Compassion and al Qaeda

Brian Bresnahan:

...

One day an old woman approached me, surrounded by several men from her village, as was customary for those occasions when women engaged me directly during this process. As she spoke and I listened to her story being translated to me, I remember watching her hands. They were extremely chapped from years of hard, laborious work and stained orange, I assumed from working with some type of plant. They told as much a story as she did.

The woman, a widow, and mother of just one remaining young teenage son, told me of the foreign men who had forced themselves into her home, which turned out was a very small shack set off away from other homes, for a night of lodging and meals. Obviously a particularly poor woman, even for an Iraqi, fearful for her and her son, with no food to offer and a very small shack to live in, against custom she had refused to the best of her ability. The next morning as her son rode his bike down the road, a roadside bomb just happened to go off next to him, killing him. Obviously the bad guys were making their point to her and the rest of the village about not cooperating.

Now, the last of her children, preceded by their father, was gone and she had nothing left.

She was asking me for any possible assistance, money for food, because without her son who had been working, making at least a meager amount of money for food, she was now unable to provide for herself.

My translator, a particularly unforgiving man, with no love for Sunni's, who'd suffered at the hands of Saddam Hussein was clearly becoming, for the first and only time, emotionally moved by the events of this poor woman's life. You could hear it in his voice, see it in his expressions, and sense it in his body language. For the first and only time, I heard him gently address an elderly woman using the Arabic word for "mother." Usually he wanted me to have everyone thrown in jail, but this time, he showed pity and compassion.

...

The cumulative effect of of abusing the population in Anbar has been the rejection of al Qaeda and the Sunnis moving to help us get rid of al Qaeda. Momentum is clearly against he enemy, but their best hope of prevailing lies in the votes of Democrats and Chuck Hagel, aka, Sen. *. When they are unmoved by the plight of the people al Qaeda is abusing in Iraq and try to justify their heartless position by talking about a sectarian civil war remember this old lady and her son.