Ahmed's Translator Stories from the Middle East | PKA

and we're live got a really cool guest tonight i think uh chiz has informed us that you are a big fan of the show you watch keep at least keep up to date with it you know who we all are and he said that you follow like politics and and then global happenings and such but what's really interesting i think is that you're from iran is that right and then you immigrated to iraq for a while uh actually the other way around okay exactly my mother and father are iraqis but uh they migrated to iran in the 90s uh running away from saddam's regime that was after my family so uh my parents went there went to iran and then i was born and in 2003 when when the regime went away and america like liberated iraq a little freedom you're welcome three americans thank you uh they liberated iraq we went back against the will of my father because my father at the time was in australia trying to secure a little uh gathering for us there so that also ruined his plans to cope there because he was planning on us coming from iran so we went back to iraq and lived there from 2003 to 2010 and then we migrated to europe finally how how old are you yeah i was going to say this is a lot of history for someone who's 13 years old i'm 27 actually i'm almost 27. okay i was born in uh well i mean 26. i was born in almost 27. i was born in 1991 in iran but yeah i do look young my brother always uh gets the gets the thing people tell him that he looks older than me and i look younger than him so i do get that a lot i do look young so i guess that's a good thing it is so anyway so that is an incredible amount of like it is almost hard with something like this to even ask a question because i i am so removed from it and i have no idea of any of the happenings what are just uh you said you were a translator for a while there how old were you when you were doing that and what was that like was that for us forces or just yeah so that's also another crazy crazy story i in 2004 like maybe beginning of 2005 the dates are kind of blurry for me at the moment but in beginner 2005 let's say i uh i used to live with my aunt with my family which we were all living in there and that was behind a very uh big shrine mosque al salah it's called the nejaf al-khufah you guys all know it of course of course and uh yeah anyway so the militia militia that were insurgents following which were militia and the south controlling the region at the time the coalition decided that the spanish and italian forces and some polish forces uh would control that region because it was the most stable and back that into crete and all those unstable regions would go to uh us troops uh uk and other uh other forces anyway so um those militias had a lot of control on the region and i used to go there a lot with my parents and they heard me once speaking farsi which is iran's language which i was of course born and raised there i speak farsi as fluently as i speak arabic and they were they just asked me i was like 14 or 15 years old and they were like hey would you mind translating for us so i went ahead and translated for a few people well hang on wait a minute wait wait let's see you're 14 years old and uh what nationality were these okay what nationality were these guys oh oh some so were these iraqi soldiers who asked no no soldiers but insurgents a militia that were used to secure shrines okay and places that are public that are that could be eventually targeted for car bombing or terrorist attack and stuff okay so they would search people that would try to enter the shrine and basically patting them down and uh and all that so basically basically i used to stand there well at the start i translated for a few people and the need for translated kept coming up so they just when they saw me again they were like hey you should come on like sort of a part-time thing how much does a job like this pay when you're 14 years old it didn't pay anything at the beginning i would picture this so you're are you giving good decisions you so you and uh the this military guy are standing outside of like a site that you're trying to protect from someone potentially walking in with a bomb you're the translator so you're standing right next to the guy who's like the point man to stop the bomb right you're you're in just as much danger as he is right or do you guys go get some sandbags until they need you no no as fun as that might sound like i've been in a lot of shitty situations with attacks and stuff which we'll get to later hopefully but that job at the time was pretty much like very safe job like there weren't the the worst thing they stopped we stopped at it was an iranian one of the reason actually it'll be interrupt myself uh one of the reasons they needed a persian translator was because a lot of iranian iranians started coming in as pilgrimage as pilgrims my english is failing me right now anyway yeah i mean yeah well i mean it's a bit out of practice but i'm trying uh so these pilgrims came after 2003 because they had a ban by saddam so they weren't allowed but after saddam went away of course the borders were open and they started coming in so the need for translator arose that's the first thing so after i started working there uh the worst thing i had we had i think was a couple iranians trying to smuggle a little bit of hash in their pockets drugs like that kind of stuff what's the punishment for that like when they found out that they had hash on them was it like a hey you give us that hash and you move along or was it like oh you're you've done [ __ ] up they were pulled apart by four camels yeah well funny funny story about that uh the first time we find a bit of hash on someone they were searching them patting