- "Habibi, to live in Baghdad now is to live in a
big prison," he told me recently, "You stay in your home, and
that's it. You only go out when you must. So many are being killed daily,
and you only hope that your day to die is not today."
-
- While reporting from Damascus
for nearly two weeks, I've worked with my interpreter from Baghdad who
came out to meet me, Abu Talat.
-
- Thus, while he anxiously maintains
contact with his family members in Baghdad, I'm granted a first-hand experience
of their life in "liberated" Iraq via our discussions and his
calls into Iraq.
-
- As catastrophic as the bloodletting
between Lebanon and Israel is, and let us not discount the scope of this
war of aggression that has now left over 400 dead and well over 1,250 wounded
in total, it still pales by comparison to Iraq - which now is getting even
less coverage than usual.
-
- On the 18th of this month, a
suicide bomber drove his van packed with explosives near the golden-domed
mosque in Kufa, south of Baghdad. Kufa, the city where Shia cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr prays, was then rocked as the bomber detonated himself and his
van outside the mosque, killing at least 59 and wounding over 130.
-
- Less than two weeks before this,
members of the Muqtada al-Sadr's militia, the Mehdi Army, donned their
typical all-black uniforms and entered the Sunni al-Jihad district of the
capital. They went on the rampage, killing at least 40 Sunnis after checking
their identification cards.
-
- An average of a dozen bodies
per day wash up on the shores of the Tigris in Baghdad as sectarian killings
have spun completely out of control. Revenge killings are occurring not
by the day but by the hour in Iraq. In February, Les Roberts, one of the
co-authors of the Lancet report, said that we shouldn't be discussing Iraqi
deaths by the tens of thousands, but rather whether it is 100,000 or 200,000
or 300,000.
-
- That was five months ago. That
was before this June, when the Baghdad morgue alone received 1,595 bodies
that month. That was before a recent UN report, released last week after
gathering data from the Iraqi Ministry of Health (which tracks deaths recorded
in hospitals around Iraq) and the Baghdad morgue, reported that in March,
2,378 Iraqis were killed, 2,284 in April, 2,669 in May and 3,149 in June.
-
- As each agency issues death warrants,
the Iraqi government states there is no possibility of overlap in the counting.
-
- The UN report found that an average
of over 100 civilians every single day are being killed in Iraq. More than
since the invasion of Baghdad, blowing away ridiculously low numbers previously
claimed by some so-called anti-war web sites.
-
- Despite the fact that for those
who live in Baghdad, and journalists who've seen the level of carnage first
hand, this is no surprise - the report findings are frightful. During the
first six months of this year, the death toll skyrocketed 77%, with a total
of 14,338 violent civilian deaths.
-
- In response to the carnage, US
Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, who assisted in facilitating the war
as one of the authors of the Project for the New American Century document,
one of whose goals was to secure Middle Eastern oil, bravely called on
the "leaders" in Iraq's puppet government to "take responsibility
and pursue reconciliation not just in words, but through deeds as well."
-
- At the same time, the deputy
Prime Minister of Iraq, Salam al-Zubaie, blamed US for much of the violence,
saying that coalition troops were responsible for about half the deaths.
He punctuated his remarks by saying, "All the problems we have today
are because of them."
-
- Meanwhile, any Iraqis who can
are leaving. Fleeing for their lives. Abu Talat, who is working feverishly
to find a way to get his son out of Baghdad, is but one example of hundreds
of thousands, if not millions. His son is not allowed into Jordan because
he is of "military age," a new decree issued by Jordanian authorities
which pens a huge section of the population of Iraqi males inside their
dying country.
-
- He tried anyway, and was promptly
turned back at the border. Now he sits in an apartment in downtown Baghdad
and dares not leave, lest he be killed for being a member of the wrong
sect of Islam, in the wrong place, at the wrong time; which means ... in
Iraq.
-
- Despite that, millions have already
fled to Jordan and Syria. Damascus today is flooded with refugees from
Iraq, and now Lebanon.
-
- On my way to an internet café
recently I strolled past a Middle East Airlines office, where crowds were
lined up waiting to find a way out of Syria on the national airline of
Lebanon.
-
- I spoke with some of them, as
so many Lebanese speak excellent English. One man, standing with his wife
as she held their wailing baby told me, "We don't care where we go,
we just want to go where there is no war. We are too tired of the death,
suffering and destruction, and now are afraid to stay in Syria because
who knows when Syria may become involved in this madness."
-
- "We just want to go where
there is no war."
-
- In the Middle East, that place
is getting harder and harder to find.
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