to the absence of reason or hope. Clock time becomes the illusion, the violent experience the present reality. The only way out of this wasteland is to restore context to the experience, to put it in the past and thus restore the temporal flow and with it context and then, perhaps, reason and meaning.
Doc says EMDR helps him. Doc knows that the wilderness he must survive, the human brain, has only begun to be mapped. It is traversed by other survivors, most of whom wander without awareness of the other sojourners. The more we learn, the better hope there is for people like Doc. He finds consolation in the other wanderers, especially military veterans.
He notes that many of them also miss the intensity of a combat zone, particularly the sense of purpose that comes from fighting evil. Perhaps they understood that the war against ISIS was fought primarily not by soldiers of recognized states but by men like Kevin and Doc, soldiers of no nation.
They also understand the struggle ahead will not be against evil on a battlefield but in the mind, against trauma, depression, and despair. The day after his suicide in , I looked at that picture of Kevin Howard from the seventh floor of the State Department and felt as far removed as one could be from the lawless roads of Mesopotamia and the polyglot militias warring on its frontiers.
For the local community, losing part of Old Damascus is like misplacing part of their own soul, their memory and identity. Yet history has shown that despite attempts to destroy Damascus, it has always risen from the ashes, stronger and brighter, powered by the local community. Time and time again, the Damascenes have proven adept at rebuilding their lives and their city in the wake of disaster.
For example, in when Syria was under occupation by the Ottoman empire, the quarter of Bab Tuma in the north-east of the city was ransacked. Over 3, houses, churches and monasteries were comprehensively looted and set ablaze. Hundreds of people were killed and thousands were displaced. The district was rebuilt between and , by local builders who returned after the clash. Elements of the old Bab Tuma were preserved by using traditional materials to create similar urban forms.
Yet innovative features were also added. Again, on October 18, , the city was bombed by the French army in an attempt to quell a revolution against French rule. As a result, the western district — known at that time as Sidi Amoud — was mostly destroyed. Several traditional masterpieces were burned or damaged, and hundreds of lives were lost. The district was remodelled in by the French, this time according to modern European characteristics.
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