SHE DIED IN THE BLAST

I had a terrible night. My friend’s mother has died in a huge blast rocked my neighborhood and killed more than 12 people and wounded dozens last night. I’ll write about everything later but for now, I feel so sad and desperate. It was so hard to see her dead. She was a kind woman. I just saw her few days ago when I was with her son.

My heart is full of sorrow and pain. My friend had a horrible night searching for her in the hospitals by the time the city was all in darkness due to the lack of electricity.

I can’t even think of any hope at the meantime. It is only despair that hovers over us. It seems it is going to stick with us. I don’t know why we have to live like this. Why do I have to wake up everyday on sounds of explosions and shootings? Why do I have to be afraid all the time, why do I have to sleep and wake up with a tear in my eyes? why why why? I don’t want democracy and freedom. I want to live. I just want to live. These two damn words brought only destructions. They never brought hope. It is only death and death and death. I don’t want them…. take them and give us back the normal life. I wish I could change the time to the past.

BOOOM

“BOOOOOM” was the first thing that woke me up this morning. Another BOOOM followed to make me feel that I wasn’t having a nightmare. It was not meant to kill or hurt; it was meant to remind me of the daily horror we should embrace everyday. I felt the BOOM telling me, “Wake up! Did you forget me? Sleeping will never let you forget me. I am always there.”

I barely opened my eyes. I was very tired. I couldn’t sleep well the whole night which is something very normal in Iraq. It was hot and impossible to endure.

When the explosion happened, I felt the ground shaking as I was sleeping on a matrice on the floor in the living room. I can’t sleep in my room on my bed anymore. There is no electricity to run the AC. I sleep in the living room because we can turn on an old fashion technique, called air cooler when we turn on the generator.

The explosion was followed by gunfire. It seemed there were clashes outside. “Ah! Clashes, nothing new,” I said within myself. I was sleeping near the window and was so reluctant to move. I didn’t even care. A bullet, two, or three break the window next to me?! Who cares? Even if I die, who cares? Hundreds and thousands are being killed. I am one of them. There is no difference. Maybe one day I join them unwillingly proudly in irrigating our land in our blood instead of water.

On the way to work, I was thinking of the two young men who were found shot dead in the neighborhood yesterday. My friend S told me that he saw a young man in his twenties lying dead in front of his neighbor’s house. The neighbor told S that as he was getting ready to take his children to school, he heard a sound seemed like opening a can of pepsi or something like that. As he went out, he saw the young man dead at the main gate of the house with his face covered in blood due to a shot in his forehead. Young men and women gathered to see the daily scene, which became like their breakfast. S said that it was the first time he’s ever seen a dead body. He was quiet the whole time we were together. He is the one whom I described once as having the best sense of humor among us.

The slain young man was skinny and putting on shabby clothes, S recalled the scene. He appeared to be a poor construction laborer. All people around his body agreed that he was a stranger and was brought and shot dead by a silencer in the neighborhood which hasn’t witnessed any presence of police or army for a long time.

Another young man’s dead body was also found shot dead on the high way alongside my neighborhood. People said he was shot in another place and his body was thrown there. His body was thrown where 14 young men were shot dead in the same area a month ago.

When the driver dropped me off at the place where I meet with my other colleague, shrapnel and broken glass of a previous car bomb was still at the sidewalks of the street as if they are like the “BOOM” reminding me and the others that “hey, I am surrounding you. I am always there wherever you go.” This time, I didn’t even care. I kept on walking until I met my colleague and went to work.


Once my mother recalled how she used to see and hear the news about life in Lebanon during the civil war. “I used to ask myself, how come people live , work and study while they are in a war?!” she recalled as we were having dinner. “Now, we are going through the same thing!” she said. “it is so sad that we go backwards not move forward,” I said.

Like Lebanon during the war, life goes on in Iraq. We are following the Iraqi saying “The wet doesn’t fear the rain”. We have nothing to be afraid of anymore. Life became like something we have to do and that’s it. People still go out, study, work, try to have fun, and struggle to stay alive for the sake of keeping themselves busy, maybe till they die by a car bomb or shootings.

When I left home this morning, the streets were full of people who were going to work and schools with full determination as if there were no clashes and bombs an hour earlier.

BOOOOOOM!!

Who else wants to die in Iraq?

I was at work yesterday when my mother called to see if everything was fine and if I am going to come back home early or not. While we were chatting, she told me something that made me freeze on the chair I was sitting on.

