News & Views 06/23/07

Photo: A boy sits next to an empty coffin as he waits to claim the body of his mother who was killed in a bomb attack, outside a hospital morgue in Baghdad's Sadr City June 20, 2007. The death toll from a suicide truck bombing that partly demolished a Shi'ite mosque in Baghdad on Tuesday has risen to 87 overnight, police said on Wednesday. Doctors had warned that the toll, which police initially put at 78, could rise because many of the wounded were badly hurt. REUTERS/Kareem Raheem (IRAQ) [And, a story below (Iraqi women mourns loss of sister, baby) on why so many die from injuries. No ambulances, no treatment, no blood supplies, no surgery, almost nothing to treat these injuries. – dancewanter]

REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ

Number Of Iraqis Slaughtered In America's War On Iraq - At Least 655,000 + +

PHOTOS: Scenes of Western Baghdad

Iraqi woman mourns loss of sister, baby

At 10 a.m. an explosion outside the school shattered the classroom windows and sent a piece of shrapnel into her right thigh. Her blood spread like that of a slaughtered sheep across the classroom floor. The girls started crying and screaming in panic and others rushed upstairs, thinking at first that she had gone into labor after the shock of the explosion. When they saw the blood coming from her thigh, they improvised a stretcher from a blanket, carried her to a police car that was standing near by the school and drove through Baghdad's clogged traffic to nearby Al-Nu'maan hospital. The doctor said he did not have what he needed to stop the bleeding, so they took Luma to another hospital.

It was 12:15 p.m. when my brother-in-law called. By then, Luma had been bleeding for nearly two hours. He assured me that Luma would be fine, and there was no need to worry, but I could tell by the tone in his voice that the situation was serious. It took us — my older brother, his wife and me — more than an hour to reach the hospital. I ran inside, down halls with people whose voices I could not hear and a feeling of numbness all over. We found her in the X-ray room, covered in a blanket with her husband and two of her colleagues at her bedside. She was moaning quietly. I could only blow a kiss toward her pale yellow face and whisper under my breath: "Stay safe. I am waiting for you."

Later, a doctor appeared and asked us to provide her at least 10 units of A-negative blood, a rare type. They said they had none at the hospital. I remember shouting and crying and screaming in the hospital's passages, asking for the director-general's office, but he never appeared. Finally, we managed to locate two units of A-negative blood. I would have given Luma all of my blood, but our blood types didn't match. I began calling relatives and friends. One of my brothers donated two units, another relative two more. By the time a cousin arrived to donate two more units, the baby had already died. Another cousin arrived to donate two more units of blood, but by then it was over. Luma had passed on a few minutes earlier. She died at about 10:20 p.m., after struggling with pain for nearly 12 hours. I fell to the ground. Everything stopped inside me.

Iraqi reporters' dilemma - risk death or leave

With their colleagues dying in record numbers, Iraqi journalists face an unenviable choice -- stay and risk becoming another statistic of unrelenting violence or leave and endure economic hardship and isolation abroad. Iraq is the most dangerous place in the world in which to report, with Iraqis working for local media or major Western outlets bearing the brunt of militant attacks and death threats. Iraqi newspaper reporter Nasser Mohammed said things had become so bad he knew he had to make a decision. Would he put his job first, keep reporting the news and risk his life, or would he put personal safety first at the expense of his professional obligation to report the news? "We have an assignment, a duty we have to do, that is to tell the world what is going on in Iraq," Mohammed told Reuters. He then made a grim revelation. "I've put my death certificate in my pocket. I don't know when it will be signed," he said. "I have to do one of two things -- stay in my office and don't leave it like a prison, or leave Iraq and go abroad. I doubt I'll find a job abroad."

THIS TOO IS IRAQ

A huge building complex is rising above Arbil's ancient citadel and mosques, for long the outstanding features of this city in Iraqi Kurdistan. Once complete, Arbil's Modern Market with its four 33-floor towers will accommodate more than 5,000 shops and business offices. Yes, this too is Iraq. The billion-dollar project is a symbol of the Kurdish region's economic growth. The Iraqi company al-Sharq al-Awsat is building this centre as part of an almost 3.5 billion dollar investment in northern Iraq. While the rest of Iraq is coping with a ruthless campaign of violence, in the north Kurds have rolled up their sleeves to rebuild their autonomous region in the north, which was much damaged during decades of war and sanctions. There is growing interest in investment in Kurdistan. More than 5,800 companies have been registered over the past few years, of which 1,900 are foreign. Last year, the U.S. Department of Commerce recommended Kurdistan as "a gateway for investment in Iraq."

Close and deadly contact

On a sunny April afternoon, a bomb ripped a jagged hole in the road near Abu Mohammed's small grocery store. Gunfire crackled along the street as U.S. soldiers responded to the attack. Someone pounded frantically on the grocer's locked door, pleading for help. Mohammed recognized the frightened voice as that of a local teenager and let him inside. The 17-year-old had been struck by a bullet in the chaos that followed the explosion and was bleeding heavily. Within two hours, the boy was dead. Witnesses charge he was killed by U.S. troops firing randomly. U.S. military officials say troops are trained to avoid civilian casualties and do not fire wildly. Iraqis, however, say the shootings happen frequently and that even if troops are firing at suspected attackers, they often do so on city streets where bystanders are likely to be hit. Rarely is it possible to confirm such incidents. In this case, the boy was the son of a Los Angeles Times employee, which provided reporters knowledge of the incident in time to examine it. Witness and military accounts of the shooting offered a rare look into how such killings can occur.

