Episode: 35 — "I Was Given a New Life" · Full Episode #35
Season: 4
Language: Libyan Arabic
Mohammed Al-Gurj (محمد القرج) is a Libyan journalist and war correspondent from Zintan. He grew up herding goats in the mountains outside the town. During the 2019 battle for Tripoli, he was the only fixer known to cross between both sides of the front line. He was declared dead for approximately one month before resurfacing. He described himself on the podcast as "a person who died" and was given the chance to observe what happened after.
Al-Gurj grew up as a goat herder in the mountains near Zintan. His father installed a satellite dish — one of the few in the area — which became his window to the outside world. An uncle in Canada provided a second reference point. The distance between the goats and the satellite dish was the distance he crossed to become a journalist. He did not describe the transition as aspirational. He described it as a series of accidents that accumulated into a direction.
Al-Gurj's first act of journalism was founding a school magazine. His motive was not journalism. He founded it to impress a girl. The pattern — romantic love as the engine behind professional projects — recurred throughout his life, and he described it openly, without embarrassment.
Every major project Al-Gurj described was driven, at least in part, by romantic love. He attended dawn prayers for two years to prove himself worthy to a sheikh's daughter. The sheikh said no. She married someone else. He told the story as a fact about how he operates, not as a tragedy. The energy that produced the effort was real regardless of the outcome.
At a student union event, Al-Gurj had a confrontational exchange with Khalifa Haftar about democracy. The details suggest a young journalist asking uncomfortable questions of a military commander and receiving a dismissive response. Al-Gurj presented the exchange without inflating his own role — he asked, Haftar answered, and the gap between the question and the answer said everything.
Al-Gurj was declared dead for approximately one month. The circumstances are connected to his work crossing front lines during the 2019 Tripoli conflict. When he resurfaced, he had the unusual experience of witnessing the aftermath of his own reported death — who mourned, who moved on, what was said.
His formulation: "I am a person who died. I was given the chance to see what happened after I died."
See: Declared Dead
During the 2019 battle for Tripoli between the Government of National Accord and Haftar's Libyan National Army, Al-Gurj was the only known fixer who could cross between both sides of the front line. This required trust — or at minimum, tolerance — from armed groups on each side. He did not explain how he achieved this. He described it as a function of being from Zintan, which occupies a particular position in western Libyan tribal geography.
An exchange between Al-Gurj and his father. The father's statement — "the wall will stop you" — was a warning about limits, about the world's indifference to ambition. Al-Gurj's reply — "the wall won't stop me" — was not optimism. It was stubbornness. He presented the exchange as the core dynamic of his life: being told something is impossible and treating that as irrelevant information.
"I am a person who died. I was given the chance to see what happened after I died." (EP 35)
"The wall will stop you." / "The wall won't stop me." (EP 35)