As she was at the school where she teaches, one of her colleagues was sobbing in the teacher’s room surrounded by other teachers who most of them were crying. “I said to myself, it seems someone has died,” she said within herself. As she peered closely, she discovered that the teacher’s 6 month-old- infant was killed!

Few days ago, a group carrying identifications from the health ministry knocked at the door of the teacher’s daughter’s house. “Do you have children?”, the men asked the daughter. “Yes, one,” she replied. Then the men asked her to bring him to be vaccinated against polio. The infant was “vaccinated” but two hours later, he died.

The victim’s sobbing grandmother narrated how her daughter lost conscious when she discovered that her son was not vaccinated and was poisoned instead. At the same time nearly, two more infants in their early months were also poisoned the same way the first infant was killed with.

The teacher’s daughter was like all Iraqis who trusted the health centers teams who come each season to vaccinate infants against polio. This time, no one expected that the new target is going to be infants.

My mother said she immediately called my sister to warn her. She told her not to open the door for these people even if they were real health teams. My sister was shocked and decided to take her 9-month-old infant to the health center as she did in the previous times.

Things have never calmed down. It is going from worse to worst. A 28-year-old Shiite neighbor of mine was killed as he was driving with two friends in the Sunni majority neighborhood of Adhamiya. As they were driving, a group of armed men stopped their car. After 15 minutes of arguing with the armed men, the three young men gave up convincing them that they live nearby. The armed men decided to search the three men and found their IDs. The two Sunnis were told to leave the area immediately while the third one, a Shiite, was kept a hostage until he was killed. His friends received a call at night telling them he is killed. He left a widow and two infants.

Although I am a Shiite but I live in a neighborhood part of Adhamiyah. I spent all my teenage and college time with my friends there. I have great and nice memories I usually share with my friends in that area. But now, I fear even passing by it. I am a Shiite and my father’s name is a Shiite. If the insurgents discover that, they may kill me like my neighbor. The last times I went their to visit a friend, I did not carry any ID.

The western restive part of Iraq continues to be out of control. 15 Iraqi young athletes were kidnapped while driving to neighboring Jordan, police and Olympic Committee officials said. The 15 taekwondo athletes, hopeful to join the Olympics game one day, were heading to Jordan after a long month of training in Baghdad for a previous championship. Dressed in Training shoes and Tracksuits, the athletes went in two groups joyfully.

The kidnapping of the Korean martial art players took place last Monday on a road between the restless hostile cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, one of the most violent areas of Iraq where insurgents carry out armed operations against Iraqi and US forces. The athletes, in two GMC vehicles, were stopped by a group of armed men who forced the drivers to take the back seat letting them drive to an unknown area.

“They were on vacation,” said Jamal Abdul Karim, the head of the Iraqi Taekwondo Union of. “They weren’t going to Jordan in an official activity or championship. They were going just to have fun altogether,” Abdul Karim said.

The fifteen athletes were all in their twenties. Five of them were members of the Iraqi national team of Taekwondo, including a 27-year-old player who won the Bronze medal in the Asian championship of Taekwondo in Thailand couple of weeks ago.

"We are negotiating with the kidnappers through a mediator. They asked for a $100,000 ransom," said Abdul Karim from behind his desk at the national Olympic committee headquarters in Baghdad. “We haven’t slept since Monday,” he said as he looked deeply moved and about to shed a tear. “They are like our sons.”

Most of athletes were residents of Sadr City, a Shiite slum in eastern Baghdad whose residents are loyal to the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Armed men always cut off the road to Jordan robbing travelers. Abdul Karim said that he and some other athletes were robbed several times as they went to Jordan. “But this time, it was different,” he said.

By the time Abdul Karim was saying that they were contacting the mediator to ensure their release, he received a phone call. After he hanged up, he said, “The ransom was delivered. We are waiting for their release now.” Few hours later, Abdul Karim said that the armed men told them the hostages will be released either today or tomorrow.

Although the players were not on an official mission, Abdul Karim and his colleagues at the Taekwondo union decided to pay the ransom to get their colleagues released. “All the staff and I decided not to get our salaries for one year. Instead, we volunteered it to pay the ransom to free our sons,” he said.

A group of athletes, friends and colleague of the 15 hostages, were gathering outside the Union chief’s office chatting about how they spent their time training and working together. Haider Yousif, the taekwondo national team coach looked sad and moved by the incident. “We feel miserable. We’ve been crying for them for three days,” Yousif said with eyes gazing on the floor.

