Invasion Generation: Iraq’s children of war come of age with little hope
BAGHDAD — He was 9 years old and needed a pencil. He ran down the road to a shop on the corner. He knew the neighborhood, the familiar faces; his friend was the shop owner’s son. But what Amir Jewi didn’t know was that the man sitting outside in the car was an Islamic State suicide bomber.
The ground shook, the car was hurled into the air. Shrapnel scythed in all directions, turning the intersection into a tangle of perforated corpses and singed flesh. A placard of a cleric shielded Amir from the blast. He lived. The shop owner’s son didn’t, another child folded into the carnage of a Baghdad afternoon. The blood was washed away, and life went on, as it did time and time again, in the Amin al-Thaniya neighborhood.
Amir recounted the story with little emotion one recent afternoon during class at the Sharqiya Preparatory School for Boys in Baghdad’s Karada neighborhood. The bombing was another episode in the deadly lottery he had always faced; a legacy of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that had defined his life even before it began.
Eighteen years after American soldiers first stepped on Iraqi soil, Jewi and his classmates — members of what’s known here as the “PUBG generation,” a reference to the online battle royale shooting game wildly popular among Iraqi youths — now grapple with a country still shattered by turmoil. Their graduation is months away. They wonder what they’ll amount to, if they’ll ever have
