by Dana Visalli
Christian Peacemaker Teams
dana@methow.com

The leading Shia cleric in Baghdad, Sayyid Ali Mussawi Al Waadh, said in a recent interview, “The Iraqi people have suffered enough.” And so they have. The air in Baghdad smells and tastes like burning tires. Much of landscape looks like it was set in place by a fleet of dump trucks. Sewage oozes out of cracks in the street while buildings crumble and electrical supply sputters and runs dry. The 200 billion dollars spent by the West to bomb and pummel Iraq during the two Gulf Wars hasn’t improved the lives of the Iraqi people one iota. Twelve years of sanctions not only ensured that Saddam Hussein would not buy new and improved weapons, but also that the garbage trucks wouldn’t run, drinking water wouldn’t be chlorinated, the sick wouldn’t get medicine and children wouldn’t get textbooks or even pencils (pencils were on the sanctions list until 1998 because the U.S. feared the graphite in them could be used for arms manufacture). In this context it is all the more remarkable, in the midst of this decay and disintegration, that individuals and organizations are rising Phoenix-like.

Alexander Christof was sitting pretty in Germany in 1995, an increasingly wealthy architect drawing plans for increasingly wealthy clients. But he was increasingly discontent with his life, gorged as it was on possessions, power and prestige but devoid of the satisfaction of serving the real needs of the human community. The emotional aridity of his life finally compelled him to make changes. He divested himself of his business, took stock of the skills he had to could respond in some way to the abiding needs of the human family, and together with his wife started Architects for People in Need, or APN. In 2001 APN came to Iraq, to try to offer to the Iraq people the basic amenities of life that their own government and the governments of the world had denied to them.

By Dana Visalli
Baghdad, Iraq
Christian Peacemaker Teams

The village of Abu Siffa is every bit as exotic as the name might suggest to the mind of a westerner. It is a small Iraqi farming community resting tranquilly on the banks of the Tigris River, some 50 miles north of Baghdad. The town consists of modest brick and stucco homes scattered almost randomly among citrus groves, all inter-connected by narrow, winding roadways and paths. Inside, the homes are spare and comfortable, with little in the way of furniture, but graced with wall-to-wall carpets and pillows that evoke childhood images from Arabian Nights. Women in black abayas chatter and laugh as they pass along the paths, and flocks of children flit about from field to town. Overall it is an exceptionally bucolic scene, and one suspects that it has changed little in the 5000 years that agriculture has been practiced on this fertile crescent of land along the Tigris.

At 2 AM on the night of December 16, 2003, the people of Abu Sifa were startled awake by the roar of tanks and trucks, humvees and helicopters, as the U.S. Army entered the village. The 4th Infantry Division was paying a house call. Acting on a tip, the Army was trying to catch members of the armed resistance that has been confronting the U.S. military occupation of Iraq. Every house in the village was surrounded, front doors were broken down, and the terrified occupants ordered out into the yards in their nightclothes. All the men present were handcuffed, hooded with plastic bags over their heads, and taken away. Women and children were herded together in the dark night while soldiers ransacked the homes, searching for weapons. Few were found, but $17,000 in Iraq dinars-savings belonging to the villagers-was taken by U.S. soldiers as they rummaged through the villager’s belongings..