Yousif who met with the families of the hostages early this morning, said they came pleading to do something. “We told them we will never let them down. We’ll do everything to get them released,” he said. Sorrowful Parents and relatives gathered, some were crying and some were strong enough to control their feelings as they were talking to the officials and colleagues of the hostages. “Their mothers’ pain was far more than anyone else. I could see that in their eyes,” Yousif said. Some of the hostages were from other provinces in Iraq. The family of one player, kept calling from Amara in southern Iraq to see if their son has been released or not. “They will come all the way from Amara to Baghdad,” he added.

Taekwondo players from different provinces joined the sad company of families and colleagues this morning. “They came from Basra, Ramadi, and other provinces and said they would do anything to get their colleagues released,” he said.

Yousif recalled how one of the hostages, Wisam Oraibi, won the Bronze medal in Thailand and how he won a previous Bronze medal in the Taekwondo Championship of the Islamic Nation that was held in Saudi Arabia few months ago.

“Not only us, all Iraqis sympathize with these players,” Yousif said.

The New York Times and the Washington Post published two stories of how daily life looks like in Baghdad. Today’s story of the New York Times was a clear picture of how middle-class and educated people started leaving and thinking seriously to leave the country due to the daily violence.

Now, on the brink of a new, permanent government, Iraqis are expressing the darkest view of their future in three years. "We're like sheep at a slaughter farm," said a businessman, who is arranging a move to Jordan. "We are just waiting for our time."

In a story published in the Washington Post, a resident described how armed men tried to break into a nearby mosque.

"God is great!" cried a man he took to be the imam of one of the mosques of the neighborhood, the urgency and fear in his voice coming loud and clear over the electronic sound system. "God is great!"
The imam's cry was the alarm recognized in all neighborhoods -- Sunni or Shiite -- across Baghdad. The mosque was under attack.

BLACK

“BLACK”! Is it a mere color? In the world, people ride black cars, use black laptops, write in black ink, put on black shoes, etc… But in Baghdad, this word means something else. “Black” hovers over the city. Whatever we see becomes black even if it is red.

Starting from the black funeral banners that decorate almost every street, to the black smoke of explosions that rock the city’s morning like fireworks everyday, and the black shrapnel that pave the roads, “black” became an everyday scene.

The latest violence that rocked the capital left many houses damaged, and mostly with family members wounded or dead. But what is worse is the daily discovery of the dead bodies dumped in the garbage or in the Tigris. This horrible phenomenon left a grave ordeal over the houses of the Iraqi people. The scene of women wearing “black” mourning the loss of a son, a relative, or a friend becomes as black as how life looks like in Iraq. Just today, Iraqi police retrieved the bodies of 11 people, nine of them beheaded, including a 10-year-old boy, in Suwayra, south of Baghdad.

Finding these bodies became an everyday show. Most of the victims are young men in their twenties. Who kidnapped them and who killed them? No one knows for sure. Everyone says something different than the other. Eventually, the lives of the people became so cheap to be even condemned by government officials who are responsible for maintaining security in the country.

Car bombs left the Baghdad looks like a woman with cuts on face, arm and whole body, bleeding asking for help but no one is listening. Her beloved ones are dying one after the other. Like other women, she decided to wear black to mourn herself and the others. She lost everything. She lost her beauty that once was a center of gravity to anyone who wants to have fun.

Every morning, I go to a nearby neighborhood waiting for a colleague of mine to take me to where we work. I do this to escape the notion that someone may discover what I do and where I work. Yesterday, as I was waiting near the intersection for my colleague to pick me up, a man on a motorcycle passed by and yelled at a police man at a nearby police checkpoint. I hold my breath for a second and said “God! I hope he does not blow up himself.” And he did not. It appeared that he was a friend of the policeman and tried to joke with him in this silly way. However, the same policeman along with his other colleagues was killed by a car bomb exploded thirty minutes after I left with my college to work. It exploded exactly where I was standing!

This morning, I took the same route and stood in the same spot waiting for the same colleague. The street was covered with shattered glass of broken windows and shrapnel of the burned and destroyed cars. Buildings, including a famous restaurant, turned out to be rubble. People at the non-functional shabby traffic lights post were gazing in pain. An old man shook his head in despair, a woman put her hand on her mouth in shock looking at the destroyed restaurant and other people were walking carefully on in the street in case a shrapnel or a piece of glass cut their feet. The spot where the car exploded was “black” and the whole street looked black. The everyday street yellow-uniformed cleaners did not show up. They maybe either killed in the explosion or afraid to come in case another explosion crops up as another police checkpoint replaced the one that was attacked.

