Sister Anne Montgomery examines the damage done to Yarmouk college, Iraq (photo: CPT)

New York Times
By Ian Urbina

In a place where everything seems broken, she has been a fixer. At a time when most other American civilians were leaving the country, she was just arriving.

Sister Anne Montgomery, a 78-year-old nun, avoided the United States-patrolled Green Zone when she moved to Baghdad, opting instead to live in Karada, a mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhood across the Tigris River from the American Embassy.

“You can’t possibly do the type of work we sought to do with Iraqi civilians unless you live with them,” she said in a recent interview from her home in East Harlem. She rotated into and out of Iraq regularly, from soon after the war started until April, when she returned home to take a break and get treatment for skin cancer.

As a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, an ecumenical antiwar group based in Chicago and Toronto, Sister Montgomery was among the handful of American civilians still based in Baghdad last year and early this year.

by Peggy Gish
Christian Peacemaker Teams

We planned to spend the evening and night with a renowned writer, Halla,* and her family and friends. Three CPT women would sleep with her on the roof of her Baghdad home and see her off early the next morning to her birth country, Syria, where she would reunite with her sister, daughter and their families.

It would be Halla’s first time to see her three grandchildren. Because she had married an Iraqi of Palestinian origin, she had not been able to travel outside Iraq for over twenty years. Her son, who had been imprisoned for eleven months in Iraq under US forces, had been released, and she was finally recovering from the cloud of grief and worry this caused her. Her family and friends were here to share in her joy and hope for new possibilities in her life.

By Greg Rollins
Christian Peacemaker Teams

Most Iraqis dislike the police and Iraqi National Guard (ING). Many people think they are nothing but thugs with guns. The police and ING drive up and down the streets (or sidewalks) shooting into the air and blasting their sirens and horns so that people will move out of their way. They abuse their power. People tell CPT that they insult and harass people at checkpoints, and arrest and beat innocent civilians.

By Anita David
Christian Peacemaker Teams

Last Monday, after a brief interview with a family, Greg and I went on a failed quest to obtain information on a disappeared man.

Today, Will and I return to the office of a small human rights organization for our second meeting with the mother and father of the man. The father carries the shopping bag holding copies of documents identifying his son. Will and I ask the parents to try to recreate the order in which they conducted their search. Their list:

Christian Peacemaker Teams

Details: On 25 June, 2005 in the village of Al-Shakh Hadid U.S. Marines staged a house raid on the home of Abdul-Hadi Al-Sumaida. His son, Mohammed, who is also the cousin to the current Ambassador from Iraq to the United Nations, Samir Sumaida’ie, let the Marines into the house. They asked him if the family had any weapons and he took them upstairs to show them the rifle owned by the family. Later the rest of the family was forced to go outside. After the Marines left the family discovered the body of Mohammed upstairs with a single bullet wound in the neck.

Action: Below is a sample letter you can use. Write, call or email your senator or representative letting them know you want a full investigation of this matter by the Senate and House Armed Services Committee. Let them know you want the many other cases of killings during house raids documented by human rights organizations in Iraq investigated as well. Let them know that killing innocent people will only fuel the insurgency in Iraq.

Additional Information: Use the following links for more information on this matter.

Iraq envoy accuses US of killing (BBC)
Or Ambassador says Marines killed his kin (San Francisco Chronicle)