Baghdad, Iraq
Kathy Kelly
Voices in The Wilderness

Meeting with our Iraqi friend, Sattar, who struggles now to adjust to the Occupation, we asked him if he has any hopes for the future. “If someone takes you to a far away land, to an unfamiliar city, and then to a street where there are no lights, –if you ask yourself how you would feel, then you will have an idea of my feelings now.”

He told us about a “good” encounter with a US soldier who showed kindness and decency during a ten-minute conversation while Sattar was stalled for two hours at a checkpoint. The soldier apologized for the long wait. Sattar posed a question he regularly asks of soldiers who talk with him: “What are you doing here?” The soldier said he wasn’t sure, but that they’d been told they had come to help Iraqis by getting rid of Saddam Hussein. “You’ve done that,” said Sattar. “Why are you still here?” The soldier couldn’t say, but he thought they still might have some important work to do in Iraq. He and Sattar shared a good moment of civil conversation, something to help balance some awful exchanges Sattar has had with soldiers who have behaved rudely.

By Ramzi Kysia
Having spent a year in Iraq, I remain continuously startled by the things I see and feel here. Perhaps I shouldn’t still be surprised by the resilience of these people. Perhaps I shouldn’t still wonder at their ability to absorb incredible amounts of suffering and go on with their lives. Or marvel at their determination, in the midst of suffering, to maintain a spirit of hospitality and generosity - with strangers and within their common lives - that is unsurpassed in any of my travels. But I am surprised. I remain in a state of perpetual amazement.

To my shame, I cannot imagine my fellow Americans being able to cope with even a fraction of what Iraqis have had to cope with over the last 30 years. How would America meet brutal dictatorship, 3 terrible wars resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings, the devastating impoverishment and isolation of 13 years of sanctions resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands more, military occupation, massive unemployment, out-of-control crime, and months without electricity or sanitation in 120+ degree heat? September 11 was only a flirting shadow of what Iraqis have experienced, and only time - and our active resistance to the Bush Crusade - will demonstrate if our democracy can manage to survive its aftermath.

People sometimes ask me how I feel about our “failure: the failure of the anti-sanctions movement over long years of struggle, the failure of the anti-war movement over short months of protest. But that question is itself a lie.

It can be overwhelming to stare, wide-eyed, into the crushing weight of a $400 billion-a-year killing machine fed by fear-mongering politicians, headed by a fool, protected by a captive media, only existing to protect an entrenched corporate-capitalist system that is eating our world alive. But if we would wonder at our inability as yet to fully overcome the death sellers and fear merchants, let us also wonder at how hard they have to work to keep their system running.

Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA)

August 18, 2003 Monday
SECTION: METRO; UPDATE: Newsmakers revisited; Pg. 1
BYLINE: By Bill Grady

With war looming in Iraq, Loyola University law professor Bill Quigley joined five other peace activists on a privately funded fact-finding tour of the country aimed at bringing back to the United States the viewpoints of ordinary Iraqis.

After 10 days in Iraq, Quigley came home with insights that confirmed his long-held belief in the commonality of all and the need for American understanding of the plight of the Iraqi noncombatant.

In addition to a significant degree of poverty, Quigley found in Iraq a pervasive sense of powerlessness among the citizenry, fear of the impending conflict, cynicism about the motives of the U.S. government and a cordiality toward Americans that humbled the New Orleans lawyer.

Caoimhe Butterly
Baghdad

Anwar Adel Khardom points to her heavily pregnant, shrapnel-sprayed stomach as she fluctuates between composure and frantic, inconsolable grief-”what sort of life will this child be born into?” Her thirteen year old daughter Hadil, frail arms bruised and scarred with shrapnel, head bandaged with white gauze, remains wide-eyed and observant, fanning her mother with a woven fan as the heat of an oppressive, airless day reaches it’s midday climax.

The room is crowded with relatives and friends who drink the bitter coffee and cry and keen in memory of Anwar’s husband, Adel, her 18-year old son Haider, 17-year old daughter Ola, and 8-year old daughter Mervat-all shot dead by U.S.soldiers seven days before. “How could they, why did they do it - they must of known we were a family - how could they kill my babies?”, Anwar asks continually as she holds a picture of her beautiful,smiling children-immortalised on the black banners hung on the outside walls of her family home, each of their names with shaheed (martyr) scripted next to it, proclaiming the family’s tragedy to the hushed street outside.

The car that carried Anwar’s family into a line of fire that pumped more than twenty bullets through the windshield and chassis into the warm living flesh, vital organs and skulls of her husband and children remains outside. The seats and headrests were ripped apart by bullets and remain covered in faded, darkened bloodstains. Hadil’s blood-stained handprints on the outside of the car are the same colour, left there as she groped her way out of the car that held dead Ola and Haider and dying Adel and Mervat, trying to follow her mother as Anwar ran towards the house they had just come from, screaming for help.

SEAN CALLEBS, CNN ANCHOR: Now the after effects of the Iraqi war here on U.S. soil. A retired Florida school teacher, who was a human shield in Iraq, is being fined by the U.S. federal government.

Faith Fittinger (ph), is refusing to fork over the — at least, $10,000, and she is not the only U.S. citizen who has been fined for going to Iraq.

Kathy Kelly is the founder of Voices in The Wilderness, a national peace activist group. Her group has received a summons to pay fines in the mid-90’s.

Now, CNN did invite the Treasury Department to take part in our interview, but calls were not returned.

Good morning, Miss Kelly, thanks for joining us.