In 2006, Sunni insurgents drove out my uncle’s family in Dora, a neighborhood where they lived happily among their Sunni and Christian neighbors for about fifteen years before the outbreak of the war. Since they left, the house became occupied by a Sunni family who was driven out a Shiite neighborhood by Shiite militias. The house is in a miserable condition, as one of the neighbors told my uncle by phone. He urged him not to come back fearing they might be hurt by the same family.
After my aunt the journalist was driven out of her house too and her husband kidnapped and released for a ransom, their house has been occupied by a family insurgents brought and relocated in the house. When her husband was kidnapped and then released, the kidnappers, who were Sunni insurgents, threatened to kill them the next time they attempt to come visit the house. And so they didn’t dare to go since. Instead, they rented a small apartment in a Shiite neighborhood and started collecting furniture from scratch.
Under the eyes of the government, parliament and the U.S. occupying forces, millions of people were driven out of their homes and were left with no compensations or guarantees of going back to their neighborhoods. The government keeps claiming that the situation has “improved,” yet millions of displaced civilians are still unable to get back to their occupied homes where they spent every penny they had to build them during the hard years of Saddam’s reign.
The BBC news website posted a heartbreaking first-person account of a woman who tried to see her house which she and her family were driven out of. This kind of news you rarely find in American media.
