CLOSER

Sydney Street Scenes 2015/2016 Picture John Stapleton

The book was finished.


Helicopters buzzed over the scene, each trailing a burning trawl rope.


He grabbed on to one, it disintegrated into his hands. He grabbed on to another, it too disintegrated.


The burning ropes cut arcing flames across the darkening scene; dank with fear. Everywhere around him cinders swirled.


He grabbed another rope and it held, lifting him above the scene, just as the ground beneath him buckled and blew. He hadn't expected to die that day, although what gave him such conviction he could barely say.


Swept away from the scene, the arc lines of burning ropes and flurries of ash behind him in an instant, he barely dared to look down.


Life was brief, but he wanted to hang on one more day, as his stomach screamed and the rotors above thrashed towards the horizon. There would be no peace, not that day.


Nine hundred Islamic State warriors had been killed in the fight for Mosul; announced one report. So many died, and this was victory? It was a victory that would taste like ash for decades to come, here in perilous times.


He was emotionally exhausted from the book, which had been written under difficult circumstance, just as had the previous two.


The harassment of the authorities, the psychological operations designed to destabilise him, never ceased. If there were Flaws in the Glass they would pounce. They never learnt, and he acted stupider than he was; a tried and true method.


They fumbled and gashed and lashed; and it wouldn't matter how major or minor the sin, they would pounce. He had been called everything imaginable, harassed month in month out. It was government money, there was no reason to stop. Under the ASIO Act journalists were classified as Persons of Interest, and they felt it was within their purlieu to harass, threaten, bully and intimidate journalists as much as they liked, to encourage them to suicide, to whisper heart attack heart attack, in the hope of bringing on an early death.


For of free thought and freedom on speech in the Australia of 2016, there was none.


The country was now a pale shadow of the boisterous, larrikin country he had once known and loved; a travesty brought on by years of poor governance and rank hypocrisy at the highest levels.


There was a price to pay for war, and they would pay it if they could. And they would silence him, if they could. The bully boys, the bully girls, the henchmen, the henchwomen, the agents of the state.


NEWS


http://www.iraqinews.com/iraq-war/isis-burns-nine-militants-fleeing-battles-mosul/


(IraqiNews.com) Nineveh – Iraqi media outlets announced on Tuesday, that the Islamic State executed nine of its members by burning for fleeing the battles in central Mosul.
Al Sumaria News stated, “ISIS terrorist gangs executed nine of its members for fleeing the battle against the security forces in Mosul, by throwing them in trenches containing a burning oil, after tying their hands and legs.”
“ISIS used the burning oil trenches to impede the visibility of the Iraqi Air Force and international coalition air force,” Al Sumaria added.


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