This is an incredible story of loss, redemption, triumph and destiny. It is a story of two survivors of a brutal war in the Middle East, and how they met decades later under astonishing and impossible-to-believe circumstances.
Meet Zahed. He was 18 years old when Iraq attacked Iran, sparking one of the bloodiest wars of the 20th century.
Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein forced Najah, and thousands like him, to fight in a war that is estimated to have killed 1.5 million people. Najah left behind a pregnant girlfriend in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the Iranian army enlisted thousands of child soldiers, 95,000 of who were killed during the war. Zahed was just one of these soldiers. He ran away from home and joined the army aged just 13 years.
Zahed’s job as a child soldier was to make mass graves for the Iraqi soldiers killed in battle. After a major attack on a Iraqi bunker, he was tasked with retrieving the corpses.
Venturing deep into the bunker, Zahed found a blood-drenched Najah, crying and begging for mercy. While digging through the Iraqi man’s pockets, the Iranian teenager came across a copy of the Quran. In it, he found a picture of Najah’s girlfriend and his son.
That photo was to change the course of both the soldiers’ lives forever. The young boy decided to save Najah’s life.
Zahed stacked bodies all around Najah, and gave the Iraqi soldier painkillers. For three days, the child looked after his sworn enemy while a battle was raging outside. Eventually Najah was taken to an enemy hospital, and Zahed was captured by Iraqi forces.
After his release, Zahed returned to Iran, only to find that his family had presumed him dead, made a gravestone for him, and moved to a different province. Having nothing left in Iran, he boarded a ship bound for Vancouver, Canada.
In Canada, Zahed was tired, lonely, and severely depressed. So he decided to commit suicide.
He fashioned a noose from a bicycle brake cable and bought a strong length of rope. And as his friends left for the Canada Day fireworks on July 1, 2001, he climbed onto a chair by the window, put his head into the noose, then stepped off the chair.
He’d been hanging for less than a minute when his roommate Akbar came back after forgetting his sunglasses. Zahed was rushed to hospital, where a psychiatrist referred him to the Vancouver Association for the Survivors of Torture (VAST).
In 2000, while Zahed was still recovering from his suicide attempt, Najah was just released from his Iranian prison, after which he moved to Canada to be closer to his brother. Haunted by nightmares, one of his friends made an appointment for him to visit VAST.
Both men had been severely tortured in prison. Zahed was terrorized by his Iraqi jailers who hanged him by his thumbs, broke his fingers and whipped him with green bamboo. Cigarettes were burned into his knuckles. Najah hadn’t fared any better. His dungeon jail was deprived of light, heat and clean water. Prisoners were fed just enough to stay alive. “They turned us into animals,” Najah said.
Both Najah and Zahed ended up going to Vancouver’s VAST… on the same day…
They got talking…
And after a couple of minutes chatting, they discovered they had fought in the same city… and then, Zahed suddenly realized that the Iraqi in front of him was the same man he had saved all those years ago.
Watch the entirety of the incredible NY Times documentary “My Enemy, My Brother” below:
In an improbable twist of fate, these two men, separated by time, distance, and pain, were reunited again in the most extraordinary way imaginable. And they couldn’t believe it.
It was an emotional reunion.
What are the odds?
The two men now regard one another as brothers. And Zahed, who saved Najah’s life all those years ago, is now being helped by the Iraqi man whom he refused to shoot.
Enemies yesterday, best friends today.
A detailed article about Zahed and Najah’s remarkable story can be found on the Macleans website.