Image Credit CPT.
IRAQ: Who's fighting whom?
CPT via BBSNews 2006-08-15 -- By Maxine Nash. I met a neighbor from Baghdad today. He is here in Sulaimaniya, Kurdistan for his work. I haven't seen him since April when I left Baghdad, and it was a wonderful surprise.
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Little boy in Sadr City, Baghdad, Iraq 2005-07-24.
Image Credit CPT. |
We talked about his family, about the situation in Baghdad, and about the recent attack that happened on 27 July, not far from the neighborhood where we used to live together.
He told me the mortars hit first and then as people rushed to the scene to aid the victims, the car bombs exploded. The reports said seventy-one people were killed and about 150 injured.
When my friend asked neighbors about their families, everyone seemed to have experienced a loss. One said, "I lost my wife" and another said, "I lost my brother." There were so many deaths that the local mosques, which would normally only allow one family to mourn at a time and usually only one on any given day, were having two families at a time and were busy from 11:00 a.m. until evening.
He described the neighborhood just after the attack. All the shops were closed, debris was in the street, and it looked like a ghost town. Residents suspected that the mortars and the attack, may have come from the U.S. forces because buildings hit by the mortars were demolished. He noted that the types of mortars used by the insurgents usually damage part of a building and shatter the windows but don't cause the demolition of the whole building. "We know about these things, because we (Iraqi men) have been in many wars and know what we see," he said. He reported people found fragments that appeared to be from the mortars and that these fragments said "USA" on them.
I asked him why he thought the U.S. might do such a thing. He said, "Everyone in Iraq has known since 2004 that the U.S. is interested in staying in Iraq for a long time." When I quizzed him about how an attack like this would serve this purpose, he said that everyone feels the U.S. wants to keep Iraq destabilized to have a reason to keep a presence here.
When I asked him if people want the U.S. troops to go, he said, "Yes, everyone wants them to leave now." After talking with him, and with other friends in Baghdad who describe the current attacks on Sadr City, the question I had to ask was just who is fighting whom in Iraq these days? Is it only a civil war, or is it also combined with another war, the war of U.S. interests? Or is the civil war the result of the war of U.S. interests? It's difficult to know, but one thing is clear at this point: many Iraqis consider a continued U.S. troop presence to be part of the problem, not part of the solution.
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