23 years of hiding from Saddam

AFP:

When, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, brothers Saad and Ibrahim left their family home in the leafy middle-class Baghdad neighbourhood of Karada for the first time in two decades, they promptly got lost.

After all, things had changed quite a bit over the 23 years that the al-Qaisi brothers had spent hidden away from Saddam's secret services in a small upstairs room.

"Two grown-up men like us asking people how to go back to our own house? It was really embarassing," recalled Saad (47) adding that their clothes, dating from the 1970s, also provoked comment.

Saad and Ibrahim, like hundreds of other Iraqis thought to have disappeared in the prisons of the Iraqi regime, emerged from hiding to a country greatly changed after two decades of war and sanctions.

"When we finally went into society, we had to be very careful in dealing with people," said Ibrahim (45).

"We have to know if people have kept the principles they had when we once knew them, or if they have changed because of the difficult conditions of the many wars."

Saad laments how human dignity and personal security have declined so much in today's Iraq, but he also remembers having constant nightmares for over 20 years about security forces barging into the small room he shared with his brother.

"When I used to put my head on the pillow, I always had the same dream and would wake up terrified," he said.

Their long confinement began after the their sister Sabeeha was arrested in 1980 because her husband was suspected of being a member of Dawa, a then-banned Shi'ite organisation that is now the party of the country's prime minister.

Security forces then arrested their father on the same charge, followed by their brother Mohammed. At that point the brothers realised they needed to disappear as well.

"We arranged things in the house so that our names would never be mentioned, and for 23 years they weren't," recalled Saad.

...
There is more. Antiwar Democrats should be ashamed when they are confronted with stories like this.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more