The kidnapping of Margaret Hassan, the British-Iraqi aid worker, is shocking but not surprising. We have come to accept that the same thing might happen to any of our family or friends. In fact, it already has happened to my dearest friend Nada.
In September, her nephew Baree Ibrahim, an engineer, was kidnapped. I remember Baree very well from the mid-1970s. Here is his aunt’s account of what happened:
“Dear Haifa, my nephew Baree was picked up on September 25 and no ransom was asked. Actually the kidnappers didn’t contact his family, and this led us to believe that they mistook him for someone else as he looked so European. He was beheaded on Saturday October 2.
“I had a phone call from his brother to tell me to tune to al-Jazeera. I saw on TV, Baree talking with mute sound and the writing at the bottom of the screen saying that Iraqi engineer Baree Nafee Dawood Ibrahim was beheaded by ‘Jamaa ansar Assunna’ and the detail of the beheading procedure can be seen on one of the Islamic sites.
“I called my sister immediately. She was unable to answer the phone. They couldn’t mourn him traditionally because the body was not found. A couple of days later his brother was in Baghdad. He and his cousins went every day to the hospital’s mortuary to look for Baree’s body but they couldn’t find him. They even went to look for his body in side streets but to no avail.
“My sister and her immediate family are all now in Amman, Jordan, and my other brother and sisters and their children are preparing to leave Iraq for Syria. At the moment there are about two million Iraqis in Jordan and the same in Syria and Lebanon. Some 200 000 Christian Iraqis have fled the country in the last couple of months. This is the freedom and democracy promised to the Iraqis. Nada.”
This is the daily reality in the new Iraq, especially in Baghdad. An average of 100 Iraqis are killed every day. Kidnapping for profit or revenge is widespread. Young girls are sold to neighbouring countries for prostitution.
Madeline Hadi, a nine-year-old girl, was kidnapped from her father’s car in the al-Doura district of Baghdad. Zinah Falih Hassan, a student at al-Warkaa secondary school, also in Baghdad, was kidnapped on her way back from school. Asma, a young engineer, was abducted in Baghdad. She was shopping with her mother, sister and male relative when six armed men kidnapped her. She was repeatedly raped.
Mahnaz Bassam and Raad Ali Abdul Aziz were kidnapped last month along with two Italian aid workers and subsequently released. Unlike the Italians, the two Iraqis did not receive media attention in the West. No one prayed for them.
And aid workers are not the only victims — 250 university professors and scientists have been killed in the past year, according to the Union of University Lecturers, and more than 1 000 academics have left the country — Iraqi journalists are also frequently harassed, threatened and attacked by occupying troops. This year 12 of the 14 journalists killed were Iraqi, and six other Iraqi media workers were killed. Many journalists have also fled the country.
More than 100 Iraqi doctors and consultants have been killed or kidnapped in the past year. A spokesperson for the Iraqi Medical Society described the kidnappings as “intimidating and forcing them to leave the country”. The latest victim was Dr Turki Jabar al Saadi, chair of the Iraqi veterinary society. He was shot in the head on October 21. None of these killings has been investigated. These atrocities go unrecorded. The dead are unnamed.
There are indeed reasons for all this chaos, murder and mayhem. Those reasons lie in the nature of invasion, war and, most crucially of all, occupation.
The US-led occupation forces presented themselves as champions of liberation, freedom and democracy. What they have achieved is chaos, collective punishment, assassinations, abuse and torture of prisoners, and destruction of the country’s infrastructure.
The “sovereign” interim government has, like the Iraqi Governing Council before it, proved to be the fig leaf shielding the occupying forces from Iraqis’ frustration and outrage.
Powerless, and with no credibility among Iraqi people, the interim government’s failure is disastrous. In addition to the lack of security, there is not the slightest improvement in electricity supply, the availability of clean water, employment, or health and education services. Fighting between occupying troops and various Iraqi groups has become widespread in more than 12 cities.
Without the consent of the Iraqi people, Ayad Allawi and President Ghazi al-Yawer declared that it was the wish of the populace that the occupying troops remain. They also stood aside while F16s and helicopter gunships showered densely populated areas in Sadr city, Falluja, Samraa, Najaf, Kut, Kufa, Tel Afar and elsewhere. The resistance in Falluja is now so persistent that Iraq’s director of national intelligence admitted: “We could take the city, but we would have to kill everyone in it.” British troops are going to be deployed to achieve this.
In his last monthly press conference before the invasion of Iraq on February 18 last year, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that removing Saddam Hussein will “save a lot of lives” as well as removing the chemical and biological weapons. The people who will celebrate the most will be the people of Iraq, he continued.
We are not celebrating. Death is covering us like fine dust. Four-fifths of Iraqi people demand the immediate withdrawal of occupying forces from Iraq. Margaret Hassan is one of them. Will Blair listen this time? — Â