As night fell, the day of war finally passed.

The orange sun gradually receded from the earth like a low tide, a new moon hung in the sky early, and the cold wind of late autumn swept away large grains of sand and dust.

After a full day of artillery fire and gunsmoke, the soldiers and civilians of Fort Sharqat, a small city in north-central Iraq, less than 30 kilometers north of the line of fire, staggered along the road of civil war with no end in sight, and soldiers and civilians who had been busy all day were hurrying to rest and rest.

Looking around the city, on the dusty, windy city roads, most of the shops along the street are closed early, and only a few pedestrians walk briskly by the roadside; The New Party soldiers, who were on duty at the intersection, carried AK74 rifles on their shoulders and wrapped their faces in dust-stained turbans, revealing only a pair of vigilant eyes, watching for any unusual movement in all corners of the city in the cold night wind.

At a time when the fighting is intensifying and the enemy forces are closing in on the city, tension is in the air at the tiny Fort Sharqat, a small military town on which the new Iraqi regime relies to defend Mosul.

If you prick up your ears and listen carefully, the faint sound of explosions mixed with the sound of the wind is still coming from the south, which is where the front-line troops are located, and at this time they may be under artillery bombardment by the Liberal forces, and perhaps some more terrible bomb bombs.

The flames of war had reached their doorstep, and the civilians of Fort Scharqat had closed their doors and windows, extinguished their lights, and endured the long cold night in their low, humble dwellings.

I have lived in this city for a long time. These poor inhabitants now have to be the same as the civilians of Tikrit and Bayi in the southern land. awaited with fear a major offensive by the Liberal army and a military occupation that was likely to occur; Although enough hard life has been lived under the Baghdad regime. However, now that the army is pressing down and the city is about to be destroyed, many people are beginning to miss the "good life of the old times" and fantasize that if Saddam Hussein is still alive and Iraq is still that unified sovereign country, maybe things will not turn out like this, and their own situation will probably not be so bad.

This kind of thinking, although it is a complete illusion. But it has to be said that it still represents the mentality of a considerable number of people.

The so-called ordinary people who are "scattered" will become more vulnerable when disaster strikes; Many people, after trying to escape failure, often begin to find solace in their memories, numbing themselves with soap bubble-like illusory memories, and by the way, they can find a reason to relieve all this suffering.

"It's all their fault, what if it was ...... at the time"

Driven by this negativity, some of the people who hid in the shadowy houses continued their persistent complaints or discussed when the Liberals would storm the city and bring them "real peace and order."

The daydreams of ordinary people. It's always easy to get ridiculous; However, unlike the civilians who are tired and sinking day by day, and even have a lot of complaints, it is at this time when the fire of civil war is burning more and more, and the Liberal Party soldiers are overwhelming. A large number of strong-willed people are still fighting for themselves, for the nascent regime, and for the future of the troubled country of Iraq.

In the past few days, the Liberal ground forces have been attacked by a large number of people, during which they have been rushed to the outskirts of the city by their opponents, and the positions of the New Party forces near Fort Scharqat have changed hands many times, and the originally flat and open ground has been scarred and devastated by shells and bombs; In this dire situation, an air base on the southern outskirts of Fort Scharqat was not spared and could not be used any longer, and a squadron of NATA independent fighters originally stationed at this small base had been relocated to the northern outskirts of the city, settling in hastily rammed runways and tarpaulin "barracks".

As a NATA that grew up in the flames of war but also suffered setbacks, the troop establishment is also different from the air power of ordinary countries, or it is an expedient move in the form of war: let's just say that the air force now stationed at Fort Scharqat is the third squadron of the New Party Air Force IFG (Independent_Fighter_Group, Independent Fighter Group) sequence, which is equipped with more than ten Su-27SK, The combat sequence of the Su-27UBK and Su-27SKM twin-engine heavy fighters is officially called 3rd_IHFS (Independent_Heavy_Fighter_Squadron, separate heavy fighter squadron).

"The 3rd Independent Heavy Fighter Squadron", this name sounds like a bluff, but in fact it is purely redundant.

