On 24 August 1990, Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr learned from ‘a short report published in a newspaper’ that Ghāʾib Ṭuʿma Farmān had died recently in Moscow (al-Ṣaqr 2001c: 79).

Earlier that month, on the day the Iraqi forces crossed the Kuwaiti border to occupy the country (Thursday, 2 August 1990), the writer wrote just one line in his diaries: ‘I cannot write today’ (ibid., p. 78). Al-Ṣaqr clearly felt that another tragedy, after the long war with Iran, was about to befall the people of Iraq, and he had become concerned that he might not be able to finish the novel he was working on. He wrote later in the same month: ‘I'm working on finishing the last pages of the novel before something happens that might prevent me from finishing it, or perhaps even from going on living, and I don't want to leave an unfinished work behind’ (ibid., pp. 78–9).