Baghdad To Amman

Some of you know that I’ve been following Treasure in Baghdad, the blog of an Iraqi who has been living in a Sunni-dominated part of Baghdad despite not being Sunni.  He has been blogging about his life there, about the dangers, and about lost friends and neighbors, and I worry when he is silent, though I’ve never met him or spoken to him.

His recent posts indicate that he has now fled Baghdad to Amman and I feel his sadness but I must admit that I am relieved for him.  I feel that my prayers at least were answered, though I wish that it hadn’t had to come to this.

I never thought that one day I will restore my real youth smile. I didn’t know that there is still hope of living normally even if it is away from my own country. I gave up hoping that my beloved country may be safe and normal again.

My life has changed now. I can breath, walk, laugh, joke, cry, run, have fun, and meet with friends and relatives. I missed these things for years. For the last three years, I was like a robot. Living and working for the sake of work and nothing else. No kind of life was represented in my previous life. Fear was my companion. Wherever I go I feel worried and whatever I do I feel cautious. I thought about each step I walked in Baghdad several times before I took its risk.

Tears, lots of tears bid farewell to Baghdad. When I was leaving, I felt my tears were falling like rain on the shoulders of my mother, father, sister, aunt and friends. We were all crying. My parents were crying of happiness because finally I am going to be safe. But where can I get the feeling of peace from while they are still there in the middle of killings and explosions?

Since I arrived in Amman, I felt that I am still alive. WOW! I am still alive. I don’t know how, I don’t know why but I am alive and breathing. “Back to life” became my slogan. Yes, I was dead for the last three years. Death does not necessarily mean you die physically.

I have lots of friends and relatives in Amman. However, I didn’t stay with anyone of them. I shared an apartment with a friend of mine whom we both pay for its rent.

Iraqis are everywhere in Amman. Maybe it’s funny if I say that there are Jordanians in Amman now! Wherever I turn my face, I see an Iraqi. They invaded Jordan as Zeyad said in his Amman posts. Few months ago, one of my best friends who works in the ministry of displaced and migration said that there are more than a million and a half Iraqis in Amman alone. Add to this the number of millions of other Iraqis who fled to Syria, Egypt, Dubai, and other European countries. Sometimes I don’t feel I am a stranger from another country because even most of those who come to the internet café I go to are Iraqis. Each Iraqi I talk to says life became impossible in Iraq under the failure of everything there.

Iraqis here are not the poor ones or the uneducated. Most of them are the educated and well raised young men and women who feel their dreams were being killed slowly in a country run by vulgar people and extremists. Most of those I saw and met were graduates of the best colleges and universities in Iraq who most of them were threatened to death if they continue their progress in rebuilding their destroyed country. If not them, their parents and relatives were threatened to death. Even the Iraqi satellite channels started interviewing Iraqi intellectuals, authors and scientists in Amman or other Arab or foreign countries. None of the good people are left in Iraq. Militias formed of Shiite hateful avenging backwards people and Sunni insurgents are the ones whom Iraq is left for. They took it by force like Saddam.  [“Back to Life”]

To read about other Iraqis who’ve fled to Amman, check out these blogs:

• Morbid Smile’s From Me With Love!
• Zeyad’s Healing Iraq
• Nabil’s Blog

Tags: Iraq, blogs, Baghdad, Amman

Day 1,230

Today is Day 20 of the “Crisis in the Middle East”.

Do you know how many days it’s been since the U.S. invaded Iraq?

According to Frank Rich in yesterday’s New York Times, yesterday was Day 1,229, making today a nice even 1,230.

According to CNN, “there have been 2,802 coalition deaths, 2,576 Americans, two Australians, 114 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, three Danes, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Fijian, one Hungarian, 31 Italians, one Kazakh, one Latvian, 17 Poles, two Romanians, two Salvadoran, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians in the war in Iraq as of July 31, 2006.”  1,000 plus Iraqis per month have lost their lives in Baghdad alone the last few months.

However, according to Frank Rich:

On the Big Three networks’ evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor, the Tyndall Report. On Thursday, Brian Williams of NBC read aloud a “shame on you” e-mail complaint from the parents of two military sons anguished that his broadcast had so little news about the war.

This is happening even as the casualties in Iraq, averaging more than 100 a day, easily surpass those in Israel and Lebanon combined. When Nouri al-Maliki, the latest Iraqi prime minister, visited Washington last week to address Congress, he too got short TV shrift — a mere five sentences about the speech on ABC’s “World News.” The networks know a rerun when they see it. Only 22 months earlier, one of Mr. Maliki’s short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi, had come to town during the 2004 campaign to give a similarly empty Congressional address laced with White House-scripted talking points about the war’s progress. Propaganda stunts, unlike “Law & Order” episodes, don’t hold up on a second viewing.

The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn’t happenstance. It’s a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever. The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. “It is depressing to pay attention to this war on terror,” said Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly on July 18. “I mean, it’s summertime.” Americans don’t like to lose, whatever the season. They know defeat when they see it, no matter how many new plans for victory are trotted out to obscure that reality.

So much for supporting our troops, eh?  What happened to reporting all of that good news that was supposed to be happening in Iraq?

I’m upset about Israel and Lebanon too.  Heck, I’m outraged; however, remember, Iraq and Afghanistan are our wars and our messes and our soldiers are dying over there.  Shame on our media for a lack of patriotic priority.

Hat tip AmericaBlog.

Tags: Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Baghdad, American soldiers, New York Times, ABC, Fox News, NBC, Nouri al-Maliki, Frank Rich