them down and then i was just standing there talking to the guys anyway so they search this guy they open as well and they have like little thing this big and it looks brown i mean we don't know what hash is what weed is what that all those kind of drugs we've heard about them but we don't know how they look how they smell how they taste so uh the security guy is like what the hell is this and he's like his medicine so our boss comes around from the oh it's like oh wait wait wait i've heard about this this is hash actually and uh in nejaf which is about 50 kilometers away you heard about it that people have been bringing this in and this is kind of a sort of a drug that is banned so he's like wait wait wait a second give it to me and he's inspecting his friend to find out what it is so he's like i don't know and he's he looks at me and he's like you give it a taste and i'm like oh my god i'm not sure i should do this anyway so i um like the dumbass i am i open it up and then split it in half like this big i split it in half and put the whole thing in my mouth [Laughter] really stupid decision yep yep and i start and i start like feeling all kind of weird things like that i don't know why it feels shitty they call it hash in our country i don't know what it is it hash is when they take the the pollen from like the the marijuana bud lately you've got lots of buds of marijuana and the way i've seen it made is like they use their bare hands to like stroke the plants and you're getting all that pollen that sticky pollen stuck to your hands and they do this until they've got like a film of it on them and they take like a butter knife and they scrape it off and you've got sort of this sort of waxy dark yeah yeah exactly and then in the bars uh yeah yeah so i put it in my mouth and i start chewing and well i mean i've started feeling like a burn i mean it was like 15 years ago but i i bought new shoes and new pants before like a week ago when i started this job so i uh start chewing chewing too and everyone's laughing at me of course at the security guards and i'm like at once i just spit it out i wait five seconds and i just vomit on my shoes and my new pants it was a shitty shitty day at the top anyway so they take this guy and they put him in a little holding cell which was just a room people used to study in in the year 1800 or something like that uh really old shrines with old runes and all doors but she basically pushed the door in the lock brakes so it wasn't any any uh sell or anything but i mean they put him in there they waited for the police iraqi police came over and they just stick him with him i don't know what happens to them possibly when you were working as a translator yeah did you have like neighbors or like distant neighbors who were like angry at you for cooperating with the americans or the attackers or whatever cooperation cooperation with the americans came at a later date and 2000 and maybe you've heard of this the battle of najef it's one of the major battles that took place against the insurgents of the south the jacial mehdi and i could actually might be able to see uh to find some coordinates for you for where this all exactly happen if you want that no just uh anyway how old were you about 2005 so i was basically 15. and i just started working for them like about two months or something and uh the activity of these insurgents joshua mehdi which i worked for as a translator was like very high they started for enforcing some new laws and other stuff which a lot of people weren't happy with the thing that angered the coalition forces was the fact that they started fighting americans trying to take uh secure areas anyway so uh a command came from america or something and basically it said all polish spanish and italian forces may evacuate and u.s military will take over that city which was my city so uh at that shrine one of the hardest battle that took place was in my backyard so that's another uh very very like uh it's kind of hard to talk about i mean there was a lot of uh a lot of scary moments in in our lives i mean battle was at that same age for you right around 2005 there 2005 it was battle of niger so anyway so uh the americans come in a lot of resistance because the leader of uh jason mehdi told all of his insurgents jesus media he was mocked out of sudden maybe you've heard of him the [ __ ] with the the thing pretty popular he was on cnn like every other week at the time even lately anyway so uh battle goes down and we're holed up in our in the corner of our house and tanks coming through the house through our backyard which was actually our front yard because the the engineers instructed those houses are pretty much dumb asses they build one room and then room next to it and then another room next to it and then the backyard would be basically in front of it and the door would be at the side not the front so it's a pretty weird uh design yeah so we were at the end of the house like at the farthest room and at the back like the wall that we faced was pretty much our neighbor that also had this exact same structure of the house except the other way around anyway so thanks for coming in and uh like the crown is shaking bullets flying everywhere two days and then everything settles down uh americans come door to door telling us to come out and research and we got search and all all that and then uh basically we spent more time on the door than the actual war here like it so there's bullets flying there's tanks moving in yeah like tell what was that part all about like it well let me i there isn't much to it we basically just cowered like all the other families i mean i was young and my father was stayed inside and you could hear bullets like zipping by yeah