At ten, Samir sliced open frogs in the backyard, not for cruelty but for truth—his small hands trembling as he pinned their guts to wax, sketching veins in notebooks that teachers later burned, calling him unnatural. He was no ordinary child. His eyes, sharp as obsidian, saw the world as a puzzle to be dissected.
By twenty-five, he was a god in the operating theater. Damascus hailed him as “The Sculptor,” a surgeon whose scalpel danced through flesh to snatch life from death’s jaws. In 1980, he separated conjoined twins, their shared heart pulsing under his blade, a miracle that echoed across borders. His hands were steady, his mind a fortress of precision. But the world does not suffer brilliance lightly. In 1983, Jerusalem called—a teenage Jewish girl, her face shattered by shrapnel, needed his skill.
Samir went, naive, believing medicine could bridge the chasms of hate. He rebuilt her, stitch by agonizing stitch, only to be accused of raping her in a post-operative haze. The lie was a blade to his soul, wielded by political vipers who needed a scapegoat. The trial was a slaughter—witnesses bought, evidence forged, his name dragged through the gutters of headlines. Sentenced to ten years, he was thrown into a Syrian prison, a pit of despair where hope went to die.
The cell was a coffin of damp stone, its walls slick with the sweat and blood of the forgotten. Samir’s body bore the marks of his keepers—fists split his lips, boots cracked his ribs, and starvation gnawed his bones until he was a husk, his once-steady hands trembling with rage. They called him “doctor” in mockery, spitting in his gruel as they broke his fingers one by one, ensuring he’d never hold a scalpel again.
But pain was a teacher. In the dark, he whispered to himself, reconstructing surgeries in his mind, imagining new ways to cut, to reshape. The betrayal festered, a cancer that ate his faith in humanity. He saw the world as a machine of oppression, its gears greased with his suffering. Israel, Lebanon, the West—they were all complicit, puppeteers pulling strings to crush men like him. When he emerged in 1993, he was no longer Samir Haddad. He was a shadow, a blade forged in betrayal’s fire.
Damascus’s underworld swallowed him whole. In smoke-choked dens, he found Jibril al-Nasr, Hassan Suleiman, and Fadi al-Bashir—men whose scars mirrored his own, their hatred a hymn he could sing. Together, they birthed The Obsidian Hand, a vow to burn the world that had burned them. While his brothers plotted with bombs and bullets, Samir turned to a darker art. Prison had cracked open his mind, letting in whispers of history’s cruelties—Nazi doctors carving Jews into screams, medieval torturers flaying skin to pulp, Chinese executioners slicing flesh a thousand times until death was a mercy. He devoured banned texts, his fingers tracing sketches of fused limbs and rewired nerves, his breath quickening at the possibilities. A pirated copy of The Human Centipede—a grotesque film of mouths stitched to asses—lit a fire in his gut. He saw not horror but destiny: to end division by forging unity through agony.
In desert lairs, where the air stank of rust and decay, Samir began his work. Captives—spies, traitors, soldiers—were dragged to his table, their eyes wide with terror. His first masterpiece, “The Singularity,” was a captured intelligence officer, strapped to a gurney under flickering fluorescent light. Samir’s tools gleamed: scalpels crusted with dried blood, a bone saw that shrieked through marrow, a cauterizing iron glowing like hell’s ember.
With a surgeon’s precision, he severed the man’s hands, the crunch of bone echoing as blood sprayed his face. He grafted them to the man’s shoulders, stitching nerves to alien sockets, creating a grotesque parody of anatomy. The prisoner’s screams were a symphony, his body convulsing as pain looped through his rewired nerves, his brain drowning in signals it couldn’t parse. Samir watched, clinical, muttering into a recorder: “Subject exhibits total neural collapse. Fascinating.” The man lasted two days, his flesh rotting from infection, his final gasps a gurgle of despair. Samir dumped the corpse in a ditch, but the data—oh, the data was divine.
By the millennium, he was a myth among killers, his name whispered with dread. His experiments grew bolder, his lairs littered with the detritus of his craft—rusted hooks, pliers crusted with flesh, clamps that bit to bone. He saw the Olympics as a mockery, a stage where oppressors flaunted false unity while his people choked on ash.
The 1996 barring of a Palestinian weightlifter, a man who’d trained eight years only to be turned away, was a spark to his powder keg. Samir dreamed of a monument to suffering, a chain of bodies—Israeli, Lebanese, the symbols of his pain—stitched into one writhing mass. In journals stained with blood, he scrawled, “Conflict ends in me. I will forge them as one, a testament to my will.” His lab coat, once white, was a crimson shroud, his hands dripping with the gore of those he’d broken.
Samir Haddad is no mere monster. He is a wound of the Middle East’s endless wars—the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, Lebanon’s betrayals, the ashes of his honor. His scalpel is a mirror to a world that birthed his rage, a question posed in Beneath the Rings: what happens when genius becomes a butcher’s blade?
The answer lies in the shadows, where blood pools and a scream is eternal. Beneath the Rings is coming. Share your dread with #BeneathTheRings. The desert waits. What price will vengeance carve?
