by Jonathan Spyer
The Australian
‘At about 10.30, we got a warning that an attack was coming. So we had to disperse. I ran home to Reyhana. I was about five meters from where the rocket landed. I was thrown back. After a couple of minutes, I woke up.’
We are sitting in the front room of Zanyar Rahmani’s house, at the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (PDKI) base in Koya, northern Iraq. The base was struck by the drones and rockets of the Islamic Republic of Iran, on September 28th. 13 people were killed.
Zanyar Rahmani is speaking in a calm and matter of fact tone about the events of that day. The base has re-acquired a peaceful, industrious atmosphere. The morning is quiet. There are pictures on the wall of Rahmani’s front room, of him with Reyhana, his wife, and of a newborn baby, their son, Waniar.
‘There was two weeks left til she was due to give birth,’ Zanyar says, taking up the story again. ‘When I came to, I saw my wife, and I told her to go to the car. But then I saw that she was looking strange, and she fell. I carried her to the car and I saw that I was covered in blood. We drove to the hospital. In the car her waters broke and she began bleeding. They gave her an x ray in the hospital, and they said probably we have to choose between saving her and saving the baby, and that she’s almost certainly not going to make it.’