The 373rd Night of Memories – Part 5

Compiled by: Iranian Oral History Website
Translated by Fazel Shirzad

2026-4-28

The 373rd “Night of Memories” event was held on Thursday evening, October 23, 2025, in the Sooreh Hall of Hozeh Honari [Arts center], featuring wartime recollections shared by former POWs Nabiollah Ahmadlou, Mohammad Hadi, Mahmoud Shabani, Ali Moradi, Mohsen Jannat, Hadi Izzi, and Abbas Pirhadi. Davood Salehi hosted the event.

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As the program went on, the host invited the fifth narrator, Mr. Mohsen Jannat, to come on stage and asked him to state his age at the time he was at the front and his role in the battalion.

The narrator began his remarks by answering the host’s question and said:

“When I went to the front, I was 18 years old. I was the radio operator for the Al‑Mahdi Division Battalion. So as not to take too much time, I’ll continue the events in bullet‑form from exactly where Mr. Hadi left off. We were under siege. Mr. Pazouki (the battalion commander) and I moved forward. We had captured one of the Iraqis, and since I had previously been a seminary student and knew a bit of Arabic, Mr. Pazouki asked me to interrogate him. The enemy fire was so intense, and they were hitting us with direct artillery, that it had turned into hell. While we were talking to the Iraqi POW, I suddenly saw that Mr. Pazouki suffered a severe blast concussion and collapsed at the foot of a palm tree, and they took him to the rear.”

He continued:

“It was close to noon when Mr. Hadi managed to reach us. We had no rations. He told us, ‘Go search the Iraqi bunkers that are like trenches; maybe you’ll find something.’ By chance, we found one of our friends’ knives there and said, ‘This is Mohsen’s knife; we have to take it back and return it to him.’ At noon prayer time, the shelling was so heavy that we performed our prayer shortened (qasr). It was exactly the 19th of January when the operation’s code word was communicated to us. Let me say in parentheses here that before the operation, I had seen my late mother in a dream and told her, ‘Mother, I’m going to the front, and I won’t come on leave for another three or four years!’ That stuck in my mind.”

Referring to the difficult moments of the siege, the narrator added:

“Mr. Hadi said, ‘We have no forces left; go back and bring a few men.’ I gave the radio to my assistant and stressed that if the siege tightened and the Iraqis reached you, swallow the paper with the codes so it doesn’t fall into enemy hands. Since I had passed along that route just ten or fifteen minutes earlier, I didn’t think the Iraqis had managed to cut us off. I was moving toward the rear, half‑bent, when I saw bullets raining from the left, right, above, and below. I said to myself, ‘you idiot, why are you walking crouched so the bullets hit your head? At least walk upright so the bullets hit your stomach!’ I stood up and started walking straight. The fire was so intense that I couldn’t hear Reza Rahimi shouting, ‘Don’t go forward! Don’t go forward!’ All of a sudden, I saw a water‑pump pipe exactly aligned with my stomach, and a bullet tore open the pipe’s side right at belly height. I thought for sure I’d been shot but wasn’t feeling it because my body was hot. I checked my clothes and saw they were neither wet nor bloody! Here again, in parentheses, let me say: the night before, my father had dreamed that I was surrounded by the Iraqis and they were riddling me with bullets, but not a single bullet hit me (and that’s exactly what happened).”

He then described the moment he was captured and said:

“When I was young, I was fascinated by Katyusha shrapnel. At night when they exploded, they would rain down like a chandelier, or like sugar‑coated nuts being scattered over the bride and groom! I was in that mood when I saw an Iraqi battalion entrenched in a pit. I told the guys, ‘Hit them!’ They said, ‘Come on, man, leave it (we’ve got no ammo, otherwise we’d have taken care of them ourselves). In the end, we were captured. I always say we were ‘two and a half people’ who were taken prisoner: there was me, Hossein Sadegh, and Ne’mat Dehghan, in whose mouth a dual‑phase round had exploded; we thought he’d been martyred. Hossein and I didn’t even raise our hands. An Iraqi soldier, trembling with fear, came toward us and said, ‘Karbala?’ I calmly replied, ‘Mashhad is closer; come on, let’s go to Mashhad!’ The Iraqi soldier got angry, yanked my glasses off my face, cocked his weapon, and said: ‘You killed all our men!’”

At this point in the program, the host, astonished, stepped into the narrator’s story to remind the audience of an important point and said:

“Just look at how much courage they had in the prime of their youth! In the midst of that storm of bullets, shrapnel, and hand‑to‑hand combat, they would stare straight into the eyes of an armed Iraqi soldier and still banter and trade taunts with him!”

The narrator continued his account and said:

“They took us, hands tied, into the middle of an Iraqi battalion that was armed to the teeth. They led us behind a broken water‑pump engine and ordered one of the soldiers to execute all three of us by firing squad. The Iraqi soldier sat down, ready to shoot. I told Ne’mat and Hossein, ‘Guys, close your eyes and don’t beg this coward. He’ll fire, and we’ll go to God.’ They lowered their heads. I noticed he wasn’t shooting; I raised my head to see why he wasn’t firing. Suddenly I saw another Iraqi, named Mohsen (whom they called “Sheikh”) knock his rifle aside and say, ‘Why do you want to kill them?’ The soldier said, ‘These men killed our forces.’ Sheikh replied, ‘In this condition, how could they possibly have killed anyone? Well, you’ve also killed many of them.’