Because now, there are nearly a hundred fighters equipped by NATA, and only this "third squadron" is equipped with twin-engine heavy aircraft, and the other only 1st and 2nd_IHFS on paper probably refer to the air force before the Iraqi Civil War, in fact, the planes of those squadrons are all MiG-29s, which are not heavy fighters.

Long Yun, who had just arrived at Fort Scharqat that day and settled down in a base in poor conditions, naturally heard about these situations of "3rd_IHFS" from his partner whom he had just met but had known for a long time.

At noon on this day, the truck team carrying supplies went all the way west, intending to go to Kirkuk, an important eastern town in the Xinparty-controlled district, but encountered a crazy air raid by Liberal fighters in an unknown village, and encountered a fierce battle as soon as he stepped into the war zone.

So in the afternoon of the same day, he broke away from the messy battlefield and continued along the road west in the "Warrior" off-road vehicle, without saying much along the way, and then took a nap in his seat even more groggy.

Half-asleep and half-awake, Long Yun occasionally looked out of the car window, the countryside scene in the earthy yellow tone was also so uniform, he sometimes looked curiously at the vehicles passing by on the road, those dusty military trucks, and the T-72S tanks with their skirts off were all the same yellow, Long Yun only felt as if he had fallen into the desert all of a sudden, and he seemed to be a mouse that accidentally slipped into the barn, in a daze at the boundless yellow and clear millet in front of him.

Once one of the four birthplaces of ancient civilizations in the world, the land of the Middle East, with its splendid civilization of two rivers, has now become like this......

After encountering a brutal air raid on the village and seeing a hellish scene on earth, and suddenly having a hint of disgust with war, Long Yun's current thoughts seem extraordinarily unbounded.

Sitting on the back seat of the off-road vehicle, he first remembered the historical Mongol Empire's westward expeditions, those barbarians on horseback swept through the Middle East again and again, burned and looted everywhere, and even broke through Baghdad in 1258, resulting in the extinction of people everywhere in the two river basins and more rapid desertification; Then he remembered the Timurid Empire, which rose like a gust of wind, and this lame tyrant who admired force commanded a large army to attack on all sides, only to die suddenly and violently as he prepared to attack the East; The Ottoman Turkish Empire, which came later, crushed the cross of the Eastern Roman Empire with the crescent flag, and entrenched its capital Constantinople to this day; Finally, there are the tragicomedies of modern history, the Israelis sent by the British Empire to stir up the situation, and the oil that suddenly entered the human eye, completely turned this land at the hub of three continents and the unrivaled strategic location into a huge gladiatorial arena for the struggle of the great powers, and since then there has been no peaceful day in the Middle East except for the monstrous war and saber rattling.

He didn't know much about history, Long Yun didn't know much about the grievances and grievances of the Middle East, and after a burst of emotion, he still remembered a sentence, "Oil is black gold", this sentence should be summed up so correctly, but how cruel it is.

Is the black oil flowing gold or the thick blood?

Whether it is a rich financial oligarchy or a war-torn refugee who survives depends on the identity and position of the speaker.

Naturally, the roads were not easy to walk on in the war-torn land, and it took more than four hours for the "Warrior" off-road vehicle with its engine to roar suddenly for a distance of more than 100 kilometers from the eastern suburbs of Kirkuk to the temporary air base at Fort Sharqat.

Thinking about it silently along the way, Long Yun didn't get out of the car until the car stopped on the side of the field airfield under the twilight sky, he jumped out of the car, said goodbye to Lieutenant Basel and others, and then followed the sound to look at the two Su-27 fighters that landed on the runway in the distance, and heard the familiar roar of the AL-31 series engines, his mood improved a lot, and he began to seriously consider the secret mission he came this time again.

Personally participating in the civil war in the Middle East is not much of a terrible thing for a veteran in a parallel world; War is certainly unpleasant, but to complete the task now, the only way to do so is to fight against the tide in this monstrous whirlpool.

With this in mind, he met with Lieutenant Colonel Sami Ahmed, the commander of the temporary base and the head of the 3rd Separate Heavy Fighter Squadron, and completed some formalities in the canvas tent that served as the squadron's office. (To be continued......)