Daily Inspiration Quote by Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

Bravado as crisis management: al-Sahaf’s line is less a battlefield report than a performance of state control at the exact moment control is slipping. Delivered in the clipped, militant cadence of officialdom, “Yesterday” plants a flag in the recent past - a claim of measurable victory - while “we will continue” stretches that claim into the future, as if momentum alone can substitute for facts on the ground. The repetition of “slaughter” is deliberately crude. It’s meant to bypass nuance and trigger a gut-level response: fear in enemies, reassurance in loyalists, and a kind of pumped-up certainty for anyone watching the regime wobble.

The subtext is panic dressed as inevitability. A government spokesperson doesn’t choose a word like “slaughter” to inform; he chooses it to dominate the narrative, to make violence sound routine, industrial, preordained. It also attempts to erase the opponent’s agency. If “they” are merely being slaughtered, they’re not advancing, adapting, or winning - they’re passive bodies in someone else’s story.

Context does the rest. Al-Sahaf became famous during the 2003 Iraq War for declarations that clashed with visible realities, turning him into a global meme before “meme” was the default language of politics. That’s why the quote works - and fails. It’s propaganda in its purest form, but it’s also an accidental confession: when a spokesperson has to shout certainty this loudly, the audience can smell the uncertainty underneath.