Rashid was a quiet child, his eyes sharp and searching, absorbing the world with a hunger that unnerved even his parents. By ten, he was reciting Rumi and debating legal principles with his father’s customers, his voice soft but unyielding, like a blade wrapped in silk. The streets of Amman were his classroom, where he learned the weight of words and the cost of truth.

But the city also whispered of unrest—tales of Palestinian displacement, of Jordan’s uneasy peace with its neighbors, of wars that scarred the region like open wounds. These stories seeped into Rashid’s bones, shaping a boy who saw justice not as an ideal but as a debt the world owed. As a teenager, Rashid’s brilliance burned brighter. He devoured legal texts, earning a scholarship to the University of Jordan, where he studied law with a fervor that bordered on obsession. His professors called him “The Arbiter,” a nickname born of his ability to dismantle arguments with surgical precision. By twenty-five, he was a rising star in Jordan’s judiciary, a judge whose rulings were as feared as they were respected. His courtroom was a theater of truth, where no lie could hide from his gaze. Yet, beneath his robes, Rashid carried a growing unease. The law, he realized, was a fragile thing, easily bent by power.

He saw it in the bribes offered to his colleagues, in the foreign diplomats who meddled in Jordan’s affairs, in the refugees who begged for justice but received only silence. The world was not just; it was a machine that crushed the weak and rewarded the cruel. The turning point came in 2014, when the chaos of ISIS spilled across Iraq and Syria, and foreign-backed militias roamed like wolves. Rashid had moved his family—his wife, Amina, and their two young daughters—to a quiet village near the Iraqi border, hoping to shield them from Amman’s growing tensions. But peace was a lie. One night, a botched raid by a coalition-backed militia tore through their home. Rashid was in Amman, delivering a lecture, when the call came. The line crackled with static, then silence. When he arrived at the village, he found only ash and blood. His wife’s body lay in the courtyard, her eyes open to the sky. His daughters, barely six and eight, were crumpled nearby, their small hands still reaching for each other. The militia had mistaken their home for a terrorist safehouse, and no apology followed.

The world moved on, but Rashid did not. He buried his family in the desert, their graves unmarked, and with them, he buried the man he had been. Grief did not break Rashid; it forged him. He resigned his judgeship, sold his father’s books, and vanished into the shadows. The law had failed him, so he would become its executioner. He sought out the region’s outcasts—men and women like him, scarred by betrayal and loss. In the mountains of Lebanon, he met Hassan Suleiman, a grizzled militia commander whose hatred for foreign powers mirrored his own. Hassan introduced him to The Obsidian Hand, a brotherhood of vengeance that saw the world as Rashid now did: a battlefield where only force could balance the scales. Jibril al-Nasr, the group’s strategist, recognized Rashid’s intellect and gave him a new purpose: to weaponize words, to twist minds, to make nations tremble. Rashid, once a servant of justice, became its dark prophet.

His indoctrination was not a single moment but a descent, each step marked by blood. In 2016, he orchestrated his first act of retribution. A Jordanian official, complicit in the raid that killed his family, was lured to a safehouse with promises of a bribe. Rashid did not kill him himself. Instead, he bound the man to a chair and forced him to watch a looped recording of his own corrupt dealings, interspersed with images of Rashid’s daughters. For three days, the official begged for mercy, his sanity unraveling. On the fourth day, Rashid slit his throat with a ceremonial dagger, whispering, “Justice is balance.” The body was left in a public square, a message to those who served the machine. By 2021, Rashid’s name was a whisper among the world’s intelligence agencies. He had become The Obsidian Hand’s chief negotiator and propagandist, a man who could topple regimes with a single broadcast. His most chilling act came that year, when he targeted an African warlord who had betrayed the group by selling their arms to a Western agency.

Rashid lured him to a meeting with promises of a lucrative deal, then leaked doctored footage framing him as a CIA informant. The warlord’s own men turned on him, tearing him apart in a frenzy of rage. Rashid watched via drone feed, his voice calm as he murmured, “Justice is balance.” The footage was later broadcast across dark web channels, a warning to traitors and a recruitment call for the desperate.Rashid’s methods were not merely cruel; they were surgical. He studied his enemies, peeling back their fears and desires until he could break them without firing a shot. He once infiltrated a diplomat’s email, sending messages that drove a wedge between allies, sparking a crisis that cost billions. Another time, he orchestrated a fake terrorist attack, complete with forged manifestos, to manipulate a government into cracking down on its own people, fueling unrest that The Obsidian Hand exploited. His broadcasts, delivered in a voice both soothing and venomous, twisted global perceptions, framing the group’s violence as righteous retribution. To his followers, he was a savior; to his enemies, a ghost. Joining The Obsidian Hand was not a choice for Rashid but a rebirth.

The group’s motto, “Through fire, we are forged,” echoed his own transformation. He saw in Jibril, Hassan, Fadi, and Samir Haddad the same wounds that drove him—men shaped by loss, united by a hunger for reckoning. Rashid’s role was to give their rage a voice, to make the world feel their pain. He brokered alliances with radical factions, negotiated ransoms that funded their war, and ensured that no betrayal went unpunished. His encrypted messages, laced with cryptic Arabic poetry, were both a taunt and a promise. In Beneath the Rings, The Obsidian Hand’s $500 billion ransom demand is not just a number—it is a scale, weighing the guilt of nations against the blood of his people. Rashid Nazari is no mere warlord. He is a fracture in the world’s conscience, a man who once sought justice but found only ashes. His broadcasts are a mirror to the Middle East’s endless wars—the invasions, the betrayals, the graves that mark the desert. In Beneath the Rings, he asks a question that cuts deeper than any blade: what happens when a mind honed for truth becomes a weapon of vengeance? The answer lies in the shadows, where justice is balance, and balance is blood. Beneath the Rings is coming. Share your dread with #BeneathTheRings. The desert waits. What price will justice demand?