The Genesis Plague (2010) by Michael Byrnes Page B

avoid reported mortar fire in northern Kurdistan the Blackhawk maintained a westerly flight path high above the Iraqi plain. On approach to Mosul it curled right, keeping the city comfortably to the west, then headed for its next destination, which lay thirty-five kilometres northeast.
    As he gazed out towards the distant city, a great sadness came over Hazo. It had been over thirty years since Saddam Hussein’s regime had forced hundreds of thousands of Kurds - Hazo’s family among them - to relocate from Mosul to camps in the desolate southern deserts. Those who hadn’t cooperated were attacked with Sarin nerve gas. Following the first major waves of ethnic cleansing, the fascist Ba’ath Party then seized the tribal lands in a bold attempt to ‘Arabicize’ the region.
    While in the resettlement camp, Hazo’s asthmatic mother had been denied access to critical medicine. She subsequently died from the desert’s oppressive dry heat. His father, once a robust, jovial man, and, prior to the displacement, Mosul’s most industrious carpet retailer, had been executed by a firing squad and tossed into a mass grave. Hazo’s two older brothers had been killed by a suicide bomber while travelling by car together to seek work in Baghdad, shortly after the US invasion. Their wives and children moved in with Hazo’s oldest sibling, his sister Anyah.
    Now Mosul’s streets were once again filled with Kurds. The tide of discontentment, however, had merely reversed with resettled Kurds staging violent reprisals - restaurant bombings, car bombings, shootings - against resident Arabs. After all that Hazo’s family had endured, how could Karsaz question the fight for a new Iraq? Otherwise how would the cycle of violence ever end? Could it ever end? Hazo wondered. The grim truth, he feared, was that Iraq’s history would continue to be written in blood.
    His sombre gaze traced the wide curves of the Tigris to the outskirts of Mosul where mounds and ruins scattered over 1,800 acres marked the site of ancient Nineveh. The Bible said that the prophet Jonah had come here after being spat out from the great fish’s belly to proclaim God’s word to the wicked Ninevites. But long before Jonah’s mission, the city was a religious centre for the goddess Ishtar. Hazo pulled out the pictures from the cave, studied the woman who’d been depicted on the wall. Had she been a living being? Or might this be a tribute to the Assyrio-Babylonian goddess Ishtar, as Karsaz had suggested?
    An eight-pointed star was Ishtar’s mythological symbol, and the woman depicted on the cave wall wore a wristband bearing an eight-petalled rosette. Close. But close enough? He tried to remember if Ishtar was ever portrayed carrying a radiating object in her hands. Nothing came to mind.
    Like most Iraqis, he could recall bits and pieces of the goddess’s lore: how the cunning seductress would cruelly annihilate her countless lovers; how after failing to bed the Babylonian hero Gilgamesh, she’d persuaded the supreme god Anu to release the Great Bull of Heaven to deliver apocalyptic vengeance upon the Babylonians; how the Queen of the Underworld, Ereshkigal, had been so infuriated by Ishtar’s antics that she’d imprisoned the harlot and inflicted sixty diseases upon her.
    Could this really be Ishtar? he thought
    Nineveh faded in the distance and the chopper began tracing a white pipeline that ran north towards the Tawke oil fields. Crude was once again flowing out from Iraq, and making Hazo think that it wasn’t only Ishtar who’d been a prostitute.
    Back to the pictures, he flipped to an image that showed a warrior presenting the female’s disembodied head to an elder. He couldn’t recall anything about Ishtar being executed so cruelly. Too many inconsistencies. Though if this wasn’t Ishtar, then who could she be?
    The fact that these images came from inside a cave raised even more questions. It was assumed that beneath every earthen mound in Iraq lay