Baghdad, Iraq
Zehira Houfani (writer and journalist),
Member of the Montreal Iraq Solidarity Project

I couldn’t believe my eyes! Is it so easy to torture someone in an Iraq liberated from Saddam?

Yet the marks on the body of Al-Mountadhar Fadhel, a young Iraqi student of 23 years old, were so undeniably real, shocking, and above all completely unacceptable.

Al-Mountadhar lives in Hay El-houria, one of the poor, run-down neighbourhoods in the outskirts of Baghdad. Most of the streets and allies are inaccessible to cars. They are either too broken up or are drowned in dirty water which nearly reaches up to the sidewalks. “It is the same everywhere since the Americans arrived in Baghdad,” Ahmed, a taxi-driver, explained. In fact, the destruction of Iraqi state buildings, such as the ministries, the factories, the universities, the administrative centres, the city halls, etc., threw millions of Iraqi workers out of work; including those city employees, among others, who were responsible for collecting the garbage. All are on forced unemployment, just at a time when there is so much to do to prevent infectious diseases and other epidemics in this extremely hot weather. It is more than 50� and the garbage has not been collected for weeks in Baghdad neighbourhoods. It took us more than twenty minutes to move less than one kilometre and arrive at El-machtel street where Al-Mountadhar lives.