His name was Dakel Abbas, and he was a 21-year-old Iraqi soldier drafted in a village where along with his wife he lived raising cucumbers, onions, eggplants. A village near As-Samawah, central Iraq. Rather than a soldier, however, you would have thought him to be a survivor from a concentration camp. His head looked like a skull with a nose and a mouth and two eyes. His chest, a bas-relief of ribs hardly covered by skin. His biceps, tiny bones that could fit inside the palm of a child. (Saddam Hussein does not feed the troops very well.) He had been captured at the end of the Gulf War by members of the Kuwaiti Resistance who, supposedly by mistake, had opened fire on his group while it surrendered. In fact he appeared badly wounded and the doctors didn't know whether he would recover.[...]