I’m scrolling through Instagram. Missiles are flying between Israel and Iran, and with them fear—of war, of siege, of hunger. Speculation flood “stories” and “reels” about a new siege mirroring that of Iraq in the 1990s, lived by what they call the “good generation.” I didn’t live through that period. My parents hadn’t even met yet.
But I lived another kind of hunger, one I remember well. A psychologist once pointed it out: “You have an eating disorder.”
He asked me, “Are you actually afraid of food not being available? That might be the root of the problem”. As he continued speaking a language familiar to only psychologists, his question took me back to a moment I thought I had overcome – a moment that could hold the answer to the intrusive voices I inevitbaly face in the mirror asking: “When will you lose weight?”
Winter 2013.
We were still in Syria despite the worsening situation; Iraq wasn’t any safer at the time. We had been expatriates for over a decade. My young parents didn’t want to give up what they had built there, believing Syria wouldn’t let them down.
In November, our area fell into the hands of the Free Army, and our city came under siege from regime bombardment. All the residents of the building took shelter on the ground floor, an attempt to escape death. But I noticed something strange between my parents and our Iraqi neighbor, Umm Hussein: they weren’t afraid of the bombing. They were afraid of hunger.
My father had stocked up with enough food to last a few weeks at the beginning of the month. But what about the neighbors, especially those who lived day to day? Hunger doesn’t recognize such arrangements. We shared our food with them.
A girl of eleven or twelve, hearing the word “siege” repeated for the first time by adults—as if it were synonymous with hunger.
In the first week, the meat supply ran out. The electricity was cut and they feared it would spoil.
By the fourth week, food began to run out and resourcefulness took its place. Limited to one meal a day: soup, or bread and yogurt; I learned how to make yogurt from a spoonful of starter and a litre of milk, and how to bake pastries in a pan without oil.
I was a pampered child. I used to ask my mother to boil chicken, then grill or fry it. I didn’t know that was a luxury. The day I asked for it, she didn’t scold me—she cried.
“This bowl has to last,” was a phrase they repeated daily, until food became scarce. Then I adopted it myself, repeating it with frustration. I was no longer full. The “lion’s share” I was used to disappeared. I remember dividing a bag of chips over several days. I don’t know if I was truly afraid, or just imitating the adults.
Today I wonder: do children of sieges and wars everywhere do what I did? Or was I lucky to have canned and fast food? I feel repulsed seeing them in markets now.
We survived that 21-day siege, but I didn’t survive the fear. I became known for my constant appetite. I frame it as a love of flavors. I grew up escaping into food, hiding from fear and sadness, hiding even from happiness. Only later did I understand that my behavior was compulsive. I eat a lot, and I feel guilty when I see scenes of hunger in Gaza and Sudan. And yet, I can’t stop. Even as I write, cry, laugh, my mouth has to be full. The hunger of those days robbed me of my sense of safety, and led me to tie safety to food. Now, if I want to feel safe, I have to eat.
Perhaps that’s why restaurants in our countries have become the most popular form of entertainment. Maybe food is no longer just a biological need, but a psychological one for those who have lived through long periods of material and emotional hunger.
Postpartum Under Bombardment
Amal Hassan
With the Israel–U.S. war on Iran and the regional escalation that followed, the news never ends. Images of smoke and fires come relentlessly. Broadcasters shout in urgent tones: new escalation, possible war, mobilization here, bombardment there. Hundreds of analysts, men and women who have never set foot on a battlefield, in suits on screens.
And just like them, on Facebook, people behind screens share posts predicting an upcoming war, as if we live in a circular time that never tires of repeating itself. Will wars return? Are we destined to live our entire lives in cycles of terror? I am now a woman in my fifties – has war not tired of chasing me from childhood until now?
At night, I stare at my phone, following the news with half-closed eyes from exhaustion. I think of pregnant women in Gaza, of mothers in Tehran rushing with their children into shelters under bombardment.
An image surfaces in my mind: scenes of them hiding their newborns in trembling arms. Will they hide in shelters again? Will I once again run with my children and grandchildren to a place I thought belonged to the past? I recall myself at twenty: how many times must we live the same fear?
A memory from the 1990s.
Just three days before Bush Sr.’s strike, I gave birth to a boy. The sky was raining bombs on Baghdad. Instead of resting after childbirth, I was fraught with anxiety. As I held this tiny piece of flesh wrapped in white cloth close, I looked at his tiny ear and wondered: can it endure the sound of all these rockets? That apocalyptic sound that shakes the soul before the body?
My baby, despite his fragility, was luckier than me. He would not remember the sound or its terror—only hear the story of our survival one day.
Yes, we must survive. We must make each day a new chance at life.
Tears stream down my face. The fear of all mothers overtakes me. Will my child die? Will he be deprived of a life he has not yet began?
The same sound of rockets. The same shelter. I was once inside it as a child, clinging to my mother during the Iran war. I remember her anxious face as she carried a basket of fruit and a thermos of tea, trying to reassure the illusion of serenity amid the madness of leaders.
I remember Quran recitations in the dark, while the sky above us screamed and trembled. It was surreal – like a loud and chaotic painting hung in an empty and modern space. We children played in a corner despite the fear, making games from small stones, refusing to acknowledge the terror surrounding us. Perhaps we didn’t understand it.
I thought the terror of that war had faded into a blurry childhood memory and we had said goodbye to it forever. But it returned that night like a ghoul trying snatch my newborn. I recall the story of the Amiriya shelter and tremble at the idea of small burned bodies, and black smoke stealing the lives of hundreds of children.
I cry again, not like before, but as a mother who has experienced fear twice: once as a child, once as a mother, and now as a grandmother. I know I must be strong for this little child. But amid all this noise, I allow my tears to fall. I am not made of stone.
I need to cry, to release my fear, before wiping my tears and holding him again, whispering in his ear, as I whispered in my own childs ear before him: we will survive, my little one. We will survive, no matter what the world intends for us.
When those days ended, I thought I would lock them away in a dark box in my memory and throw it far away. But suddenly, with every news report, every image of bombardment and a child’s cry, I relive it all subconciously. The same horrors during the 2003 invasion of Baghdad- worse this time. The same panic seeped into my bones, like a fever that never leaves.
Sometimes I think this country does not want to let us love life. The sky is always busy with wars instead of rain. We try to plant safety in our homes, but rockets land faster than our dreams can grow.
I realized then that my son would grow up with rockets as a familiar presence.
In the shelter, I wondered: when I tell him our story, will it feel like a distant memory—or like current affairs, breaking news repeating itself over and over?
And that is what has happened. Each explosion in Baghdad, everything this country has endured and continues to endure – the turmoil and the fear – is inherited by our grandchildren, just as it was inherited by me and by those who came before.
