When my sister and I were talking the other day about my niece, she broke my heart on something she told me, which chilled my entire spine and let my tears loose. My niece has started crying when she wakes up in the morning.
A few weeks ago, my sister heard my niece crying in her room a few minutes after her father went to work. She ran quickly to her room seeing her weeping in her bed. She held her and tried to comfort her but she didn’t stop. She went crying more as my sister held her. She took her to the living room and brought her all her favorite dolls and toys but she didn’t stop. She didn’t even touch them. She played a Sesame Street DVD for her but she didn’t look at it. She kept crying. Desperate, my sister took her outside to the backyard. As her feet stepped on the garden’s grass, she started jumping and running here and there with her tears drying gradually on her delicate cheeks. “She was depressed,” my sister told me. “She wanted to be outside the house. We barely go out these days.”
My heart sank thinking about how my 17-months old niece felt imprisoned in her house. She is one of the hundreds of thousands of children imprisoned in their houses, unable to enjoy their childhood. The last time my sister said they went to an amusement park and zoo was last month where she said they took the risk for the sake of this little girl. She told me how she was absolutely happy to see the animals at the zoo as she was jumping, carrying her red and purple balloons. She said they can’t go frequently there because one car bomb or a suicide bomber would be enough to turn their life into a tragedy.Now my worries do not only include fear of death for my family, but also the trauma that this war is going to leave on this little girl. USA Today published a very good article about how 70 percent of Iraqi children are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which ironically, I don’t believe it’s a “post” disorder since they are still going through the same horror every single day.
Many Iraqi children have to pass dead bodies on the street as they walk to school in the morning, according to a separate report last week by the International Red Cross. Others have seen relatives killed or have been injured in mortar or bomb attacks. © USA Today
What will happen to her in the future? How is she going to deal with her childhood deprivation in the future? What kind of a child she is going to be being deprived of even enjoying the slide on the weekend? What kind of child she is going to be being imprisoned inside her house all day unable to be among children in her age? What will she say when she grows up and talks about her childhood? So many questions are in my mind but there is no answer to any one of them.
And as usual, the elected Iraqi government has no solutions for anything. Their recklessness to this situation has become as damaging as what the insurgents and militias are doing against the people of this country. Every time someone asks them about something, they use the phrase “security situation”.
The Iraqi government is aware of the problem but largely unequipped to address
it, said Ali al-Dabbagh, a government spokesman. "Until we have proper security
in
in
I don’t know when this security situation is going to be improved. Maybe when there will be no more Iraqis in
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