maybe you’ll believe an Iraqi who fled the violence in Baghdad in 2007 and has recently returned home.
At the end of the journey when we reached the main entrance of my neighborhood my mother told me “Just slow down and say ‘Asalaam alaikum,’ (Peace be with you). Do not tell them you were in Syria.†She was afraid they would think I was a wanted man who had run away.
At that moment everything I had heard before seemed not right and I became more anxious with each meter I came closer to the checkpoint. Then I turned my head to the left and I saw the biggest cement wall I have ever seen, which encircles my neighborhood.
There were two Iraqi soldiers standing at the checkpoint. One of them stopped me and told me to open the trunk and engine. The other smiled, saying: “It is the day of bombed cars.â€
He inspected my car with an explosive detector device. The other was just looking at us and it seemed that he recognized my mother’s face because he said: “Hi, auntie.â€
Now I felt really safe because those people were working properly, not like the security forces in my neighborhood before who were making a secure path during the night for militia members to pass through, targeting everything there.
I think that the Iraqi police and army are working in the right way because there is an American military center inside my neighborhood. But all the people I met said that if the Americans left, those militias would eat our flesh without mercy.
He concludes:
Will it stay safe or not?
I guess that all depends on the American troops, since we will not have qualified Iraqi forces soon. Although most Iraqi forces are sincere you find some have been infiltrated by groups of gunmen and sectarian people who made the mess all around us.
So we still need the Americans because if they intend to leave, there will be something like a hurricane which will extract everything – people, buildings and even trees. Everything that has happened and all that safety will be past, just like a sweet dream.
As people say in my neighborhood: “The Americans are now Ansar al Sunna.†Protectors of the Sunni.
Presidential candidates, are you listening?
{ 3 comments }
excellent.
i really hope everybody’s listening. i want to buy into aziz’s position but i have to say it is getting difficult to keep reading between the candidates’ lines.
If you are so certain about your position, Dave, then why is it so important to you to prove to other people that you are right, and ask plaintively that they believe you?
People who work on me to try to get me to believe something — or anything — generally lose me before they even make their case.
If the Iraqis re-assemble a unified country and beat town the mainly shi’a militias that are working day and night to rip up the country, it will be because the Iraqis want it that way, and not because the Americans say "that is what you ought to want, for your own good."
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
So we still need the Americans because if they intend to leave, there will be something like a hurricane which will extract everything – people, buildings and even trees. Everything that has happened and all that safety will be past, just like a sweet dream.
To some people, death is a feature, not a bug.
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