“Then he turned to me, as the younger one, and said in Arabic: ‘Why are you fighting? You have Muhammad, we also have Muhammad. You have Khadijah, we also have Khadijah.’ But when he said, ‘You have Ali, we also have Ali,’ I realized he was a Shia. I said, ‘After all, it’s war… that’s how it is.’”

He went on to describe the terrifying moments that followed:

“They put us in a jeep. Before being captured, we had been radioing our own artillery, telling them, ‘Increase the range of the guns so the shells land on the Iraqis’ heads, not on ours. The Iraqis are further ahead.’ On that same route, one of our own artillery shells landed on the ground right in front of the jeep. I thought to myself, ‘I wish it would hit the middle of the vehicle and finish everything once and for all!’

“When we reached their headquarters, my seminary card was still in my pocket. The garrison commander came and, as soon as he took out my card, I thought, ‘that’s it, I’m done (they’ll realize I’m a cleric!’ But he mistakenly thought the word talabeh meant ‘student’ in the sense of a school pupil. He said, ‘Look at this (they’re sending schoolchildren to the war!)’”

Referring to the beginning of the torture, the narrator said:

“Some time later, their senior commander arrived. Everyone showed him great respect. He asked me, ‘Why did you come to the front?’ I said, ‘For Islam.’ He shouted, ‘You bastard! So you mean we are disbelief (kufr) and you are Islam?’ I said, ‘That’s what they say…’ Right then he slapped me so hard across the face that I fell to the ground. He burned both sides of my neck with his cigarette, then handed me over to the professional torturers.

“They threw me into the middle of a room, with interrogation experts seated all around. They said, ‘If you talk, we’ll take you to the hospital and pay you money.’ I gave them a sharp reply. The soldiers would grab me by the stubble of my beard and beat me. In the darkness of the night, one of them kicked me in the face and eye with his boot so hard that sparks flew before my eyes, and from that day on, the left side of my face has always been sickly and quickly catches cold.”

He went on to describe their transfer to the camp and the prisoners’ resistance and said:

“The next day they put us on a bus. They had turned the heat inside the bus up so high that the guys were dying of thirst. The fighter sitting in the seat right in front of me was martyred there and then from sheer thirst. They first took us to the intelligence service (Istikhbarat), and then to the POW camp.

In the camp, three of our guys who had escaped earlier and whose faces had even been shown on Iraqi television had been recaptured and brought back. An order had been issued that no one was allowed to talk to them. One of them, named Masoud, had developed serious kidney problems; he couldn’t walk and kept collapsing on the ground. I went to take his hand and help him up. He said, ‘Mohsen, don’t. They’ll beat you too.’ I said, ‘Give me your hand.’

There was a very cruel guard there named Majid. He came over and said, ‘Let him go!’ I said, ‘I won’t!’ He said, ‘I’ll beat you!’ I, who had completely forgotten I was in Iraq, raised my hand and said, ‘If you hit me, I’ll hit you too! Don’t you see he can’t walk?’

A sergeant who was watching the scene ordered Majid to leave us alone. Later, Mr. Hadi Izi told me that at that moment the entire camp had fallen into a deathly silence, and that if I had actually hit Majid, the others would definitely have risen up and started attacking the Iraqis in a kind of uprising. The sergeant, realizing this, fearfully pulled Majid away from me.”

The narrator, describing the unbreakable spirit of the freed POWs, said:

“We had two huge, burly guards. Because one of them was named Salam (‘Salam’ meaning ‘peace’ or just the name), we called him ‘Salam the Camel’! They used to beat the guys with three‑phase electrical cables that were braided together like a little girl’s hair. One time they lashed my back four times, and the fifth blow was so vicious that my chest burned with pain.

But the willpower of the guys was so strong that they had driven the Iraqis to the point of despair. Sometimes, if we went a while without being beaten, we would joke with each other: ‘Guys, our backs are itching (it’s about time we got a good beating!’)

Under torture, they would demand that the guys insult the Imam (Imam Khomeini) and shout ‘Death to Khomeini.’ But the boys, with clever wordplay, would shout things like ‘Mard Khomeini’ (Khomeini is a man) or ‘Mard ast Khomeini’ (Khomeini is a real man), so that in their ears it sounded like an insult, but in our meaning it was praise. This love and steadfastness had driven them crazy.”

The narrator closed with a bitterly humorous anecdote and an emotional sting:

“One time, one of those giant guards had fixated on me and was beating me. He slapped me hard once on the left side of my face and once on the right. I staggered and was about to fall. I felt like the entire area of the camp was spinning around my head!

When I got back to the guys, I said, ‘The whole camp spun around my head!’ The guys said, ‘Mohsen, the camp didn’t spin; we saw your eyeball spin in its socket!’

In the end, after 3 years and 7 months and 10 days and 10 hours (approximately the three to four years I had told my mother it would be) I returned to Iran. Later, one of my relatives told me, ‘Mohsen, in all those years you were gone, every afternoon when I came back from school, I would hear your mother’s cries, and no matter what we did, we couldn’t calm her down.’

To be continued…