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PUBLIC LIES, PRIVATE LIVES: AN UNTOLD STORY OF AN UNCOOL COUP
The Year 2000
Asiah Kethurah AL Haqq looked through the scope, her eyes boring a hole into her target. Her hands sizzling like a live wire.
Ratattatat! Rattattatat! Ratattatatat! Ratattatatat! Ratattataat…
“Hold your fire,” shouted Hussain, the man who was training her. “Lord! That’s what you call the overkill, AK.”
She was still looking through the scope, her eyes burning mercury not seeing the target, but seeing her target, her smoking finger cradling the trigger, ready to let off another round.
“Hey, AK,” Hussain approached, “take a break.”
Keturah placed her weapon down and looked up at Hussain.
“Why?” She barked.
“I’m the commander! Soldier, meet me in an hour at the tent by the dome.”
“Yes, Sir,” she replied, shaking her head like a pendulum. She got up with the grace of a gazelle; it was almost as if she bounced off the sand where she was on her stomach. And as she stood she flexed her body, her back and more so her shoulders were screaming tension.
Hussain sat in the tent by the dome, stroking his long white beard. He was now dressed in the usual flowing white thoub with his ghutra thrown around his shoulder, on his head his pakhol was sitting drunkenly to one side. His long muscular limbs stretched out in front of him while he propped his upper torso with a cushion. He was really wondering what was the deal with this woman. Salih, his nephew, had brought her to camp two weeks ago; she was one of the six females they had with them in this unit off fifty.
In fact, she was the forty-seventh to join them. He called her “AK” and the name suited her well on the field. Salih had become friends with some of her friends and Salih’s sister did some type of nursing class with her years ago in La Trinity and Togob, a pair of islands in the Caribbean where Salih and his sister were studying. Hussain knew that her husband had died, but he didn’t know the details. He also knew that some of her family members were involved in the coup attempt in La Trinity, but that was all he knew from his nephew. They didn’t have much time to speak since training started. Hussain was not the type of man to make mistakes with his soldiers and have loose cannons running around. He dealt with their mental conditioning before any other training.
They were situated in Ghanistan, training with other members of a guerilla unit called IKH - It Kuldi Hayat - Save Your Life. They were mainly a Muslim group, their aim was to destroy the ISL - Islam Soldiers League and help to save the people who were being oppressed by this group. They held the belief that ISL was not functioning on the tenets of Islam and what ISL was doing was destroying the true meaning of Islam. Their fighters came from different countries just as ISL fighters did. And, they were also different because they trained women fighters.
“Men don’t see a woman’s bullet, they don’t see it coming from a woman,” Hussain would say.
Anyhow, Kethurah was all steel, he did not know her full story but he knew she surely had one. It was not just about saving lives, she was out to set the scales right. It was personal; she walked with a volcano on her shoulder. In his twenty-plus years of training fighters for various organizations, he found only a handful like her. But, they could be a danger or a plus to a mission depending on how you mould their attitude. And he definitely needed to bring hers to the buckle.
