Dispatches from Iraq: The following article was written by Mohammed Ibn Laith. Mohammed is a volunteer rescue worker in Baghdad who also provides security to community members targeted by death squads. The following is a memoir of a day when he and his brother responded to a car bombing in the neighborhood of Al-Sadriya. This article was posted on a website called Gorillasguides.com. Gorilla’s Guides is a compendium of blog postings from within Iraq and often unheard voices from the fields of Operation Iraqi freedom.
We have not been able to contact the author, and the following is republished without permission, but with a hope that Mohammed’s voice and experiences might be considered by those of us fortunate enough not to have to walk a mile in his shoes. We wish him well, and we wish him peace.
Limited editorial changes were made for the sake of clarity and length.
Mohammed Ibn Laith’s story can be read in full at www.gorillasguides.com.
There is a brief epilogue.
The editors.
When I heard the bomb explode last Saturday the first thing I did was telephone my father. But there was no reply. Again and again and again I tried to phone him. My fingers hurt because I stabbed them onto the buttons on my phone so hard. I fell onto the floor and prayed please let him not be dead. Please let it be that he died quick if he is dead.
And my heart was sick inside me.
What will we talk about today, you and I? I do not want to talk about last Saturday. Shall we talk about peace? I would like to talk about peace. I love the word. No, perhaps we are not ready to talk of peace yet, you and I, we are not at peace; we are not even at truce.
My father is one of the organizers for the men who protect neighbours who have fled here from the death squads. When they go to get food we go to the market with them – my father, my brother, myself, some of the men in our neighbourhood.
They do the same for us.
What will we talk about today, you and I? I do not want to talk about last Saturday. Shall we talk about peace? I would like to talk about peace. I love the word. No, perhaps we are not ready to talk of peace yet, you and I, we are not at peace; we are not even at truce.
Does “peace” mean that your aunt does not weep as she tells you of how the young couples she serves ask her after the X-Ray:
Well, is it a child or is it a monster?
And how she curses the Americans who littered our land with Uranium munitions and then denied us the cancer drugs. Because we needed to be contained.
We sand niggers who had been abandoned to the tyrant you had supported for years needed to be contained.
And though it was hard for you, though compassion swelled in your noble and peaceful heart, we sand niggers needed to be contained.
For my own good. I needed to be contained.
The new world order and the peace dividend required that the sand niggers be contained, and you assured the world, that I was indeed contained.
You told me that though it was hard for you:
We think the price is worth it.
Shall we talk about peace, you and I? I would like to talk about peace. I love the word. No, perhaps we are not ready to talk of peace yet, you and I, we are not at peace; we are not even at truce.
Will we talk about how the Americans urged our people to rise against the tyrant? Will we talk about that, you and I? Will we talk about what happened to the men who believed the American lies and rose?
There is one who helps me with my English who does not know where his wife and young children are buried. He does not even know if they were buried. But he knows that they were killed, and he knows how they were killed, and that they died screaming, the Mukhbarat saw to it that he was told. You were quick enough to sell to the Mukhbarat, but you would not sell the chemotherapy drugs to save our children’s lives.