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 Ramzi Kysia

I lay in bed in the mornings listening to a wind that drowns the call to prayer and whips at my windows, “wake up, wake up, wake up.” But even awake I can’t shake the nightmare. Corpses piled high in the streets. This is Baghdad at the end of 2001 - soon to be the city of the Dead.

I was in New York City on September 11th, and the one source of hope I have today is in how generous the people of New York were after the terrible attacks of that day. I take comfort in the feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood that I overwhelmingly felt in the aftermath of that terror. And I take comfort in the cries for peace that I heard and saw as well. The messages scrawled on sheet after sheet at the peace shrine in Union Square read, “We don’t want a war,” “Give peace a chance,” and, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

By Ramzi Kysia

When I first visited Iraq in the summer of 1999, I wrote that nothing could have prepared me for my trip - for the incredible hospitality of the people, or for the incredible brutality of the sanctions. Since then, I’ve seen reports that sanctions against Iraq were crumbling, and I had hoped that the lives of the Iraqi people were much improved.
I was wrong.

Chronic unemployment, underemployment, and hyperinflation are still the rule, and most Iraqis are still struggling in terrible poverty. 11 years after the Gulf War, the electricity has not yet been fully restored, and much of the country’s infrastructure remains in disrepair. The hospitals here are just as crowded, and almost as poorly stocked, as I remember from 1999. The doctors complain just as much about not having enough medicines, or the proper medicines. And the children are still dying by the thousands every month.

Dear Friends,

Greetings from Iraq! After a week in the country, I can say that the attitude here is pretty fatalistic. People are not too worried about the U.S. expanding the “war” to Iraq anytime soon. They’re celebrating Ramadan and going about their lives as usual. They say that the future is out of their hands, so why bother worrying about it? Everyone agrees that after Afghanistan, America will bomb Iraq next. But - as one man put it to me the Iraqi people are “used to the voice of American bombs.” In fact, this is something people have said to me again and again - that if America thinks they’re going to fall apart like the Taliban, they should think again. People say that Iraq has been bombed repeatedly by the U.S. for 11 years - almost every day in the North and South - and they’re still here. They don’t like it. It really, and justifiably, angers them, but, well – one woman compared U.S. bombings to the weather, saying it was just a fact of Iraqi life. I don’t know myself. This time it seems different. This time it seems much more serious. And much more frightening.