By Ramzi Kysia

Baghdad does not know it’s a city under a death sentence.
The sun still shines here. The date palms and poplars still line the Tigris River. The streets are still full of cars, and buses, and taxicabs searching for fares. When night falls, the mosques are full of people praying, and the sidewalks jam with families enjoying the festive Ramadan atmosphere of street vendors, sweets dealers, and restaurateurs roasting chickens in the open air. And with smuggling at an all time high, the shops are full of pretty things to look at - even if most people still can’t afford to buy them.

Walking the streets of Baghdad you notice the architecture - the boarded-up buildings, the crumbling sidewalks. This is what happens after 11 years of economic ruin. But then you also notice the new, box-like structures being built, with huge archways, intricate brickwork, and jutting columns, balconies, and facades. It’s a striking mix of old and new, of socialist sensibility and Babylonian splendor - Frank Lloyd Wright meets Lawrence of Arabia. These buildings are beautiful, and you have to wonder how many of them will be standing in six months if the U.S. does decide to massively bomb this country.

By Ramzi Kysia

Baghdad, Iraq - Dr. Alim Abdul-Hamid’s office at Al-Mustanseriya Medical College in Baghdad is decorated in bright, cheerful colors, but what he has to say is anything but cheerful. Formerly Dean of Basra Medical College, Dr. Abdul-Hamid has had plenty of first hand experience with Iraq’s unprecedented plague of cancers and birth defects.

“We have seen cases of breast cancer among women in their 20s. In their 20s!,” says Dr. Abdul-Hamid. “This is really tragic, because, you know, in America, probably when you come across a case of breast cancer in a woman in her late 30s you would consider that this is a young age for cancer, while we see cases of breast cancer in the 20s. There are increased incidences of colon cancer, thyroid cancer, in addition to, of course, leukemias and lymphomas.”

By Ramzi Kysia

THE DRIVE from Basra to Safwan, Iraq, is eerily apocalyptic. In the Demilitarised Zone, the Iraqi desert is an odd mix of greenhouse farms competing for space with decrepit and bombed-out concrete factories and mills. To the east run a series of rebuilt plastics factories whose stackfires bellow acrid, black smoke over the whole landscape. Burned, rusting cars dot the sides of the road on this, the northern tip of the infamous “highway of death”. This is the road along which the US massacred thousands of retreating Iraqi soldiers after an armistice had been signed at the end of “Desert Storm”.

A stone’s throw from the Kuwaiti border, Safwan was once a large farming town that traded with the whole Gulf. Today, the sight of strangers is enough to bring out seemingly every child for miles around to chase after our car and beg for money. Throughout Iraq, war and drought and sanctions have resulted in a 30 per cent drop in crop production. After the destruction of Iraq’s vaccine facilities by UN weapons inspectors, hoof and mouth disease ran rampant, killing over 1 million cattle.

By Ramzi Kysia

It was in a cold, dark room in Basra, lit only by lamplight, that I fully realized that George Bush is insane.

I was in Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness, a U.S.-based campaign to end sanctions. The house belonged to the al-Saraji family in Jumhuriya, one of Basra’s poorest neighborhoods. Raw sewage runs through open trenches on the street. There’s no running water, and they have electricity only half the day. 25 people live in 6 rooms: Salah and his children, Ali and Humdia and their children, Salah & Ali’s younger brothers and sisters, and presiding over them all with quiet dignity, Salah’s wife, Um Heider.

Heider Salah al-Saraji was killed, along with 16 other human beings, when a precision-guided U.S. missile hit their neighborhood on January 25, 1999. Heider was 6 years old.

By Kathy Kelly

Dear Mr. Perle,

I am writing to you from a faraway land, Iraq, and yet I sense we are not remote from one another. Perhaps you are thinking every day of the cities I’ve visited this last month: Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. Be assured that I am thinking, every day, about the recommendations that you and your colleagues make as you urge President Bush to show strength, courage, and vitality by intensifying U.S. warfare in Iraq.