Syriacide

By Michael Mulvihill

A fleet of SUVs park outside an abandoned apartment block in the besieged Aleppo, off loading groups of ISIL terrorists who storm a building. No one is there, except one man, the Syriacide blogger, and treacherous, blood thirsty and merciless killers.
He is desperate to escape, as he tries to save himself from live gun battles. But how to do this is poses the greatest challenge of his life?

“Syracide is a book that focuses more on building tension than on prose, and drags the reader on a ride that doesn't ease up until the very end. We start with the immolation of a holy man and the violence only escalates from there. Written in a very real and journalistic style, Mulvihill takes us on a trip through a hell that feels all the more real for the direct and simple style that he writes in. The prose reminds me of Crane or Thomas Harris, straightforward and without frills. Yet it is this home brewed style that makes the horror palpable, and gives life to scenes of almost utter depravity.

The story functions as the blogged notes of an unnamed writer who is living in Syria and watching the deterioration of Aleppo into religious anarchy and politically motivated violence. We see everything from the writer's perspective, which alternates between journalistic aloofness and existential ponderings about the nature of suffering and evil. Our narrator documents the demolishing of Aleppo, all while dodging insurgents and burying the bodies of loved ones in a futile attempt to inject some dignity into the chaos. The plot is very bare, and focuses on our narrator's attempts to record how the lives of his friends and family are affected by the disintegration of order in the middle east. Interviews and slice-of-life meanderings give way to extremely intense scenes of violence and horror as everything descends into madness, eventually forcing the narrator to leave the middle east altogether.

Mulvihill has captured something very real here, something that is both human and exceedingly horrific. This book is less of a story in the traditional sense, and more a wake-up call to the west about what its imperialistic tendencies and interference in foreign affairs have wrought. None of us is as civilized as we think we are, and the reality of social decay is always just around the corner. Overall, I think those who can stomach the violence and engage with the book's break-neck pace will find some real gems in the narrative."
Andrew Hodges Horror Novelist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Mulvihill
• Release date: Aug 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005258290

Book preview

Syriacide

Novel by Michael Mulvihill

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CONTENTS

1. Self Immolation

2. Urban Warfare

3. Clean Up

4. AZ

5. Discovery

6. The Group

7. Blacksmith's Hand Powered Generator

8. Brutalism

9. Nime

10. Poetess of Ar Raqqah

11. Dig

12. Dark Rooms

13. Dripping

14. Corpse

15. Bin

16. Institution

17 Therapy 1

18. Rise

19. Meeting The Dead

20. As Normal

1. Self Immolation

Outside the hospital, my friend Ehab watched the Syrian flag wave from its pole. By the exit from the hospital, the nurse, dressed in blue scrubs, examined all of Ehab’s belongings, making sure that everything he had presented to the hospital were returned to him. She also went through his books; a Quran, a Hadith, a Bible, a Torah, a Talmud, one Orthodox Christian prayer book, a copy of the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, and one material on the basics of Zen Buddhism and Hinduism. He did not know exactly which was the correct version of how humans were created or what happens after death, but did believe in God. He believed God was omnipotent, omnipresent, all-merciful, all-wise, all-compassionate, all-loving, all-forgiving, in complete contrast to the humans that he created. Religious and softhearted, Ehab detested violence. He had enough of it in his former life to conclude that violence is not what a human being is made for. If life became so worthless that war was considered its normal state, why live?

God, so loving and kind, wishes us well. We have made this world sick with hatred, he told the nurse, who smiled back at him, and handed him a slip of paper to sign.

He looked at her sadly. She was beautiful. She did not know the road ahead. Ehab did, and he, in no way wished to reveal his visions. Having been hospitalized for blood pressure, he did not want to be kept there because if they knew him better he feared they would think he was crazy. Nobody believes in predicted devastation until it is upon them.

Released from the hospital, he returned to his apartment in a complex that I managed since aged 18 when I did the dual function of studying Psychiatry and working here to make ends meet. Yes, I am a qualified Psychiatrist. No, I have no present day paid work in Psychiatry. I am stuck in a siege, and war has ruined my lifetime ambition to simply be a mental health care worker. Now, how I survive, is the very theme of my blog and this book, is how I dip into the stories and lives of those people I encounter on my journey through this war.

Once home, Ehab boiled water in a kettle for coffee while listening to music. The view from his kitchen window showed him the old city he knew all his life.

He kept his journal in his apartment, and, after his passing, when I had to clear out his apartment, I paused from duties, sat on the floor, and read every single word of it from start to end in one sitting. I found his testimony horrifying. He wrote about events which have now happened and others which I do not want to happen but expect will.

I am not sure if the man was as mad as his means of protest made him appear. He was erudite, his space full of books. He had writings displaying intense interest in Philosophy, Politics, and History. His big question was: What does it mean to be a Syrian now? He embraced cultural diversity, but foresaw a war wherein people used diversity as a catalyst for division and mass murder.

The Ehab I knew for fifteen years had always worked selling goods in markets that had been around for years. In his writings he predicted they would be destroyed. He kept asking how people like him could then eke out a living? When his business went belly-up, he did not wait around to see.

A week after his release from the hospital, he woke up one morning and decided to walk the streets as a prophet of an undeclared (although rumored) war. Dissatisfaction had been the status quo for decades; nobody really thought this could result in homegrown conflict. Would any normal person agree that killing was the answer to our differences? Despite the flaws of the state, no one would have desired a resolution by conflagration.