A river of corpses

For centuries the Tigris River has provided Baghdadis with a rare delicacy: the famous Iraqi Samak mazkouf, a grilled fish. The Tigris was the main source of the fish, kept alive in a tank and you only needed to pick one for the restaurant owners to grill it for you on open fire. But a recent fatwa, or religious decree, issued by Muslim scholars in the city, forbids eating fish from the Tigris River. It is not because of pollution as the Tigris was, before the 2003 U.S. invasion, one of the cleanest rivers in the world. The decaying human corpses dumped into the river, according to the Fatwa, make eating its fish inhuman, unethical and anti-religious. Thanks to U.S. invasion, the Tigris River has turned into a cemetery of floating bodies. The murderous militias and death squads – which the invaders brought with them and nurtured – see the depths of the Tigris as a perfect place to hide their sectarian killings of innocent Iraqis by dumping the bodies of their victims there. Fishermen say their nets and hooks sometimes catch more corpses than fish. The former regime, in a bid to purge the river of any garbage, had erected a steel mesh close to the town of Suwaira. The mesh was cleaned every week. But instead of unwanted materials which the mesh used to catch, it began seizing floating corpses. Scores of families visit the area regularly in the hope of collecting the corpses of loved ones who had gun missing without a trace. Since 2006, at least 800 bodies have been picked up only at Suwaira, according to Abdulwahid Azzam of the Interior Ministry.

REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ

A Culture of Atrocity

All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are swiftly placed in what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton terms “atrocity-producing situations.” In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke or driving down a street means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress leads troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage that soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen as supporting the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral one. It is a leap from killing—the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm—to murder—the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. American Marines and soldiers have become, after four years of war, acclimated to atrocity.

The American killing project is not described in these terms to the distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract of glory, honor and heroism, of the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. The press, as in most wars, is slavishly compliant. The reality of the war—the fact that the occupation forces have become, along with the rampaging militias, a source of terror to most Iraqis—is not transmitted to the American public. The press chronicles the physical and emotional wounds visited on those who kill in our name. The Iraqis, those we kill, are largely nameless, faceless dead. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a regrettable but necessary virtue.

COMMENTARY

Interview: The Lose-Lose War

And it’s important to keep in mind that we have reason to doubt what’s being said now, because the same people who are telling us that it’s a civil war and sectarian strife are the same people who told us, “Saddam has WMDs and has ties to al-Qaida.” You know, 3½ years after the invasion, the Senate Intelligence Committee determined that there were no ties to al-Qaida. And this is what many people were saying. It didn’t make sense because Iraq was a secular government, Saddam Hussein was a secular leader, and al-Qaida, led by Bin Laden—at least his coverage of it—was an extremist, a religious extremist. And we actually used Saddam Hussein during the 1980s to prevent the spread of Islamic fundamentalism from Iran. So the history did not even make sense, but the American people were terrified after Sept. 11, and their government, who they wanted to trust, told them, “This is who is responsible.” But we had as much right to invade Mongolia as we did to invade Iraq.

Scheer: Your relatives, I guess your family is basically centered in Basra, right?

Wasfi: Correct.

Scheer: And these are supposed to be the people who have most benefited from the invasion. These are the people who were oppressed by Saddam Hussein. These are the people that, it is argued, “We can’t just abandon them.” And you’ve traveled. You went back to that area, right?

Wasfi: Uh-huh.

Scheer: And without claiming to speak for every individual there, what is your sense of the people there? How has the occupation affected them? What did you observe, and why do you think they might want us to leave, if that’s what you think?

Wasfi: I believe that probably—and this is something my Dad will say—probably at the time that the regime fell, maybe 99% of Iraqis were happy to see it go. It was a brutal regime. With the sanctions, people were starving to death. Between 1.2 and 1.8 million Iraqis died during the sanctions period. They were happy to see Saddam go. But they wanted their freedoms. They thought any change would be for the better. And if you ask Iraqis now, “Is your life better now than under Saddam Hussein?” They will tell you, “No way.” Because first and foremost, there’s no security now. People used to stay out to the late hours, having a social life, meeting at the tea cafés, coffee cafés. From the day of the invasion, “Everybody inside by 6 o’clock!” Because it was our responsibility, American forces’ responsibility, to establish law and order, and we failed miserably. In addition, the infrastructure continues to deteriorate. The services, as has been documented by the U.S. Government Accounting Office, even in 2004, the services had already deteriorated to be worse than under Saddam Hussein. So you have a population whose government, the puppet government in the Green Zone, is not providing security, is not providing electricity, is not providing potable water. What are they doing? They’re working on oil laws that will privatize Iraq’s oil and give up ownership to foreign companies.

IRAQI REFUGEES

'TERRIBLE THINGS HAPPENED TO ME'

The Women's Commission has been in Amman, Jordan for two weeks to talk to refugee women and youth from Iraq. Over four million Iraqis have fled their homes because of
brutal violence that is ravaging Iraq. This warfare has taken an incredible toll on the health of the Iraqi people, and women and girls are being particularly and systematically targeted for violence.

AUDIO: 'We're going to see thousands more killed'

Prize-winning journalists Ghaith Abdul-Ahad of the Guardian and Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post discuss Iraq's future.

How to Help Iraqi Refugees

RESISTANCE

Iraq Moratorium Day – September 21 and every third Friday thereafter

"I hereby make a commitment that on Friday, September 21, 2007, and the third Friday of every subsequent month I will break my daily routine and take some action, by myself or with others, to end the War in Iraq."

Quote of the day: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” ~ Ernest Hemingway