Despite the pain and the daily death threats, life goes on in Iraq. But, Iraqis are not the same ones a year, two years, or three years ago. They became sad, desperate, tired of being tired, hopeless and full of pain. My friends, who all are in their twenties, and I always try to amuse ourselves but unlike the way we used to. These days, the ghost of kidnappings and killings haunted our minds. We don’t feel comfortable even when we visit each other. Wherever we go, we don’t carry any identification, even the work ones. We don’t trust anyone in the streets. Just in Baghdad, the health ministry announced that 122 young men under the name of “Omar” were killed, most of them is believed were killed intentionally by Shiite militias.

We are not even sure that the men at the checkpoints are policemen or not. Yesterday, the bodies of two journalists working for al-Nahrain TV station were found shot dead in Baghdad. The channel officials said the slain journalists were stopped at a police checkpoint. As usual, the interior ministry denies that and said these men did not belong to them. My guess is that it is either they know that these men belong to them and then lied or they don’t know which is the worst. Armed men move freely in the capital while the ministry does not know. What a disaster.

Summer has begun and all its problems started. It’s been a week now since the one-hour a day of electricity disappeared. Owners of the local generators of the neighborhoods stopped supplying us with power. Their excuse is they are short of diesel to run the generators. We were left helpless enduring a day of 100 F degrees. The worst part is at night. No Iraqi, except the ones inside the green zone, sleeps well at night. Even our nights are “black”…

As a young man, I can endure many things these days as I used to since I was born, but watching my parents’ ordeal is something else. I cannot endure the fact that they are depressed and desperate. Few days ago, my father was so sad. He said he feels he is in a prison, a big prison, called Iraq. My mother, who sometimes feels scared when someone slams the door, was scared few days ago when a car bomb exploded at the corner of the street where we live shattering the glass of the windows. She, my father, aunt, and two cousins were just about to have lunch. They said the house was full of dust blows due to the effect of the blast. The next day another car bomb exploded at the entrance of a famous market near our house. The market was one of my mother’s favorite. It was the last thing she expects to be targeted. One day I told them not to go there anymore. I regretted that as I saw the sad look on their faces. “What can we do? It’s the last place left,” my father said. I had no words to say. I just don’t want to lose them.

“No one will go in before being searched...”

Like everyday, Ahmed was going back home after a long day at work. Since college and since he started his job as a government employee in 2004, he did not have any problem in transportation. Most Iraqi middle and working class people use government buses and private minibuses for their transportation.

Lined up near the old non-functional traffic lights in Bab al-Muadham district in central Baghdad, KIA minibuses were empty. Angry people, including Ahmed, argued with the drivers to let them in. “No one will go in before being searched,” one driver told the mob. Men and women disagreed first but later surrendered to the driver’s insistence to save their lives. There might be a terrorist putting on an explosive belt or carrying a bag with a bomb ready to cut the people’s body into pieces.

As it is known for everyone, Iraqis’ life has changed from bad to worse since the U.S.-led war. Now, even buses become one of the hundred things Iraqis fear. Distrust becomes something stuck with Iraqis wherever they go. Everyone started suspecting each other. If someone parks a car in the street, nearby shop or house owners ask him to take it away. It may be a car bomb.

Ahmed started to be worried all the time. Like all Iraqis, he is unsafe at all. “Wherever I go, I feel I am going to die. Even going to work became as hard as getting a job,” he told me once.

Today, a bomb planted inside a minibus exploded in Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City neighborhood, killing at least two people and wounding six.

In addition to bombs put inside the buses, car bombs are also fatal and one of the daily threats people may face. In last August, at least 43 people died and 76 were wounded in triple car bomb explosions in central Baghdad. Two of the blasts went off within 10 minutes of each other at the busy Nahdha bus station. The third blast happened on the road to a nearby hospital, Kindi, some 15 minutes later, just as victims of the first two attacks were being brought in.

On December 08, 2005, a suicide bomber boarded a packed bus as it was pulling out of the same bus station, Nahdha, and detonated an explosive belt, killing at least 30 civilians, mostly women and children. Police said the death toll was especially high because the blast triggered secondary explosions in gas cylinders stored at a nearby food stall. At least 25 people were wounded in the attack.

Last Tuesday, a bomb hidden in a minibus exploded near one of the offices of the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Kamaliya neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding three, police said.

