May 3rd 2003 the Endbringer wars PBS
Bombs over Baghdad- the arrival of Jinn
Prince Ali- Iraqi parahuman
"I chose the name because I liked the movie Aladdin, this was in the days of Saddam before... before Jinn, after the conquest of the south. I was a kid when I triggered probably what, 13 years old. I managed to avoid Saddam's draft, and the crazies purges. That's what you guys call the fundamentalists. We don't really have that word in arabic, we just called them the crazies and they hated parahumans, tried to kill them."
He stops.
"You had four choices in the middle east, sign up with the government, get killed by some psycho who had read the Quran while high on something, become a villain or go into hiding. There's a reason why the middle east got so secular after the war, after the collapse. We got real tired of the crazies. So back to the topic at hand, we get the warning that an Endbringer is going to attack Baghdad in three days. The world offers to come in and help, yah know."
He sighs.
"Saddam... the fucktard, I know english loan word but it fits so I use it, decides we can handle this ourselves, I mean the chinese could do it so surely the glorious Iraqi government can handle this. The UN demands observers so that there won't be another West bank. We were insulted by that, we had our issues but we were nowhere near as fucking stupid as the palestinians were."
He lights a cigarette.
"But they just said everyone has to follow the new rules and pointed out that the americans, the brits, everyone else was following them. We know you're not as stupid, but Hamas ruined it for everyone because they were fucktards. And yes I curse a lot, I watch a lot of western media and have picked up bad habbits. So Saddam agrees you can have your cameras or whatever and watch our glorious victory."
A deep drag on his cigarette.
"The Winged Bitch, she had wreaked our oilwells, so economy's not doing so well, we didn't know what the new Endbringer was capable of, not even Ironwood, apparentely this was a brand new monster. But London had just won a victory and we were overconfident, we didn't even evacuate the city. Saddam just took his entire army, all of his parahumans and got ready for a fight."
Another drag on his cigarette.
"It was a slaughter, Jinn could control the air, create tornado's, create explosions by manipulating the air. We fought with everything we had, I even came out to fight and used what weapons I could make out of scrap, and when it was over the army was dead, Saddam and his family was dead, the government was dead and most of the city was dead."
He puts out his cigarette in an ashtray.
"The kurds revolted within the week, with most of our army slaughtered by Jinn we didn't have a choice but to let them go, they were the lucky ones, after that the country went into a violent civil war, the UN didn't intervene, they had bigger problems to deal with and they didn't need our oil anymore."
He leans back into his chair.
"Once you got out of Kurdistan you had city states and warring tribes. What was left of Baghdad was split between warring gangs. For a young punk Tinker like myself it was scary, it was terrfying. Some people tried to become refugees inEeurope but by then the European union had been taken over by the far right and middle eastern refugees were not welcome. They didn't bother being nice about it, some crazy had blown something up so they just used their machine guns.
The whole world was like this, everything was collasping, so I go to the surviving embassies and beg for help and the americans mention that though they can't let me into the US, they had a space program. I mentioned that I was a Tinker, showed my stuff and got my parents to Seattle. I ended up working as a miner in the Belt, my parents did whatever they asked of us. It was a hard life but it beat being killed by one of the crazies or something else. I don't think it really hit us, the arab people just how serious the war was until Mecca. Unfortunately that's what it took for us to get our heads out of our asses."