A fighting man. Gegard Mousasi's face is marked with scars, many of them small, and healed, like the pitted landscape of this road warrior's life. The 32-year-old, fighting for the 51st time and headlining on his Bellator MMA debut against tough Russian Alexander Schlemenko on Friday's card here at the Mohegan Sun on a Native Indian reservation in Connecticut, has plied his trade across the world from Asia, through Europe, to the USA.

Yet his life story is one of Exodus, upheaval, and the long struggle to prove himself. With all that, Mousasi remains one of the quiet men of mixed martial arts, in spite of a history that resonates with turmoil once the lines open up and you read between them.

Born in Iran into an Armenian community, at the height of the Iran-Iraq war - in which half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers, with estimates of a similar number of civilians, are believed to have died – Gegard’s formative years were inextricably linked to conflict.

The first Persian Gulf War has been compared to World War I with large-scale trench warfare. It was attritional, with manned machine-gun posts, bayonet charges, and waves of attacks across a no-man's land, and extensive use of chemical weapons.