bullets explosions it was intense we didn't just hear them it was like we were just right there and the the wall that was like the wall of our town our uh our backyard was actually broken down by a tank because it hit it and yeah it was pretty intense how long did it last or how long i guess we hold up in your house there for the whole two days yeah we were we were uh hold up two days well thankfully we had uh we had food and all that stuff my uh cousin actually which was my aunt's house had an ak and he was like holding it by himself he's like what the [ __ ] are you doing my i didn't say anything obviously but my aunt was like you dumbass if the americans come in they're the first one they shoot it's you why at your side it's not gonna help you it's like maybe some insurgents will try to hide in our house i'm not gonna let them american will kill us anyway so uh yeah so that happened and that went on the next thing that i remember happening was like just life going on and a couple of weeks later i uh real quick like as the battle was raging and everything i remember like obviously fear is the number one thing but as far as like anger at the the sides of the battle were you just like what was that mentality like ah these [ __ ] americans are like oh both of these [ __ ] people or like what were you thinking as far as just the direction i know you were young at 15. yeah i was going to say i mean i was 15 at the moment i didn't really have a specifically uh oriented my political opinion or anything but at the moment i feel differently of course but at that time i was just scared and with my family just uh waiting to be to to see what happens that was it yeah but uh so after that a few weeks ago i uh we kept uh like life went on and then uh uh with my family we went to visit the shrine to just go pray and stuff and when we went in uh a lot of the people obviously changed but some of the people that worked for militia after surrendering the american agreed to keep so uh the commander that used to be kind of my boss like that i mean when i say commander sounds like a military commander but he was just at a dumbass that that had control of the of the search point that was uh situated right at the shrine so he he was still there and he was like you should come back because we still have a lot of a lot of iranians coming in after the battle maybe next week's hopefully in the coming weeks hopefully still no pay though right yeah at that point after the second time i came back with them they did start to pay me how much i needed to know like exactly how much because that's too dangerous of a job to not get paid a decent amount yeah yeah like you should be getting paid like those [ __ ] crab fishermen on like deadliest catch right there should be like a voice over as you like translate and check papers like ahmed is making more money this week than most americans will make in a year but instead like what are you actually making i did make bank so let's see as far as numbers go i made the first two months i made fifteen thousand denarii which is about fourteen dollars oh [ __ ] fourteen i'm always bamboozled by foreign i don't know why i thought i'm like 15 grand this [ __ ] had me going no nope nope 14 bucks yeah a couple of foot long sides i mean you got to think i was young and i didn't have any little hash and yeah i mean yeah that too but for me i could have bought like a shoes a few books from my school and and new clothes so it was helpful i mean i didn't do much i just went there two hours a day it wasn't like a nine to five yeah i mean the danger of course but yeah after the americans came uh we were hoping there would be no more danger uh so yeah that's that you're welcome again how did that happen thank you very much the american dollar smelled good yeah so after that i uh americans came of course uh like uh i think at 10 o'clock in the morning and at four o'clock in the uh in the midday and they just came check around they go into the shrine even though a lot of people were angry about that because they were quote-unquote not muslims what happens when they came like two when you guys were in your house and they came to your house did it was after the battle that you left and then they americans found you or did they actually break into your house no no they didn't break into the house they just knocked on the door really really hard and shouted uh if your families come out hands on your head no weapons no movement so we we all came out like the family that we are and we stood there americans started coming in we went in the house take a really quick look and they just saw a woman and stuff they didn't even search us so they just left did they they didn't find your cousin's ak either eh even if they have bonded everyone had an ak there so yeah oh i i assumed so yeah kyle's got a couple in frame yeah get a couple of aks on the under the camera but they didn't search very very well they weren't searching for aks they were searching more for people that were hiding from the insurgencies that were uh hiding and big weapons possibly rpgs and stuff those were the things that were they were looking for because rpgs played a lot a big role in that battle yeah lots of casualties uh on the insurgent side wow so two years of battle battle with netf and i believe 40 american soldiers died and 4 000 or something or three thousand insurgents died so that shows the effectiveness of your military of tanks yeah yeah uh well i mean they're certain also had a lot of uh a lot of hardware and they had a lot of good hummers and big trucks uh shield clips trucks i remember but i mean of course it didn't come close to the yeah there was um i i don't want to get too specific but there's a member of my family who