About the Author

Najah Aboud was brought up in a middle-class Iraqi family and was conscripted at eighteen, serving eight years in the army. Afterwards, he managed a falafel restaurant for two years, but at age twenty-eight was called back when the Iran-Iraq War broke out in 1980. After two years of fighting, he was captured and spent the next seventeen years suffering in Iranian prisons as a POW. When he was finally released in 1999, he emigrated to Canada, where his brother lives. He owns a moving company in Vancouver. Najah is the author of the book I, Who Did Not Die. Najah and his compelling, stranger than fiction life story is also depicted in the documentary: My Enemy, My Brother.

Book: I, Who Did Not Die

“When I crashed back to earth, I had no more faith in anything. I didn’t believe in God, in humanity, or in war. There was no time for such devotions, as blood seeped from my forehead and chest, and all around me men were being executed as they begged for their lives. There was only one truth left: I was going to rot in a mass grave with hundreds of other forgotten soldiers…. I opened my eyes and saw a child soldier pointing a rifle at my temple. He was so small that he had to roll up the sleeves and pant legs of his uniform. The boy had been brainwashed to hate me. I spoke as softly as I could. ‘Please,’ I said ‘I’m… just like you.” – Najah Aboud, I Who Did Not Die

Khorramshahr, Iran, May 1982—It was the bloodiest battle of one of the most brutal wars of the twentieth century, and Najah, a twenty-nine-year-old wounded Iraqi conscript, was face to face with a thirteen-year-old Iranian child soldier who was ordered to kill him. Instead, the boy committed an astonishing act of mercy. It was an act that decades later would save his own life.

Documentary: My Enemy, My Brother