Letter from Baghdad
By Yanar Mohammed

Life in Baghdad in these days is nerve wracking. It is so hard to keep your sanity through one more night of bombing. The explosions, the machine guns all around your house at night, the many times you jump up and down because it feels as if the last gun shot came from your own bedroom.

Nobody deserves to live like this.

Al Jazeera tv bombards us with the numbers and scenes of those of us who are killed each daythe children who don’t have the slightest idea why they are dying the women holding their heads unable to understand how their babies meant nothing to those who bombed them in the last air raid.

Hundreds of families in Al Thawra city are unable to buy meat for their meals because they haven’t worked for many days now. All the shops are closed in their area because it happens that the “holy” Al-Mahdi Army chose their streets and their neighborhoods as a battlefield against the American occupiers. People have no income and definitely no prospects; the young men are recruited (by al-Sadr’s army) for a monthly salary of 200$. They have only one way of getting by; take a few magic capsules from this sheetand the world will turn rosy as you are fighting to realize the will of God. “Capsuling” (or cabsala as they call it in Arabic) is a drug habit that has spread in Iraq over the last few years, only now it has become an epidemic addiction that the Al Mahdi Army thrives on. It turns thousands of young men into addicts of drugs, violence and fanaticism.

Military helicopters took to the skies around our buildings at dawn this morning after the machine guns went quiet. The beautiful skyline over the river was filled with black Apachee helicopters, flying so low you could see the drivers and of course you could feel your heart beat in a way you are not familiar with. Fear takes so many forms in this city that a heart attack awaits you around the corner at any time during the day or night.