It had been taken from the control for a remote controlled car that a refugee family had left behind a few weeks earlier. And with that thought still wobbling drunkenly through his head he looked down at the road below him and then at the switch in his hand. It was with that conviction in his heart that he joined the resistance against the Turkish occupation force. The Turkish occupation forces had sent more than a few patrols through the village and while the soldiers were quiet and treated his people with respect, Ahmed knew that so long as they were in his village, Kurdistan could never become a reality. The fighters had scattered, but more than a few had stayed put, looking more for a home than anything else. There they could occupy oil fields and hold them hostage in exchange for ransoms and weapons.
The jihadists had mostly left at that point, leaving the north to do battle with the Turks in the central flatlands. They had made the village an endlessly more diverse place, but even as they arrived and Ahmed began to hear stories of the collapse of what remnants of government had survived the Israeli strikes, there was an undeniable tension in the air, war was coming, and nobody knew who they would be fighting.Ī month later Turkish forces crossed the border and swiftly occupied the nation. They were an eclectic group, made up of all different types, refugees from China and Pakistan, former Soviet soldiers who had deserted during the Soviet Civil War, and Muslims of a hundred different ethnicities and nationalities who had come to answer the call of jihad following the destruction of Mecca. The fighters, though they had perhaps more in common with the jihadists than anyone else, mingled with both groups. They were quiet though, Ahmed liked that about them. As such they segregated themselves fanatically, forbidding much more than casual glances between the groups. They didn’t agree politically or religiously with the more moderate Kurds that they found themselves thrown together with, but a fragile alliance held as they both found a common enemy in the governments that opposed them. The jihadists were different, a mixture of hollow eyed older men who had spent years fighting everywhere from Pakistan to Kazakhstan to the Sinai. They were heading towards Azerbaijan and Turkey, anywhere that was away from the growing chaos in their homelands. The refugees were ragged, desperate families who had mostly been moved along on their way. Those days had been chaotic, and Ahmed had watched as streams of new arrivals came to the village, refugees, jihadists and fighters alike.
Many people in his village had gotten sick from the fallout that had rained down upon them in the days and weeks after the mushroom clouds had faded, but even as they lay and coughed bloody phlegm, the elders had been discussing joining the growing Kurdish led uprisings that were beginning to ripple across the remnants of the Middle East, gathering weapons and recruits alike. He thought about the days, only a few months earlier, when the dreams that his family had held so dear, a united Kurdistan, had been mere abstractions, and how the Israeli atomic campaign had changed all of that. Waiting gave a person plenty of time to think, and though a slow burning sort of stress clouded his thoughts even as the cold made him shiver, he found his thoughts darting to the strangest places as he sat, breath steaming in the air, the very air he was breathing so cold it felt as though he were inhaling shards of glass. He was alone in the hills, high above the kill zone, and he was shivering. It was a cold day, a few sad patches of snow speckled the ground and Ahmed idly wondered how much of it was made up of corpses as he waited for the Turkish convoy to round the corner. This is a continuation of Icarus Falls (An Alternate 1960's)
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