This Is Their Time

LOUAFI LARBI/REUTERS

This Is Their Time

They are the faces of young men
their eyes facing into the camera
those lens captures their earnest attitude
sometimes leavened by the courtesy of
a gracious smile, more often a fractious
scowl, for theirs, after all, is a serious
business, something the camera 
operator, a photo-journalist from some
foreign news agency knows well, for
he is there, in Syria, in Egypt, in Turkey,
Tunisia, Libya, Somalia, Iraq, Iran and
Jordan for that very purpose of capturing
their urgency and the foetid heat of war.
This is their employment, deployed
by the heavens above - for God is great
and God is with them - to do jihad
and to further aspire to the venerated
role of martyrdom. Not all seek the
identical objective but all are inspired.
Some are liberal socialists, others clearly
fanatical mujahideen. Most, though young,
are bearded, swarthy, even black-masked.
They are evanescent in shared determination
to surmount all obstacles in their path to 
reform - or to Sharia, as God calls them
to defend and surrender. Their zealous,
impressionability lends them to their
mission. Their smiling, proud, scowling
defiant visages can be seen, immortalized
on news sites and within books written
by well-read journalists recounting their
news-gathering adventures at great peril
to life and limb. The reader is left to ponder
whether those young faces have become
the sad legacy of youth sacrificed to the
discords and discards of mordant history.