Horrific daily tragedies
A years of accomplishment, made of daily tragedies.
Sometimes I am horrified by what happens on Baghdad’s unforgiving streets, but today more than usual.
I was talking with an Iraqi friend who’d come by to wish me a happy New Year.
He’d told me he’d been in a store, a small grocery store, on Friday afternoon in western Baghdad when gunmen walked in and grabbed a boy.
The kidnappers weren’t masked. The abduction didn’t take long. My friend and the grocer were left stunned, and silent, feeling powerless.
There are many kidnappings here. This was just another, but it happened under my friend’s nose.
“Who was the boy?” I asked
“Just a kid.”
“From a rich family?”
“No, a normal family.”
“Not a doctors son?” I asked. (Many doctor’s children have been kidnapped.)
“No, the thing now is if you have a house, the kidnappers say, ‘sell your house and give me the money.’”
“So just owning a house is now enough?”
“Yes.”
“My neighbor just got his son back.”
“He’d been kidnapped too?”
“Yes.. they paid $30,000 and he was returned after four days.”
“He was okay?”
“They (the kidnappers) were drunks, losers, thugs.. they gave him whiskey and made him watch porn movies. They beat him up a bit.”
“Why, just for fun? What sarceriya (scumbags).”
“I think so, he was only 6 years old. These are dirty people. It’s the kind of thing that will stick with him all his life. It will stay inside of him.”
Then came the horrific story.
“And with girls, do they rape them?” I asked.
“With girls, forget it … consider it done.”
Rapists told to keep a girl
He told me the story of a shop owner we both know.
“They kidnapped his daughter and were asking for money,” he said.
“The father was talking to the kidnappers on the telephone, and said ‘let me talk to my daughter and then I’ll pay you’re the money you want.’”
They put her on the cell phone.
“Did these men… did they aggress you?” he asked his daughter.
Amid wet sobs, she said they had.
“It’s okay.. now put them back on,” he told her.
One of the kidnappers got back on the line.
“You raped her,” the father said, “Now I don’t want her back. You can keep her.”
“He said that?” I almost shouted.
“Yes, it’s cruel. It’s too much.”
The father never tried to secure her release. Instead, he and the rest of his family moved to Jordan. It’s not clear what happened to the daughter.
Looking back at 2005, I fear there have been so many of these incidents that collectively they might be as powerful as both of this year’s elections and its constitutional referendum.
This war has brought out some of the greatest in Iraqis -– resilience, bravery, solidarity -– but also the worst of the ignorance, chauvinism, and religious and ethnic bigotry bottled up here for so long, and never properly reconciled.
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