BAGHDAD, (Reuters) -
For Abu Mina, a ceramic artist and professor, Baghdad is one big jail -- too dangerous for him to live with his wife and daughters, too dangerous for him to meet his students openly, too dangerous to work in his studio.
He and his son, a 21-year-old medical student, recently left the family home for fear of sectarian attacks, dividing his family as the city itself has become increasingly divided.
It is just this sort of private tragedy that U.S. President George W. Bush must help end with his new strategy for securing Baghdad with more troops.
"They kill just boys and men," Abu Mina said of sectarian gunmen. "They leave girls and women. Yesterday my wife gave me a call and she told me my neighbour, a dentist, they took him.
"That means in two days they will find him outside Baghdad without life. They kill everybody. So I left my wife and my two girls and I brought with me just my son," said Abu Mina, who studied in the United States.
His family is now divided by the Tigris River, increasingly a sectarian barrier that slices Baghdad into mainly Sunni west and mostly Shi'ite Muslim east, and he rarely sees his wife and daughters, though they managed a brief holiday chat last week.
"Can you imagine how horrible, my wife and my kids can't come and see me," he said. "At Eid, they came by taxi to a market and they gave me a call and I went to the market and we met. We hugged and kissed and then we cried. It was terrible."
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As much as possible we need to put a human face on the tragedies. Numbers can't possibly tell the toll of suffering going on.
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4 comments:
An excellent article, TC. No wonder so many Iraqis are fleeing the country.
yes.
and I'm ashamed of my government for setting them on this path.
we've managed to do what Saddam did not. and HE was hanged.
what does that say about what should happen to Bush'Cheney, et al?
Well, hanging doesn't work for me. I oppose capital punishment, but life without possibility works.
I'd like to see em imprisoned for life.
and have the torture methods they've endorsed used on them.
and, every night at bedtime someone they've harmed directly comes into their cells and punches em in the nose.
that'd work for me.
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