It is known among people that young generations are the seeds for a bright future and prosperous country. But what if these generations are traumatized by war? What if they immigrate?
Ahmed, one of my best friends, became hopeless. I chat with him and sometimes we talk to each other through voice chat on the internet. His sense of humor was one of the best among my other friends. This glow of humor is distinguished and maybe forever.
“I am desperate,” he says every time I talk to him. “I am alone and miserable now,” he said in despair as I was gazing at his image through the webcam. He was pale. He was not Ahmed the one I know. He was a different man. I could see his eyes were full of tears resisting falling. He did not want me to see them in order not to depress me. Even when he is sad, he doesn’t want to make others sad.
Ahmed was left alone. Our group of friends has left Baghdad. Safaa resisted to the last minute to stay there but he couldn’t. He left to Egypt to work, study, and find a new life where he can feel alive and able to produce to do something useful instead of staying in a war zone where death is the only production. “I decided to leave in the last minute,” he told me by phone from Egypt yesterday. “I just couldn’t stay there anymore. I expected to be killed at any moment,” he added with a sad tone in his voice. The ministry where he worked refused to give him a two-year leave to study abroad. So he decided to leave them chasing a brighter future he planned for. Unfortunately, this future is not going to be built in Iraq.
Jordan, Syria, Dubai, and Egypt are the new destinations of Iraqis running away from the worst war happened in the region since the civil war in Lebanon in the 1980s. Massive immigrations to these countries and some western countries flourished as everything else in Iraq deteriorated.
Sameem, one of my other best friends, left Baghdad and went to Kirkuk. “It is unbearable to live in Baghdad,” he said. He preferred going to his hometown Kirkuk which is another victim of the war. “If I die by a car bomb is better than being kidnapped, tortured and killed,” he told me in email he sent three days ago. He added that our neighborhood is no longer the same. “Many things have changed since you left,” he said. “It is much worse now.”
The family of my other friend Ahmed has left to Syria before he did. He did not want to go there at first. Satisfied with his computer sciences degree and his electronic and electric store he owned in Adhamiya, he did not join his family there. Since this area is no longer alive and since the militiamen started kidnapping shop owners, he thought about leaving. He is in Syria now looking for a job. He sold his store as well as his family’s house and left for no plan to return.
Most of my blog readers and visitors remember Bashar whose mother was killed in an explosion in our neighborhood last May. He is now desperate like many young Iraqis. He lost his mother, lost his hope and lost everything that brings smile back to his face. He also started thinking of leaving trying to save the rest of his family before he loses them.
We never felt we were going to be separated like this. I remember how our eyes were filled with tears when I left. We hugged each other and cried realizing that we may not see each other again. We were great friends. We always considered ourselves the sign of hopeful Iraq. We were Sunnis, Shiites, and Turkomen and we always considered ourselves the New Iraq, not the “New Iraq” that Hakim's and Sadr's militias and insurgents formed.
