Overkill

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Most of the time they didn’t fuck about with the executions. A bullet in the back of the head or a blade drawn across the throat and the body left pretty much where it fell. But when Rashid was there it was different. Rashid liked to play.

Bizarrely, Rashid looked more like a caricature of an accountant than anything else – small and slight, hunched, with thick pebble-lensed glasses – but nobody smiled when he was around. He had learnt his trade in the back streets of Baghdad and Basra, and refined his skills working on Russian prisoners seized by the Afghans. The smell of death was on him.

As Sadoun Khamil’s enforcer, he would do his master’s bidding without question and without compassion. To him it was just work, and he was very good at it. His speciality was the lingering death, what he called ‘shwai shwai noum’ or ‘sleep slowly’, slicing through the victim’s spinal cord with a thin and extremely sharp knife. He always knew when he had cut enough, because the body would slump as the nerves were severed. Then they would prop the limp body against a wall or tree and leave it. The man could take days to die, usually of thirst, but occasionally Rashid would enliven the process by making shallow cuts on his arms and legs. The fresh blood and total immobility of the body would attract the birds and the rats and the stray dogs and the insects, and the victim would be literally and slowly eaten alive.

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