Fiction and the Unofficial History of Iraqi Poets In his recent novel The Professors of Illusion (2011) Iraqi author Ali Bader tries to document the devastating and alienating effects of war on a marginal group of Iraqi poets who participated in the Iran Iraq war and found death as martyrs or because of desertion. In this fictional exploration of poets and poetry in times of war The Professors of illusion with humor and irony draws a dramatic psychological portrait of alienated young poets who came under the influence of western poets and ended up in a state of total disconnection from their realities. At the center of their philosophy the novel stresses how these outsiders poets in their opposition to war did not even condemn it in their poems, rather they followed a Sarterian conception whereby the poem is considered as an imaginary aesthetic object outside the world; and where poetry, as opposed to prose, cannot be committed to moral ideas or social and political causes. Poetry saves them from the craziness of war only to deepen their alienation and their schizophrenia. In this paper I will try to shed light on the relevance of this war novel and its approach of the devastating and alienating effects of war on marginal poets/soldiers. And I will examine its historical importance at the light of the context of the literary records of propaganda war poetry written in the 1980’s during the Iran Iraq war.