The ex-Mehdi Army member

It is Sat­ur­day night in Beirut, restau­rants, enter­tain­ment places and beaches are totally full, a usual week­end in Lebanon.

My Sat­ur­day night was a bit dif­fer­ent from the tra­di­tional Lebanese week­end? A meet­ing with ex-member of Mehdi army, recently lives in Lebanon and this is what he told me:

I was a dri­ver, I get $500 each time I drive the 4x4 GMC given to me by the “Army” to “Udhaim” [near Kirkuk]. There in the small city I go to a small house in a very poor dis­trict, they give me a large suit­case full of Amer­i­can dol­lars to deliver it back to Sadr-City — Bagh­dad. I don’t know how much exactly in the bag because I never counted the money but from the size of the suit­case I can imag­ine that the total cash is some­thing about 1 Mil­lion Dollar.

I also get an open enve­lope, I looked inside the enve­lope few times and I saw a paper with a list of names of peo­ple I don’t know, but after few trav­els and look­ing at the names I once saw few names of peo­ple I know in my neighborhood.

After few days, I real­ized that the list is a death-list, after the peo­ple I know are assas­si­nated. I started to check the names in each travel but I never dared to warn any­body in the list.

Afetr Muq­tada Al-Sadr announced the ref­or­ma­tion of Mahdi Army, they told me that they don’t need me any­more and took away the GMC car from me.

For few weeks I worked as a taxi dri­ver, but the income was too lit­tle, so I decided to send my fam­ily to Syria and I came to Lebanon look­ing for job here.