I am reading a novel about Iran. In one chapter, the protagonist describes the beginning of the war with Iraq. She was 10 years old at that time; I was six. What she wrote about that period is very close to what I experienced.
She was on the other side of the conflict, yet her life, thoughts, and struggles were almost the same as mine. We were two elementary school girls trying to understand and learn to live with the monsters called war and the enemy.

The only difference was that the name of the bad guy in the Iranian media was “Saddam”, whilst the villain’s name in the Iraqi media was “Khomeini”.
She wrote, “Saddam was everywhere,” meaning that his image filled the news until it was burned into her mind, so that she started to see his face even when it was not there.
It was almost the same on my side of the story. Pictures of Khomeini filled the television and the newspapers. A man with a black turban and a long white beard was the evil representative of our neighbours, whose country turned overnight into the country of the beasts who were trying to harm us.

To make it clear to the children who the new enemy was, cartoons were produced that made fun of Khomeini and portrayed him as a dumb character. In one of those videos, Khomeini was being followed by an Iraqi missile, and after it hit him, he would fall from the sky, with torn clothes and red underpants, into the sea. At the end, a shark that had been waiting for him would finally eat him. Those cartoons influenced my childhood. We drew these image in art class at school. And in all those drawings, something bad had to happen to Khomeini. He was either under a tank, blown up by a bomb, or drowning in the sea. The imagination of children trying to kill the homeland’s enemy had no limits.

Other practices, like shutting down the city and house lights, were also mentioned in the book. We did the same and spent lots of candlelit evenings. The lights were turned off to make the cities invisible to attacking aircraft at night and reduce the danger. This technique might not be relevant nowadays, since the missiles are guided by GPS instead of relying on a pilot’s vision.
Her family would gather in the most protected area of the house when the alarm went off, which seemed to be the cellar in her case. We gathered under the stairs, because there were no windows.

One more similarity was how the feeling of going to school changed for both of us. Like her, the thing I was most afraid of was that an attack would happen whilst I was at school and away from my family. This was definitely the worst-case scenario of all. And we had every reason in the world to be afraid.

I remember the day when we heard the horrible blast of a missile after midnight. In the morning, on our way to school, we saw the house that had been hit and destroyed by the attack, a building in the middle of Haifa Street. Dust filled the air, and many ambulances and fire engines were blocking the road. At school, I was told that a sixth-grade student had been killed with his family. Sadness covered the school for the next few weeks.

Maybe one of the worst days of the Iran–Iraq War on the Iraqi side was 13 October 1987, when an Iranian missile hit an elementary school in Baghdad shortly after eight in the morning, as the children were lining up for the morning ceremony. The missile killed more than thirty students and three teachers and injured over one hundred and fifty.
It could have been any school and any group of students, but on that day, the missile chose them as the victims and all the rest as the survivors. The survivors lived with the fear that “tomorrow it could be us”.

The loss of safety for the children living in countries at war is the same everywhere.

*In case you are curious, I found a low-quality video of the Iraqi anti-Khomeini propaganda cartoon on YouTube:

The name of the novel is „Together Tea“ by Marjan Kamali