ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Blood was pouring down Zanyar Rahmani’s head and stomach as he observed the chaos unfolding around him after Iranian drones and missiles forced young and old to flee for their lives into the hills surrounding their refugee camp in northern Iraq on Wednesday morning. Around a dozen children still in their school uniform took cover under a rock.
A few hours earlier, Rahmani had noticed a drone flying over the camp on the outskirts of Koya town in the Kurdistan Region. They were on high alert as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), recognized as a terrorist organization by the United States, had shelled the border area for several days.
Rahmani had been a Peshmerga of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) for ten years and had tied the knot with Rayhan Kanaani about two years earlier. She was a secret member of the KDPI in western Iran and crossed the border to join her husband.
The couple was preparing for an important event - the birth of their first child. She wanted a son, but Rahmani hoped for a daughter.
"We agreed that if it was a girl I would name her and if it was a boy she would name him," Rahmani told Rudaw English on Thursday morning with still plasters on his head. Kanaani had chosen the name Wanyar, which means “educated” in the Kurdish dialect of Hawrami.
Like every mother-to-be, Kanaani bought Wanyar plenty of clothes. "She often held up the clothes and smelled them," Rahmani recalled as he tried to control his emotions.
As her due date - October 3 - neared, Kanaani and Rahmani grew more excited to meet their unborn baby.
Rahmani was on duty at 6:00 am on Wednesday morning, manning a checkpoint at the camp. When his two-hour shift ended, he went home to his wife. "She felt very homesick," Rahmani observed. The couple had no immediate family members in the Kurdistan region. "Please embrace me," his wife said and Rahmani stayed home for another 45 minutes consoling his wife before heading to a meeting.
Meanwhile, the protests that started with the death of Mahsa Amini while in morality police custody in Tehran were growing. The IRGC blamed the Kurdish parties including the KDPI for a violent unrest that had engulfed the country for nearly two weeks.
"We will not allow the formation of any threats in our surroundings," IRGC Deputy Commander for Operations Abbas Nilforoushan said on Tuesday. "Wherever the counterrevolutionaries establish bases and become a source of operations against the security of the Islamic Republic and the Iranian people and try to coordinate or lead terrorist moves they will be targeted. The bases that we targeted recently had the greatest role in the riots of past days."
Rahmani had been very active on social media following the death of Amini, like hundreds of others who spoke against the Iranian regime and Amini on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. His phone buzzed as he was walking to the meeting with his comrades. It was a message on Instagram from an account called “Joker,” threatening about revealing his identity, as well as other Kurds, for their role in the deadly protests against the Iranian regime.
Then, all hell broke loose and Rahmani’s gnawing feeling of the IRGC striking them came to life.
The head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces General Mohammad Pakpour was just across the border of the Kurdish areas in western Iran with loaded missile launchers and suicide drones. It was the beginning of a military operation against Iranian-Kurdish opposition groups, codenamed “the Prophet of God,” a reference to Prophet Mohammed.
US forces stationed in Erbil watched as about 73 missiles and dozens of suicide drones passed through Iraqi airspace. They did not take any action except when one drone was spotted heading to Erbil, where the American forces are based.
“At approximately 2:10 PM local time, US forces brought down an Iranian Mojer-6 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle headed in the direction of Erbil as it appeared as a threat to USCENTCOM forces in the area,” the US Central Command said in a statement.
The Kurdish opposition parties were aware of the IRGC’s anger towards them and had taken precautions to avoid large casualties in case of deadly attacks on them. However, they could not move hundreds if not thousands of women and children to a safe refuge.
“There were explosions and my ears started buzzing,” Rahmani recalled. He could only remember two of the explosions and had no memory of the third one that hit his vicinity after 10:00 am. He was wounded.
He was familiar with IRGC’s missile strikes as he had survived the 2018 ballistic missile strike on the same base miraculously, where he lost a close friend. He had been a school bus driver and went to a mechanic's shop after dropping the children at school when the missiles struck in September 2018, killing at least 13 people.
With blood dripping down his body, Rahmani could not help but think of his wife and their unborn baby this time.
"I tried to hide in the chaos around me to avoid my wife who had come out of the house," Rahmani said. "I did not want her to see me in that state as it could have been threatening for her and the baby."
At least 13 people have died and 58 others have been wounded, according to the Kurdistan Region’s health ministry.
But the inevitable happened and his wife saw his bloody face and shirt. Within a few seconds, she slumped to the ground and collapsed.
Rahmani picked her up from the ground and placed her in a pickup truck while a few women accompanied him, rushing to the hospital she was scheduled to give birth in. Kanaani had suffered internal bleeding as a result of the Iranian strikes.
"You need to sign this document," one of the doctors told Rahmani, handing him an official paper to permit the health staff to operate on his wife.
"We cannot save your wife but maybe we can save your child” were the last words he heard before the doctors rushed Kanaani into the operation room, but it was a late arrival for both of them.
Kanaani had died and Wanyar opened his eyes to a world empty of his mother’s love. The one-day-old baby had also suffered perinatal asphyxia and his fragile body is struggling to send oxygen to his brain.
“Only his heart is functioning, his brain has stopped working. The hospital is waiting on me to make the last decision, to decide whether he should live or not,” Rahmani said in a desperate tone.
The 28-year-old father has to decide whether his baby should be taken off the oxygen machine or let him live with severe disability and a life expectancy of five to seven years.
"Last night the doctors said that they would take him off the oxygen machine, but it was too much for them and they did not have the heart to do it and they left it to me," he said.
The IRGC has continued making threats and warned that it would continue targeting the opposition groups “until they are no longer a threat.”
Rahmani sobbed as he rose from his seat to go to Erbil’s Jumhuri hospital to do the inevitable. “I do not know what to do,” he said and placed his face in his both hands crying.
Dilovan Mohammed, Head of Erbil Health Directorate, told Rudaw late Thursday that the newborn baby has passed away.
Updated at 7:35pm