Ehab was so perturbed by his visions that madness overcame him. He was besieged by images of what he believed to be the apocalypse. Any witness to the destruction here will agree these are apocalyptic scenes.

Tormented, he sought a holy end. How could God condemn him, if his created world was being perverted by humanity? God should understand Ehab’s profound need to simply withdraw from life when there was nowhere left to go. God would know why my friend had to make a decision that rejected a world conquered by hell.

That fatal day I saw him dressed in a white shirt, which I noticed was blood stained. He was screaming and roaring at the top of his lungs. He was in the florid state of psychosis, and I was afraid of what he would do next. For a man that was so strung out and insane, his rage and his utterances felt poetic and sensible.

Fools, he said, as he paraded down the roads that would become terrors dividing lines, why allow greed and madness to win? You sell your souls and violate peace when you let hatred dictate the terms! This was his analysis of what was behind the coming strife. On the eve of a dying state, his was the dirge over the slaughter of freedom.

Evildoers! he cried in accusation. He shouted at skies that would be filled with air support where warring factions would meet to destroy the city. You shake me to my core. I am not cold or indifferent to your intentions. Hear, my objection, to your tyranny.

Exhausted and delirious, Ehab talked to the buildings he knew would fall. He hugged walls that would soon be rubble, those who built and maintained them lying crushed beneath, along with their children. After hugging the walls, he listened to the birds sweetly sing. They would not draw out the bombs and guns that put them to flight. He heard their songs only as laments for those dying. Knowing the terror that lay in store tormented his soul.

The attacks would be described by a UN official as a crime of historic proportions: citizens annihilated on land, sea, and sky. Rescuers, like the heroic firefighters, also targeted, many killed while trying to rescue people buried under rubble.

He must have heard those future heartbreaking shrieks of pain and panic.

My late friend could have shared the same message with many a Syrian cities, whose people danced and dined, shopped in stores, worked and studied, played and prayed. He could have told them that this haven was doomed, but who would have listened?

To make his point, Ehab chose what he thought was the best option. I saw him pour what I now know was petrol over himself.

I was no hero in this situation. Human beings most of all want their own continuation. Even though I was across the road from him, when I saw flames engulfing his body, my instinct was not to go over to him and try and put them out. My instinct was to save myself and pray he would not approach me. I was afraid I too would be set in flames. At this stage I still had a hope there was a future for Syria.

Before he set himself alight, I remembered how he hugged the still- standing buildings and walls. Who else knew that they would soon be shattered, blood pouring from debris enveloped in the reek of decaying corpses? Nothing would ever be the same.

Walls have ears, he told the wall as petrol dripped from his body onto cement. Bear witness of my visions of the coming catastrophe so absorb my mind, that I have sought release.

The walls were mute, unable to testify to a future that would bring them down.

Oh, come-on, he said, do you really think even walls can survive evil?

Sighing, he looked up at the sky, lit a match, and burned to death.

I imagine that as he burned, his cries of anguish joined the future wails of babies, and adults begging for mercy. His eyes sizzled but could not burn away what he had seen within and written down—violent waves drowning the survivors of human cruelty along with the so-called victors in war. He had seen too much, not only the discontent that would bring down stability, but the indifference of humans to their own home.

When Ehab became ashes, the rest of us were just beginning to catch fire. How the self-immolator must have suffered in knowing that even holy places would be blown up. The wave of this social media-fueled revolution, was rising in a restless tide; dissenters’ demands breed waves of war and states fragment like shells shattered on a beach. In his written dreams, he became a bird taking one last look at his nest before his tree was cut down. Seen on the self-immolator’s body before he burned, was the state flag; possibly a statement of where Arab Unity was and a fitting symbol for the coming destruction by the fires of war of the souls living there. His death cry were but the first of millions.

I can tell you this and more from my home here in Syria, which plays host to propaganda films, murder, torture, and rape; even hospitals are bombed. Any civilian can be taken to the slaughter. Occupied territories are turned into slave markets. Diverse ethnicities are purged in the name of population control. Here, the light of hope has been extinguished.

Scholars apply terms like genocide, ethnic cleansing, and cultural cleansing to this conflict, but who were the true instigators? They are dealers in powerful, technological weaponry, ideological cancer, extremism, terrorism, hatred, murder-for-hire, and mind control. These expertly stoked the flames. Surely, years of oppression from social vices, hurt the poor and the crumbling middle class, but no one of sober mind expected a mass grave.

The evil eye came to this region. Calling several factions part of an axis of evil; eagle claws were sharpened. International, powers were ready to pounce a predator with no compassion, merely objectives to realize.

The outside world could not leave Syria alone. Its internal affairs were meddled with. The crisis here is an international experiment. We are the pawn and violence, the instrument. Humans love to assume power over life and death and assert their power, by killing each other. These are the proxy wars of vicious fantasies, creating warnings, to the discontented of the world, of what superior weapons can do.

Death is not at fault just because he stands on the roof of your house, or sits at your fireplace warming what can never warm. No, there is always something conjured up by the unapologetic psychopath, who claims like the bureaucratic Nazis of yore, to just be following orders.

Death has been following orders since time began. This war has certainly been no exception. But it is the demons under Lord Keres, God of Violent Death, who now call the shots. Although the greyness of neutrality is ugly, Death’s position has remained stuck there since arriving to lay ultimate claim.

I studied pictures of the state before this war and viewed normality. Looking at those