To The Americans Who Are Questioning The Death Of The Children In Connecticut
BY NESREEN MELEK
Nesreen Melek (about the author)
PHOTO A mother with her daughter in her arms in the infantile hospital of Bagdad
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You gathered to mourn the death of those kids but when the war was launched, my sister who lived in the states that time and I cried alone as our family members were still in Iraq and we didn't know what happened to them. The American missiles didn't differentiate between children and adults during the war, all Iraqis were exposed to death all days long.
No one offered us condolences for the loss of our country, our dreams and our hopes for good days to come. We were alone with our grief; the whole world watched the continuous bombing in silence. Some people protested but their voices weren't heard. The leaders of the Middle East watched their brothers and sisters killed, your military bases were on their lands yet they did nothing to stop you from the war.
Your President called the kids who were killed at the school by names. Our children who were killed by the American bombs had no names. I remember a picture of bodies of small kids covered with blood and piled on the back of a truck, those kids were killed during the bombing of a small city in Iraq. No apologies where given to their parents or to the Iraqis for taking the lives of these kids... there were no teddy bears and no candles..
Do you know Abeer? Abeer is the Iraqi kid who was fifteen when she was raped in front of her family members by the American soldiers. The soldiers burnt the house to hide their atrocities. How many of the American people know the story of Abeer? .
The depleted uranium your troops used in Fallujah caused higher rates of cancer, leukemia and infant mortality? Young women in Fallujah in Iraq are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies being born deformed, with no heads, two heads, and a single eye in the foreheads or missing limbs. Do you know that young children in Fallujah are now experiencing cancers and leukemia?
We had endless shooting across my country by the American troops during the war and even after Iraq surrounded, many of your soldiers kept shooting at the civilians they thought were a threat. My relative's wife was shot by your soldier in a checkpoint when her husband didn't hear the soldier asking him to stop. The cause of the violence in Iraq wasn't complex as you concluded for your country. The cause was the brutality of the troops.
Yet in Iraq we don't hear someone walks in a shopping centre or in a school and start shooting people. But we heard that innocent people were killed by your troops, I wonder why?
As your president said in Connecticut a few days ago: "Let the little children come to me" Jesus said, "and do not hinder them, for to such belongs to kingdom of heaven"
For the Iraqi children who are alive after experiencing the war, they will watch the news and will feel for your children. Those who died and no one acknowledged their death they will belong to kingdom of heaven like the American children who lost their lives during the shooting and they will be one. Children are children and they deserve to be given the opportunity to live whether they are Iraqis or American.
One man took the life of the twenty beautiful children and the six remarkable adults, but your government took the life of thousands of beautiful children and remarkable adults in Iraq during the ugly war on Iraq.
Why does the death of the twenty children affect you so much when the death of the thousands of the Iraqi children was ignored?
Your loss is big but our loss is greater..
I am an Iraqi woman. I've been living in Canada since 1989. I left Baghdad in 1979 but Baghdad had never left me.
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