by Mike Ferner

All last week I had a rare opportunity – to join several impressive speakers on the “Bring Them Home Now” tour’s northern route. Al Zappala, whose son was killed in Iraq last year; Tammara Rosenleaf, whose husband is due to deploy to Iraq this fall; Stacy Bannerman, whose husband has already served a tour in Iraq; Carlos Arredondo, whose son was killed during a second tour in Iraq; Elliott Adams, former Army paratrooper in Viet Nam; and two Iraq war veterans: former Marine, Michael Hoffman, and Cody Camacho, former Army Specialist.

At each stop I was with them: Detroit, Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Albany, Amherst, and Boston, we explained what motivated us to be on the tour. We condemned the war and ongoing occupation. We urged people to attend the massive demonstrations planned for September 24-26 in Washington, D.C.

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 Tom Fox
Christian Peacemaker Teams

Spending three days in the Baghdad airport waiting to see if the sand and dust would let up enough to allow flights to arrive (and then allow me to leave) was more stressful that I imagined. Of course, six trips on the airport road may have been a factor in increasing my stress level.

There were a number of internationals in the same predicament I was in. Many were people I’ve had very little contact with in my time in Iraq. Some were private security contractors who work for the large international firms like Dyncorp and KBR and are paid substantial sums (many 1,000 dollars a day) to protect international facilities and personnel. Others worked for NGO’s and organizations that were business related, such as a firm that did management training for Iraqi entrepreneurs. I took the opportunity of being stuck there to try and get to know a number of them.

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.