NOWHERE IS SAFE

Vanessa Walker The Lost Cities

There they were in these nether-reaches of dark games, everyone paid but him.

"What do you do when you get home, puff out your little fat chest and say: 'I did good today. I harassed an old man.' "

They told him, there in those long nights, of magnificent tranches of malfeasance, of malfunctioning agencies and incompetencies on a grand scale.

He turned, exhausted, and wished leprosy into their eyes.

Rotting souls and smelly feet and malignant intent, he had seen it all now.

And he had seen the way power corrupted their bureaucratic little hearts, while out in the deserts the gods awaited. He had seen the dark forms dancing at the edge of liquid scapes, and had seen the wotst that men were capable of, or begun to understand. Here on the outer reaches of consciousness, when they, in their mundane lives, were chortling self-satisfied, he had set the hares running, as the saying went, and just as they had tried to kill him, now the hounds they had unleashed would turn.

They were fleeing through forests, European forests, and across sands, Eritrean sands, and they were all, yes, they were all now slouching towards Bethlehem, for they had stirred the forces that should have been left unprovoked, And the Lord would not forgive, for they knew not what they did. Their callow, dissembling hearts, their personal greed, none of it would serve them well in the harsh landscapes they now entered, their eyes dripping blood as they ran.

These were the demons they had so unwisely woken, and the land that should have been safe was not safe, and the villages that should have been safe where children ran and played and old grandparents watched with pride, wind swept through them, arid and hot, and doors banged in deserted buildings, and times of festivity never came.

It was the season of killing, the harvesting of souls, and even in this far off place, the dark lords stalked and manipulated, and the bombs that rained down half a world away, they shook through their temporal dreams as surely as they destroyed the flesh upon which they poured.

And so it was he looked up and said: Leave me alone. You know not what you do. And the interconnections of everything, they ran every which way to hide their own disease stinking guilt and barren consciences they themselves had betrayed, and stoked not flames but bitterness as they stunk and slunk into the reaches, never finding the courage they so desperately needed.

They would not be born again.


THE BIGGER STORY:

MOSUL

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/10/town-tal-afar-focus-en-route-mosul-battle-161030060800595.html

Iraqi Shia militia groups have launched an operation to retake the town of Tal Afar from ISIL and cut the armed groups's supply lines from Mosul to Syria, a spokesman said.

Michael Pregent, Middle East analyst and a former US intelligence officer who served in Iraq, told Al Jazeera the militias' move was not sanctioned by Iraq's government.

He said the hope by Baghdad and Washington was that ISIL would use the western route to flee Mosul for a "final battle" later in its Syrian bastion of Raqqa.

"The Shia militias are operating outside the control of the Iraqi government. They're not responsive to US requests not to participate," said Pregent.

"The military operation wasn't to encircle Mosul, it was to force ISIL out into Syria. The Shia militias are blocking that now. It sounds like a good military tactic but it's not synced, it's not coordinated. And the Shia militias remain a wildcard, based on what they've done in Ramadiand Fallujah."

The Mosul offensive involves tens of thousands of soldiers, federal police, Kurdish fighters, Sunni tribesmen and Shia militias.

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