By Donna Mulhearn
Dec 21st

Dear friends,
Tomorrow morning I will drive along the treacherous highway of death to the heavily fortified Baghdad airport and then fly to Jordan. I leave with a heavy heart. As the west shops for Christmas bargains, Iraq still struggles to survive the chaos and violence of occupation.

My month in Baghdad gave me joy and sadness, hope and despair, moments of light and times of darkness. Feeling overwhelmed by the human catastrophe around me, I have to remind myself that we can only do what we can do. But do this we must – whatever it is!

By Donna Mulhearn

On arrival at the school where the Fallujah refugee families were staying, I was ushered into a front room not really knowing what to expect. But the answer came quickly in the response of one of the dozen or so men in the room, who, sitting at the big desk near the window, appeared to be the leader of the group.

As soon as he saw me he stood up and smiled widely as he stretched out his arms. Then he announced to the other men; “I know this lady; she stayed at my house in Fallujah!” I was just as surprised as they were to hear this. But sure enough, I soon recognised the big-moustached, distinguished looking man as the Fallujah community leader who offered our group hospitality when we went there to deliver aid during the previous US attack on the city back in April. Of all the 150,000-odd Fallujah men currently displaced and scattered around Iraq, to meet this one, this day, was a handy stroke of serendipity.

Raid and the bundle of aid given to Fallujah refugees.

By Donna Mulhearn

The statistics on the whiteboard looked frightening. There were columns of Arabic words in black pen and rows of various numbers in bright red. Asterisks, arrows, ticks and crosses. The whiteboard squiggles presented a scenario that appeared chaotic and overwhelming. But still it did not convey the human horror of the Fallujah refugee situation.

We were in the offices of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, the group now grappling with the disaster of an entire city becoming homeless in a war zone - a disaster within a disaster.

By Donna Mulhearn

“The enemy has got a face,” a US Marine lieutenant-colonel announced before the recent attack on Fallujah began. “He’s called Satan. He lives in Fallujah. And we’re going to destroy him.” With that, thousands of heavily armed members of ‘God’s army’ proceeded to reduce this formerly living city of 250,000, to a dump of ashes, rubble and de-composing bodies.

The US forces has not yet announced the capture of Satan, so I figure that he must still be at large.

By Donna Mulhearn

There’s a family in Leith’s neighbourhood that is selling their house. He says it’s a large, beautiful home with a big garden – one of the nicest in the street. They are not selling the house to move to a more fashionable neighbourhood. The desperate sale is to access funds to pay the $50,000 ransom that has been demanded by kidnappers for the life of their 10-year-old son.

They are not alone. Five children were kidnapped in this suburb last month in the space of a week. Two in a neighbouring suburb before that and so on.

Kidnappings in Iraq are now endemic. Along with the international community, Iraqis condemn, discusses, analyse and mourn the kidnappings of a number of foreigners that have occurred in Iraq. But for them there’s more to it. They know how it feels. The only difference is their stories rarely make it to the news.