Cold nights never change, winter is very cold, and so is the memory, especially if the memory of a war is renewed with every cold. The sounds of bombing that fill the atmosphere of the streets of Kyiv were not strange to the hearing of the Iraqi young man who left Karbala 10 years ago, and chose to stay away from war and destruction But the war never left him.

Here is last February, has brought the scene back to Murtada al-Amiri's memory. Twenty years after the US forces invaded Iraq, Murtada is experiencing a new conflict, but this time with the other superpower, after Russian forces launched military operations against his second home, Ukraine.

Dreams chased by bad luck

Life before Thursday, when Russia began its military operations against Ukraine, was normal and devoid of expectations, but bad luck was the companion of the journey of the thirty-year-old who fled from Karbala to Ukraine, where he expected the doors of hope to open wide for him in the European country, and to win The young dentist with advantages that he could not obtain in his country.

10 years that Murtada al-Amiri spent in Ukraine, promising opportunities, easy citizenship and easy marriage;

Those were the dreams for which Al-Amiri chose Ukraine, and only fulfilled the marriage, which was not possible as he expected.

Al-Amiri tells Al-Jazeera Net the story of his marriage to the Ukrainian girl he loved for two years and then they got married. He says, "The story of my marriage is not without war either. My wife is from the disputed Crimean region between Russia and Ukraine."

In 2014, after Russia took control of the region, his wife and children were banned from visiting her family as they were Russian lands, and the whole family became exiled. The father denied the war in Iraq, and the mother denied her the Crimean War. As for the children, the war did not leave them in their new place, which reunited the entirety, and entered Kyiv is a cycle of conflict that no one knows when it will end.

Al-Amiri tells Al-Jazeera Net that his young children do not know what is happening, he tries as much as possible to keep them away from the sounds of the bombing and the panic of the fugitives. .

"Our house was fairly spacious, so I was taking them to the farthest place where the constant sounds of planes would not come, hoping that the situation would not deteriorate further," Al-Amiri added.

Children play while sheltering in a metro station during the day in Kyiv (European News Agency)

The pain of war is one

The war and its memories are still strongly present in the memory of the Iraqi youth, the invasion is one, it does not differentiate between an American and a Russian invasion, both are ruthless, but the victim in Arab countries, does not find anyone to cry out for her, deprived even of the existence of shelters that protect people from bombing.

Al-Amiri lived in Kyiv a different experience this time with the Russian invasion, for the first time he knew what it meant for people to gather in underground shelters to protect against raids. This did not happen in his country, which experienced long wars, where the most that happened was that the family gather in a room One in the farthest corner of the house, but the experience of Al-Amiri's war this time is similar to the films he used to watch on the cinema screen about world wars.

A few days after the beginning of the war, Al Jazeera Net contacted again with Al-Amiri, who is not thinking of returning his wife and two children to Iraq, to ​​escape what is happening in Ukraine, especially since his experience of returning with them several years ago was not appropriate, he said.

But his attempts to bear the scourge of the war in Ukraine ended, and his wife had another opinion, as she asked him to leave Kyiv all as soon as possible, as she saw that her country was no longer a safe place for them and their children.

Al-Amiri had no choice but to leave Ukraine, which he considered the second homeland, in search of another safer one, so the family headed to Poland, which Al-Amiri wished for stability, so that war would not chase him again.