An Iraqi's Personal Response

One positive item from being a feature writer for an on-line news magazine is the ability for anyone that has read your article to immediately respond directly to the author via e-mail. Having this capability has allowed me to receive some harassing comments (mostly from neocons and irate Bush supporters) and some very insightful inputs from individuals that have actually “been there and done that”.

The latter is what has recently occurred from a 25 year old Iraqi that up until a few months ago had been living in Baghdad. He now lives in Europe and he had been reading my articles via the Internet (among many others) about the war and the occupation. He had felt that my last article was similar to many US articles discussing the erosion of the situation in Iraq and that it and the others deserved some additional understanding of the situation. He did ask that if I wrote anything about his comments, I not use his name. So for this article I will just refer to him as al-Vali.

Al-Vali says he was born and raised a Sunni, but he lived with his family in one of the mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad that was highly integrated with both Sunni and Shi’ite neighbors. His father was a professor at a Baghdad university and there were other family members that had married individuals of both Sunni and Shi’ite backgrounds. He said that in many Baghdad neighborhoods, prior to the US invasion, this was not uncommon in Baghdad. He compared it to what he understood about an American marriage between a Roman Catholic and a Southern Baptist or an American Jew and a Protestant. The more important issues in Iraq were as they would have been in America. “Now, how do we raise the children? Sunni or Shi’ite?”

Al-Vali wanted me to know that even though my previous explanations were correct about the difference between the Sunni and Shi’ite tribes, the issues that divided the two Iraq sects were not just based on the religious issues from 1400 years ago. He said that personally, he did not know for years which neighbors in his neighborhood were Sunni or Shi’ite. Each individual in his neighborhood went every day to their work or school, they dined together, socialized and developed relationships regardless of their religions. They looked at the government under Saddam as probably not really affecting them personally. Yes, Saddam was Sunni. He did kill some Sunni’s that betrayed him, and he did kill many Shi’ites without a second thought. All the major individuals within the government and military were Sunni, but to the average Iraqi on the streets in Baghdad, that did not affect them directly. In the local neighborhoods, al-Vali says everyone ignored most of what went on in those areas of the government. And for the most part, they were all left alone to mind their own lives and business in their own neighborhoods.

Al-Vali says the problems began many months after Saddam was removed. He states that the Sunni extremist started to be afraid of the larger Shi’ite population gaining too much power. They also saw a chance to gain back the power they had with Saddam. They then started bombing Shi’ite targets and neighborhoods and marketplaces. This began the division and what has now become a civil war. It became so bad in al-Vali’s neighborhood that they blocked the streets with broken concrete and refuse to keep suspect cars with bombs out of the neighborhood. (See Picture) The final straw was the bombing of the Mosque of Samarra, the most sacred of Shi’ite religious locations in Baghdad. The Samarra attack may in fact have not been a Sunni attack, but the Sunni’s took the blame. From this point, everything just escalated. When the new Shi’ite government hung Saddam during morning prayers on a Sunni day of religion, this also was like rubbing the Sunni’s nose in the dirt. Everything has gone down hill from then.

Al-Vali says that Americans also haven’t understood until recently that the Sunni-Shi’ite war is a neighborhood-to-neighborhood conflict in Baghdad. The current troop surge is only causing the insurgents to back-off and redeploy and they know the Americans will eventually be leaving. “They will fight the Americans while they are here and will fight each other when they are gone.” Al-Vali is also very angry at the US bringing al-Qaeda to Iraq, “Al Qaeda was not in Iraq until the US began the occupation.” He also says that with the Iranians, Syrians, Hizballah, Wahhabi’s, Lebanese and Hamas also joining in, this war could continue to expand and go on for years. It has also been confirmed that approximately 2 million of the “best and the brightest Iraqi’s” have left Iraq. Al-Vali says that all that is left are the poor and the extremists.

Al-Vali misses the good times, the dinners and celebrations that he had with his friends and neighbors. He does not believe he will ever see this again in his lifetime. He lives in Europe today and does not see that he or his family will ever return to Iraq.

He also blames it all on President Bush and his administration for going into Iraq and their lack of knowledge about the Middle East. His last comment was “This president has no idea what he has started in an area that will now be at war for many years”.

Al-Vali is probably right.