Utkarsh NarangFounder, IgnitedNeurons · Your best doers become your worst managers as you scale. I turn them into leaders so your best people don’t leave.

Growing Up During The Iraq-Iran War Made Me Who I Am Today #shorts

21 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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1:03

In this short, the speaker reflects on his childhood from 1980 to 1988, the period of the eight‑year Iran‑Iraq war, while living in northern Iraq. He describes the constant uncertainty of daily life under the threat of air‑raid sirens, the routine of seeking shelter in a bunker that was attached to his house, and the moments when reaching a bunker was impossible, forcing him to stand against a wall as instructed. The narrative conveys the pervasive fear, the communal reliance on shared shelters, and the lasting psychological imprint of growing up amid relentless conflict.

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So again, to reflect on that 8 to 80, at 8 I was living through a war. So I was living in the north of Iraq. Iraq had been in an 8-year war with Iran, and that was my life. I was born in 1980 till 1988, lived that war. So, you know, it, it, to just bring that to life, that looks like every day you don't know what your day might look like. I still remember a day walking to school and hearing a siren. So normally we all knew what to do when we would hear the siren, we would go. In a bunker, our neighbors would come. We were lucky to have a bunker in my house. So, you know, I would often be in the bunker with pretty much our whole street, sometimes multiple times a day, but on good days, once a day. But often you were close to home. That was lucky that you could make it to the bunker. But sometimes you, you knew based on the siren, you could not make it to a bunker. So your job in that case was just to stand against a wall, basically. That, that was what we were told to do.