was in the first iraq war and uh he had a lot of like mixed feelings and stress afterwards about how lopsided it was like there was something there was some guilt because you know he just it was he was a tank commander and they just like rolled the [ __ ] through the iraqi tanks and stuff and um yeah after the fact you know it was something he had to cope with that's an interesting perspective i hadn't thought about that of being like uh yeah we were in the war and we did what we had to do but i was in a tank that they gave me and said hey drive this as your job as a tank commander in this war it just happens to be an invincible magic ship that you can just drive around like oh yeah i mean these battles that happened uh the only problem emerge americans faced were the numbers i mean people these insurgents would scatter into neighborhoods and in every house there will be five or four of them and it doesn't matter what you have is it the drone is it the tank i mean you with kim you will get ambushed and it's a lot of time it takes a lot of time to clean out those uh neighborhoods so that was uh challenge number one just the numbers and how they were scattered and obviously urban warfare i mean it was uh months before uh the the main battle of the niger ended the battle that we experienced in kufa which is like a little uh uh it's a small really small town right next to najef pretty important as far as position it's right on the on the euphrates and uh that took two days but the battle of nature of the main battle then i just took two months or something for the insurgents that were there you're talking about them was it common for them to have to like break into someone's house and be like you're gonna hide us here or did they usually have enough people who were on their side that they could go find somewhere or was it kind of a fear that they would show up and harass i i couldn't answer that man i'm sorry but i i have no idea maybe but i've never heard of that or never seen it so i don't know but it is possible obviously i mean they used a lot of uh shitty tactics even though they're it's against all their mottos and their islamic and uh you know how it goes these since insurgents when it comes to it if it's life or death they will do anything it doesn't matter if it's against their uh ideologies or instruction of their leader or whatever anyway yeah but i wouldn't put it past it man that is intense yeah and uh so i didn't tell you about uh when i met with a few of the soldiers that they came to you they see the american soldiers or the insurgents okay the americans after the whole battle we went to the mosque one day and i started talking to the old my old boss and americans came in and they started talking to people and stuff just kind of seeing how the the searching and patting down goes on there wasn't much to do so they they talked to me and at the time i was watching a lot of english movies and stuff and and i i still have my like my dvd collection i used to like buy 10 dvds a day which were basically like uh i don't know a thousand denarii like 19 90 cent which is like basically next to nothing for movies i spent all my money just buying dvds of shows like i remember lost and 24 were big at the time uh so those were my favorites yeah yeah yeah exactly that's really weird but i really love that show anyway at the time so i have a lot of dvds and i've picked up a lot of language from that and so it was my third language so it was pretty impressive for these guys so they were like you so you speak arabic fluently and a bit of english that could be better but also persian that we very much need because of all the pilgrims that are coming in so the american soldier is like uh if you come tomorrow we will take you to the checkpoint at the next to your neighborhood we need a few translators there so you gotta stand there for five or six hours and we'll pay of course a hundred dollars and i'm like oh my god a hundred dollars are you serious so that was my biggest payday as a translator so the next day i came over and they picked me up and i went there and they gave me a vest and i standed there and basically didn't translate anything absolutely nothing just talked to the soldiers in the first day a few weeks later the after the combat like that does settle down a lot of uh pilgrims started coming in a lot of people started getting arrested i mean iranians really hate the americans even the pilgrims yeah so anyway a lot of translating was needed so i basically go i was on my toes my english was very weak at the time so i was barely speaking and uh yeah so that was also a big challenge for me so i did that for a couple of months and what was the attitude of the soldiers like when you were kind of getting to know him and talk to him the best the best i one of the funnest thing i've done like in this whole shitty situation was friends of the team for the soldiers they were telling me all about the american life and and how i should go to america since i'm learning and i'm smart enough and this and that they were motivating me to do all kind of things so i just tell them i would really love to go to study in america or maybe in europe or or wherever and they were they would motivate me and they were like uh you know you work here six months on the salary you'll be able to save up a bit of money you should save up and this and that and so they were all they were really cool guys really cool guys i didn't i i didn't really have bad experience with the american soldiers that's good you said there was it was annoying dealing with how much the iranians hated the americans even the pilgrims what what do you mean by that like they just yeah i mean they wouldn't they wouldn't be one attached that's