Despite the above mentioned incidents, there are no serious efforts to put an end to this phenomenon. Security forces should be guarding the entrances and exits of the public bus stations to prevent any such attacks.

However, people always try to have a better life by tipping off the security forces of any suspected thing. Today, a group of people noticed an anonymous car parked inside the main bus station in Baghdad's famous Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiya. They called the police who came hurriedly to see if the vehicle was a car bomb or not. Bravely, they defused the bomb they found in it and saved dozens of innocents’ lives.

baghdadtreasure@gmail.com

Sanctioning whom?

Everyone knows that after Saddam’s invasion to Kuwait in 1990 and his later withdrawal, the Security Council imposed severe economic sanctions on Iraq, including a full trade embargo barring all imports from and exports to the country.

On 6 August 1990, Iraqis started the 12 years of suffering, to starve and struggle for food and medicine. They had to suffer because the west’s former spoiled puppet, whose birthday is today, invaded Kuwait.

Most of yesterday’s top news on the Arab Satellite channel was about the embargo of the US and European countries imposed on Palestine. “The health situation is deteriorating day after day with the US and European countries’ recent decisions to cut their financial aids to the Palestinian people,” the news headlines said. This came as a collective punishment on the Palestinian population for democratically choosing their own government.

The situation in Palestine reminded me with how we had to suffer for twelve years from a brutal embargo imposed on people who did not have any fault but the fact that they were ruled by one of the worst dictators on earth.

In the period from 1991 to 2003, we didn’t feel but to hate the mute international community which agreed on punishing a nation’s people instead of its regime. Dozens of countries supported the victimizing resolution against the Iraqi people. They did not punish the dictator. Instead, they punished the people whom he ruled with an iron fist.

Saddam did not suffer, neither his gang whom he appointed in all fields of life. He took everything. In fact, the embargo was in his benefit as he used it as an excuse to rob the income of the local industries and say that there was no import and export to the goods, simply because there is an embargo. He and his ugly family, like his ugly daughter who showed up on Arabiya on her father’s fall anniversary, enjoyed the best kind of life any human being dreamt of. But what about the people? They were crippled. They had to work twice a day, they had to die unwillingly out of shortage in medicine and food, they had to face the financial problems by themselves while the whole world was watching silently.

A cousin of mine suffered a special and rare kind of Rheumatism. As far as I remember, it is called “Blood Rheumatism”. Due to the lack of medicine during the embargo period, she had to suffer a lot as the drug did not exist in Iraq. My aunt, who is a widow, had to sell all her jewels and gold and sometimes some of the house’s furniture to buy the medicine from outside Iraq. She couldn’t afford it every time she needed it. Eventually it became a chronic disease that will accompany her till the rest of her life.

This is one of the hundreds of thousands of similar and maybe worse cases that Iraqis faced during the embargo period because of a mistake they did not commit.

TV stations showed how pharmacies were empty and how hospitals were filled with patients without medicine to heal them with in Palestine. The images reminded me with the same pictures that we used to see and hear for 12 years. The Palestinian people are being punished because the west doesn’t like the government they chose. Is it logical? The US and Europe always call for democracy. The Palestinains chose the ones whom they felt will best represent them. Is it accepted? Why do these countries repeat the same thing? Does the west know that the leaders of Hamas and Fateh are enjoying the palaces and the fancy life while the people are the ones who are suffering? It is almost like what happened in Iraq for 12 years. How do you expect people love you and cooperate with you while you are the using the meanest way to kill them? How did you expect Iraqis to like you and welcome you while you were the ones who punished them instead of punishing the real perpetrator of invading a country you worship for its oil?

The punishment imposed on people does not fix the problem; it increases it. It turns the people against those who are punishing them for things they were not responsible for.

The new Iraq-like images of the Palestinians starving and dying in hospitals will be seen again for other peoples like the Iranians and Syrians due to the US pressure on the UN to impose sanctions. The real governors of these countries will continue enjoying the fancy life leaving the people die in hundreds of thousands. Do you think Bashar Asad or Najad will suffer if sanctions are imposed on their countries?

Let the world continue being silent. It seems they are bored with the Hollywood movies and now want something live to watch. Enjoy the show… it seems it will never end.

Banner

As my friend S. was driving in Adhamiya, he had to stop at an Iraqi army checkpoint. When the soldiers were searching the car, S. noticed this banner. It says “No Iranian, Persian, Solaghist Police are allowed in Adhamiya”. The banner was signed by the people of Adhamiya…