Retour à Babylone

Riad Hassan:
For 14 years I was "missing in action". The Red Cross visited us during the first year and I could send a letter to my family. After that, they transferred me to another POW camp where I was deprived of everything.

Abbas Fahdel:
[voice-over] The past, with its overwhelming splendour and its scents of paradise lost, is too painful for Iraqis to bear. I recall my father reciting the poet Al-Rissafi: "We are not masters of our miserable present / On men of a foregone age / The face of time once smiled / But on seeing us, it darkened."

Abbas Fahdel:
[voice-over] This man seems so familiar. He resembles my old history teacher, Mr Nima. But it must be a hallucination, because I was told he was dead. I'm already starting to see ghosts.

Mohamed Abdel-Kader:
These last ten years, we've really had to pull our sleeves up to rebuild what was destroyed. Thank God, we survived.

Mohamed Abdel-Kader:
You see us smiling, but we've been through some difficult times. We were bombed for two months.

Abbas Fahdel:
[voice-over] I can't wait to meet my childhood friends. Have they survived? The only one I have news of is Mohamed. He wrote to me: "Come and film us. You'll see how photogenic we've become with all these scars of waste chiseled onto our faces by 20 years of war and 12 years of embargo."

Abbas Fahdel:
[voice-over] I remember this bridge, I recall this street, these buildings. And yet, nothing resembles the memories I have kept of them. Everything is so run-down.

[last lines]

Abbas Fahdel:
[voice-over] I found my last friend. If I were to die now, I would do so in peace. I have finally retied the threads of my history.