THE CHILD SOLDIER

Yussef Bazzi was born in Beirut in 1966. As a young teenager Bazzi joined one of the militia groups fighting in the Lebanese Civil War, which began with sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims but escalated into a regional conflict involving the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Israel, and Syria. Bazzi fled to Africa with a relative four years before the war officially ended in 1990 and went on to work as a journalist in Abu Dhabi and Kuwait. He eventually returned to Lebanon, where he is now a columnist for al-Mustaqbal and the editor of its weekly cultural supplement. Bazzi has also published four collections of poems.

The following narrative is excerpted from Bazzi’s autobiographical Yasser Arafat Looked at Me and Smiled (Diary of a Fighter), which was published in a bilingual (Arabic-English) edition in 2005 and later in French and German editions.

Mahmoud al-Taqi wrote my name down in the ledger and led me to the supply room: boots (rangers), khaki uniform, the zawbaa patch for my shoulder, an ammunition belt with three rounds, and a shiny metal Russian Kalashnikov, its 11cm barrel sawn off. Thus I became, in the summer of 1981, a member of the Central Emergency Forces of the Syrian Progressive Socialist National Party (SSNP) in Beirut. My salary was 600 Lebanese pounds and a pack of cigarettes a day.

“He threw a grenade