number one which patting down becomes really challenging so that's why they called a few guys from the mosque from the uh all insurgencies that they used to like the checkpoint at the mosque uh so they used to pat down the the so the american basically did respect that because a lot of iran started getting angry and started shouting and this and that and weapons were pointed at some point i remember what was that that was such a big deal about being touched yeah i mean they didn't just i don't know iranians i mean iraqis most of iraqis said they would be wanna search by a soldier they would just uh okay go ahead man uh no big deal but i remember a lot of the pilgrims from iran made a big deal about it and i used to intervene and come and speak farsi their language so they would feel a little bit better by the time like uh don't worry about it so it's just for security no big deal on this and that but it didn't help i was like no this american dirty peasant will not touch me and this yeah i remember a lot of hatred from iran when you translated did you like tell them straight like stuff like dirty peasant or did you like smooth it over oh absolutely not i definitely did it yeah i mean i was young i mean i was afraid i remember like every time someone would say something that i would feel would offend the other party i was like oh my god how am i going to say that you're a terrible translator yeah i need to know if i'm sitting there saying you 80 000 denarii or whatever so if they just took a transcript of your translations they'd be like this is the friendliest checkpoint that we've ever seen like everybody seems to be getting along oh thank you not that extreme no but i mean i mean a lot of anger was also conveyed by their official depression and their how they start screaming so i didn't have to translate everything anyway but when there was like a few words thrown at i wouldn't translate them unless i was asked i don't actually remember if i have ever done that do you remember like one line or one thing you were told to translate that sticks out in your mind as something that like was like you're like oh [ __ ] because um comes to mind which means you [ __ ] but much worse because in the western culture [ __ ] used like a buzzword and in arabic that's like serious [ __ ] so when you say that like you're offended like i [ __ ] your mother or something so that's the thing that i would never translate or ever even dare to translate so oh that was that must be stressful with curse words like oh sorry go ahead kyle i would want it straight like i would i would i'd be like look if if they're saying some crazy [ __ ] i need to [ __ ] know it because because things can escalate here we're not talking about hurting feelings we're talking about people dying you let me know what they're saying over there like you can smooth me over a little bit if i step out of line but don't you smooth them i need to know i needed like warts and all right but it must have been annoying to have to be like all right i'm translating this what i'm about to say is from him it's from him keep in mind not for me i think you're great i'm on your side all right it's like yeah you're gonna be everybody's buddy you also have to consider that the fact that it was a checkpoint it wasn't something official or anything exact translations weren't needed so basically i had to just tell them what they what the what they were saying in any context would have been uh what it uh it would have been uh okay doesn't matter i don't i don't always have to be literally literally translating every single word so as long as the message gets through how did uh like your day-to-day life just routine kind of change up after the americans showed up yeah so after the americans showed up there was still a lot of a lot of uh what do you call it like a lot it's still a lot of movement from the insurgents so they were still there obviously but they they got a ceasefire from order from their leader was it something like you were being stopped and checked more often or you'd go outside and be like oh look a humvee and a bunch of soldiers again surprise no i mean we we were kind of in our bubble we didn't go far very much i used to go to school go to the thing and just to go to friends and go home that was that was my life for years at that point but after months ago months later i mean a lot of people like my family my cousins that are older than me they were like uh you need to stop working for the americans it's not safe anymore so uh i think i work three months in total uh and then i stopped so i just quit i told them i had to move and concentrate on my schools and my funnels were coming up which were actually coming up at the time so i just quit for that reason i was kind of afraid were you was it you think it was the right move at the time to be like yeah this is getting a little too hot or is it something that looking back you're like oh i probably could have kept doing that a little longer no it never got hot to be honest if i'm honest it never got hot not working for that checkpoint it never got hot i mean heated discussions between a tourist and another uh salesman or a soldier that was trying to pat down that was the most extreme thing i witnessed at the time so it wasn't hard or anything but i kept hearing from friends and family they were like you gotta stop from the working for the americans you never know what happens and this and that you know how people are just here in general so it was a messy situation at the time so you don't want to get it tangled up in something yeah [Music] and

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Id: i_tinsGGlzY

Length: 29min 58sec (1798 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020