The gate, made from bright-blue bricks and polished off with a gold overlay, looks like it could have been transplanted from Vegas, or Disneyland*. Nowadays, Farhoud waits daily outside the entrance to Babylon, where he works as a tour guide for hundreds of visitors from all over the globe. I loved it.” Meky Mohamed Farhoud grew up in a village just steps away from the ruins of Babylon.
“At that time, I felt like the village was a member of my family. That beautiful view came at an immense cost. Today, Saddam’s palace upon a hill stands on the same site where Farhoud went to school from it, you can see reconstructed walls and mazes with perfect clarity. In 1986, Saddam’s workers blasted away Farhoud’s village and built an artificial hill in its place. Saddam wanted a palace to overlook his works, and Qawarish had the unfortunate luck of standing in the perfect location. Saddam saw himself as a modern reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar, and to prove it, he spent millions building a massive reconstruction of Babylon. In the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein became obsessed with the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar, who is notorious for waging bloody wars to seize large swaths of current-day Iran and Israel. “I had a golden childhood,” he says.īut Qawarish’s famed location ultimately doomed it.
As a child, Farhoud played soccer in fields studded with ceramic shards and bricks from long ago. The village is just steps away from the ruins of ancient Babylon, the Mesopotamian kingdom that Hammurabi helped build into one of the world’s largest cities. Meky Mohamed Farhoud grew up in a small village called Qawarish on the edge of the Tigris River, among pomegranate, orange, and date trees.
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