IslamOnline - Iraq... The Aftermath

Families visiting wounded victims

Planes had left my country to drop bombs on his and he was sorry. It was the wee small hours of March 20th. The windows were crossed with parcel tape to stop them shattering. We had as much bottled water as we could afford because no one knew how long it would go on. Already the price of water was five times that of petrol.

A bit after 4am it started, the sky flashing with yellow sparkles as if the stars were burning out, forty cruise missiles roaring through the sky that first morning, no one quite sure whether this was really the start, unable to believe they were really firing huge explosives at this city full of families, friends, shops and schools.

For the next twelve days, until I was told to leave by the nervous Iraqi foreign ministry, I stayed in Baghdad , interviewing civilian casualties in the hospitals. Fear and suspicion were intense and it took time to negotiate our way into the hospitals. The first day I was allowed in was March 24th.

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The doctor was called to the emergency room, brought us with him, to the chaos of a family still screaming, still bleeding, Fatima cradling one child after another, Nada with an open skull fracture and her leg torn apart, Rana deeply concussed, struggling to breathe, Mohammed a patchwork of shrapnel cuts, eyes wide with panic, eight year old Zahra dead in the rubble along with her aunt (Fatima’s sister, Hana, who was due to graduate with a teaching degree in the summer).

It was the seventh day after the wedding of Hana’s brother, Khalid, to Nahda. They brought Nahda to the house at 4pm , exactly the time when the rocket (one of three fired from a plane which had been circling overhead) hit. It took off the entire upper storey. Khalid collapsed when given the news, as if his breath were entwined with that of his new wife, crushed to death.

Taalib drove us around, looking for the possible military target, the base, the ammunition factory, even a communications tower or electricity station, that could have been the intended target, but we found nothing. Almost a year later a group of us were working in a school in Diyala Bridge , near where the farmhouse was; so we went to find them and look again for the intended target.

The directions were only approximate, as much detail as Taalib could remember, then we started asking around for the house that was bombed. Neither of us recognized the building we were shown to. Nor did we recognize the woman outside, or the children peeping through the windows, or the description of the attack: a rocket struck one of the houses at midnight , killing sixteen, maybe seventeen people and demolishing three houses.

Fourteen-year-old Nabil stood up out of the row of young men sitting on the step, a little man. “I came back at noon from my uncle’s house and the house was destroyed. My mother and father and my five brothers and sisters were all dead. I am the only one left,” he said, unable to look at another face.

How appalling it is to go out in the morning with three dead and to come back in the afternoon with twenty. We found Fatima ’s family in the end, though she and her children are back in the city now. “Their family is broken,” Khalid said. “They are too sad. Their house is near the air force center; so they came here because they were afraid it would be bombed. It was bombed, of course, but her home was not so badly damaged as ours.”

Ajama returned from a relative’s funeral; his relative was killed in the crossfire between US soldiers and Iraqi militiamen. He thanked us for coming. Like Nabil’s family, no one has asked after them since we saw them in the hospital. But he was afraid: “If someone sees us with foreigners, they will tell the Americans we are with the resistance or tell the militias we are working for the Americans. They will come and say, ‘How did you communicate with these foreigners, how did they know about you, why did they come here?’ We are more afraid now than we were before the war,” the Shiite farmer and small businessman added.

There is not a single child in Iraq without some degree of post-traumatic stress.

Since the war, I’ve often been asked how it changed me. I can’t tell. But I have learnt from the Iraqi women to wear a kind of poker face when I walk down the road – expressionless, slightly severe, not responding to any calls or comments from either side. Last night’s bomb at the hotel round the corner sent a spasm of reaction up my leg, but the poker face didn’t flinch.

Only when young men started running past me towards the explosion did I realize I had become used to it, used to the sudden fullness of the air, the bursting, the tremor through the ground. A year ago I couldn’t have imagined being used to things blowing up around the corner. But already a few hours earlier a blast in an electricity box in the next street had shaken our windows and failed to hit two Humvees. Only later I notice the physical symptoms of fear and shock. You never really get used to things exploding around you.

Dr. Ali Hameed is one of Iraq ’s few authorities on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He believes there is not a single child in Iraq without some degree of post-traumatic stress, and that play therapy is the best, perhaps the only means of diagnosing and rehabilitating the children in a country where “mental illness” is heavily stigmatized.

Formerly head of the PTSD program, his funding from the ministry of health was withdrawn by its American advisors who demanded results after only a few weeks. The funds were reallocated to a center for torture victims of the past regime, a project which, though important, is also politically much more valuable for the new leadership than one which criticizes the harm done by the war, sanctions and occupation.

Since the invasion, thousands of people have been arrested in house raids, at checkpoints or from workplaces, imprisoned without charges, without trial, without access to lawyers or visits from their families, sometimes for many months. Released cellmates are the only source of information for most prisoners’ families, the only confirmation that the disappeared person is still alive.

