There’s nothing like a good story of destiny, and in a time when three continents are engulfed in war, CBC News brings a story of reunion by two star-crossed soldiers.
The Iran-Iraq War became the longest conventional war of the 20th century and claimed over 1 million casualties, but this inspiring tale of former foes Najah Aboud from one side, and Zahed Haftlang from the other, is unforgettable.
“I didn’t know much about Iran. I knew it was a neighboring country. And that they were people next door to us,” Najah Aboud, an invading soldier from Iraq told CBC’s show Ideas. “We enjoyed their music. They enjoyed ours. They were just like us.”
A conscript assigned to a tank unit, Aboud was told to occupy a bunker in the city of Khorramshahr which the Iraqis had captured. Shortly after he got there, the bunker was cleared out in a massive take-no-prisoners counterattack by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and their militia support, in which Zahed Haftlang was assigned as a medic.
Haftlang was ordered to go into the bunker and treat his wounded countrymen, and that’s where he came upon Aboud, lying with injuries to the head, back, and chest. While each worried that the other might do them violence, it eventually happened that Haftlang found a picture of an infant son and woman in Aboud’s breast pocket: his family.
It was at that moment when the Persian, who couldn’t speak Aboud’s native language of Iraqi Arabic, decided to save him, even against the will of his comrades.
In some cases he had to physically fight his barracks mates off, with one Iranian soldier hitting the prone Aboud’s face with the stock of his rifle. Against all odds, Haftlang got Aboud to a field hospital and asked the attending doctors to treat him—which they didn’t want to do at first.
Even they relented though, and Aboud was successfully saved before being dumped in a POW camp for 17 years. Haftlang visited him one time, but the two men could only communicate with gestures—the kissing of a hand.
The war took everything the two men had. Aboud was eventually released and returned to his home in Basra to find his fiance and his son long gone. Haftlang spiraled into years of depression and violent jobs before jumping ship in Vancouver after getting into a scrap with the Iranian sailors on board.
After a brief stint in homelessness, Haftlang ended up in a halfway house where he would try to commit suicide. But in an incident indicative of fortune, some coworkers came in, rescued the poor Iranian, and recommended he visit a hospital for mental health crises. Haftlang relented.
It was there in the waiting room that Haftlang saw an obviously Middle Eastern fellow about his age come into the same mental hospital. The two opened a conversation, and the Iranian found that the newcomer spoke his language.
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“I was a prisoner of war,” the newcomer replied, explaining how he had come to know Farsi.
“I remember taking an Iraqi to a field hospital. His teeth were broken,” Haftlang recounted to Ideas, before mentioning that he hadn’t finished speaking before he saw that the man’s teeth were in fact broken.
“He’d mentioned that he’d been captured in Khorramshahr. In a bunker. And I asked him, ‘Which bunker, where?’ And then I said to him, ‘Did you keep a photograph of your family in your pocket?’ and he said, ‘Yes, how did you know that?’ And I said, ‘I’m the guy! I’m the soldier who was with you, caring for you!'”
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In the most unbelievable coincidence, the two men had immigrated to the same country, and visited the same hospital on the same day at the same time. Their joy—their hugs and kisses, caused the staff of the mental hospital—who are probably easily triggered by raised voices, to come rushing in, only to burst into tears alongside the former soldiers turned friends after hearing their story.
Without family and without their homes, the two men admitted that their friendship is the most precious thing in the world to them.
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