Mike Ferner
Voices in The Wilderness

BAGHDAD-Iraq’s largest Sunni mosque, dedicated to the revered Imam, Abu Hanifeh, has a new addition. It is not, however, a space to accommodate more worshipping faithful. It’s a space to lay the bodies of civilians killed in the U.S. invasion last April.

Several members of the Christian Peacemaker Team visited the mosque in Baghdad’s Al-AaDamiyha district recently and were met by Mohammed, who described himself as a “servant of the mosque.” He took them to five tidy rows of graves, some quite small. Speaking through a translator, he read some of the tombstones.

“Here this is the tomb of a woman, her name Aqadeth Naji. It says she was killed on 10th April 2003, with her son, a child. His name is Natha Ayab Natha. They were killed from bombing her house…This is the grave for the small girl. Her name is Ala Mohammed Hassan Hatumini. She was killed on 11th of April, 2003, playing in the streets…and this is another child killed …and this man’s name was Ma’mhoud Nasaid Sa’id…and…”

Mike Ferner
Voices in The Wilderness

BAGHDAD - If a “rogue nation” or swarthy men with foreign accents did it, we know what we’d call it. What the world’s most powerful military did to the village of Abou Siffa must be called the same thing: terrorism.

A small citrus grove was the last stop on our tour of this farming hamlet on the Tigris River, 30 miles north of Baghdad and Mohammed Al Taai wanted to give us a gift of fruit. I put the two oranges he gave me in my right coat pocket. In the left clinked two spent shell casings I’d just found on the ground that came from a 25mm gun mounted on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. We listened to the story of how the U.S. military came to Abou Siffa three times in one month, leaving a terrorized community in its wake.

“On December 16, at 2:00 am, on a rainy night, all the houses in this village, about two dozen, were surrounded by U.S. troops in tanks and humvees. They surrounded the fields of the farmers by tanks and they destroyed the fences of the fields,” Mohammed tells the six people from Christian Peacemaker Teams who have come to document detainees’ stories.

By Anna Bachmann
Voices in the Wilderness
Baghdad (This letter written from Amman, Jordan, on her way into Iraq)

“They say ‘Welcome to Jordan!’ when you arrive in Amman,” Hassan said, “But for me it was really ‘Welcome to Hell!’”

Hassan was our waiter at a local restaurant. He stood out immediately because of his Brooklyn accent. Over the course of serving us a simple meal of hummos, tabouli, roasted chicken and flat bread, he told us his story.

Hassan came to the United States in 1974 … he was 17 years old. Growing up in New York, he eventually started a family and later a small business with a partner. Then he made the mistake of obtaining a unregistered handgun for self-protection. In September 2002 he was arrested for carrying the weapon but was soon on probation for the offense. For most American citizens the probation would have run its course and that would, most likely, have been the end of it but Hassan’s probation brought him under the eye of the Immigration Service.

By Anna Bachmann
Voices in the Wilderness
Baghdad
February 12, 2004

We waited there for three days before our driver, an Iraqi named Sattar, was ready to take us in. An engineer by training, Sattar supports his family by driving the 12 to 15 hours each way from Amman to Baghdad and back several times a week. At 1 AM on the dot, he met us in the hotel lobby ready to drive us in. We had heard stories of drivers falling asleep at the wheel and Sattar couldn’t have had more than five hours of sleep, so we were determined to stay awake for the entire journey. Unfortunately, I was quickly out like a light. I had two travel partners. N, a student from Virginia who I had met briefly before the war in Baghdad and who had spent most of the last year studying Arabic in Syria, and Lorna, a journalist from the Hudson Valley of New York. N was soon splayed out on the seat in front of me but fortunately Lorna had more staying power and kept up a near constant banter with the soft-spoken Sattar.

Mike Ferner
Voices in The Wilderness

[Note: This article begins a series of reports titled “War of Terrorism.” While writing the essay, “Terror by Another Name,” I realized that we apply this most potent term in the American political vocabulary very unevenly. We define terrorism as tactics used against us, but deny that it applies to our own actions taken to purposely and unmistakably instill terror. Our denial is compounded daily when the U.S. government promotes and the media report news from a “War on Terrorism.” Our “War of Terrorism” deserves its due.]

ABU HISHMA, IRAQ - This is the farm village that Cliff Kindy, leader of the Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT), refers to as the “razor wire place.” It’s actually a small town, around half of which the U.S. Army has unrolled concertina razor wire, and completed the effect with a checkpoint and curfew. Six CPT members are returning for an update from the residents on the latest U.S. raids and detentions.

On the 30-mile trip from Baghdad, the city falls away as we drive into open countryside. Approaching Abu Hishma, we pass a small house about 150 feet from the road that is now a pile of rubble. Our interpreter, Sattar, said the house was destroyed because “it was too close to the road and coalition forces destroy it.”