Amid crowds of mothers outside Abu Ghraib prison, Hamdia waits every day for information about her son, Hayder Sahib. “Under the old regime he escaped from the army, and even when they caught him they let his mother see him – but now, no. We thought the Americans would do something good for us but they did not. They did the worst. I just want to see my son. Just let me see him. They should at least tell us where he is.”

A former detainee, Abdul Rahman explained that the US administration has continued the old regime’s practice of paying for information and acting on it without verification so that a grudge can be profitably exercised by accusing a neighbour of working for the resistance then watching US forces arrest him.

“Nothing has changed,” the people outside the prison say. “The Americans are the same as Saddam.”

Hundreds of bank clerks, mostly women, have been threatened with arrest, sixteen actually imprisoned, and forced to pay for the discrepancy between the genuine value received and that given out in the exchange of the old Saddam notes for the new currency. There is no suspicion of any fraud or theft by the clerks. They were instructed to pay out new notes for old ones, even if they appeared to be forged, as there was no way of verifying which were forgeries. Now the shortfall will be taken from their wages in instalments.

Their lawyer, Faleh Maktuf, says there’s no legal basis for the arrests, nor the coerced payments, but in the absence of a legal framework, power is unchecked in the hands of ministers, police and judges. “Nothing has changed,” he added.

Released cellmates are the only source of information for most prisoners’ families.

The last few days we’ve been working in some of the poorest schools around Baghdad, in Sadr City, Afdhalia and Diyala Bridge. Not one of them had a window intact, nor a working toilet – either without running water or with constantly erupting water pipes which caused the toilet to overflow.

There aren’t enough schools for all the kids and they’ve been segregated since 1999 so the classrooms – with their limited furniture – are rammed with boys in the mornings and girls in the afternoons, or vice versa. Headmaster Mohammed pointed out that these shifts mean there is no time for teacher training.

Add to this the lack of textbooks, because the contracts to print the new ones were due to be allocated by UNICEF, who then withdrew. There are no other teaching materials. It means the teachers can only lecture. Each child gets 12 pencils a year, an average of 1.5 per school month. “But children don’t keep a pencil for a month. They keep it for a few days,” Mohammed said.

The US government-linked corporation Bechtel is involved with school rehabilitation. Abbas is a volunteer in the Nasariyah-based organization E’maar (Rebuilding) which identifies and carries out small to mid-scale reconstruction projects with local communities, like building a mud brick school in a marsh village which has never had a school before.

Bechtel works in Nasariyah, another Shiite area: “They have a contract for $40,000 to rehabilitate a school and they immediately subcontracted the work for $28,000, keeping $12,000 for doing nothing. The work is poor. They just paint the walls, with bad brushes and paint, so there are bristles on the walls. One of the schools had a new fence built and it fell down. Two girls got broken hips.” Diversion of wealth into the hands of those favoured by the leadership: Abbas laughed dryly, “Nothing has changed.”

Unemployment is 60-70% throughout Iraq. Workers in several industries have been struggling against the newly appointed US bosses and against the setting of unfair and unliveable wage scales by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Attempts to set up trade unions have been suppressed in several places, including the port of Um Qasr, operated by SSA Marine, formerly known as Stevedoring Services of America.

And so on. Little has been done for women’s rights, though the CPA has been busily setting up “women’s centers” and other hollow enterprises designed to emphasize Saddam’s wrongs – backed up by the weapons coalition members sold him – while some really positive women’s projects coming from the Iraqi women themselves are attacked by groups which object to them (unprotected by the coalition). Women frequently say that before the war, if they had few rights, at least they had security.

Of course it’s not quite true to say nothing has changed. Bashar is out of prison, where he was tortured. Saif and his brother are not on the “security list.” The Kurds are celebrating the establishment, finally, of a federal state of Iraqi Kurdistan. Dissatisfaction with the invasion and occupation does not necessarily mean that people want Saddam back, but I often hear people say the US is no better. Bashar said he would rather the Iraqi people had been allowed to get rid of him themselves, though it would have taken longer and he would have still been in prison.

But it’s undoubtedly true to say that human rights are not being respected, that the Iraqi people are still being crushed between other people’s agendas, that financial gain and cronyism are still dictating policy, that there is no security, inadequate electricity or petrol rationing, and that Iraq is not free.

Jo Wilding is an Iraq-based British human rights campaigner, writer and trainee lawyer from Bristol, UK. 29-year old Wilding first came to Iraq in August 2001 with Voices in the Wilderness. Then she returned to Iraq as an independent observer in February 2003 and stayed for the month before the war and the first 11 days of the bombing as a human shield, before being expelled by the Iraqi foreign ministry as part of a purge of independent foreigners.

Currently inside Iraq, Wilding is taking part in Circus 2 Iraq, “a small group of circus performers - fools, clowns, jugglers, stilt walkers and magicians - set up to… perform and give circus skills workshops to children [in Iraq] traumatized by sanctions, war and its aftermath.”

Her writings about Iraq and ordinary Iraqis were published in the Guardian, the New Zealand Herald, Counterpunch, Australian radio, and in Japan, Korea and Pakistan .