Partition the Only Solution for Iraq and Palestine
The futility of the U.S. policy of a united democratic Iraq and Palestine is best expressed by the story of Khamael Muhsen and her husband Mohammed Sadiq Falhee. Khamael was a reporter with Radio Free Europe, the U.S. government-funded broadcaster who was killed for being a reporter and a Shiite in the middle of the Baghdad security plan that the Bush administration claimed was making the city safer. She had been a TV personality in Saddam Hussein’s era. The 54-year old Khamael became one of those statistical bodies dumped on the side of the road like garbage ─ one of at least 158 journalists, most of them Iraqis, who’ve been killed since the U.S. led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In Iraq and Palestine, if a mobile phone is switched off for an hour or more that means the phone owner is dead. That is how Mohammed knew she had been murdered. “If you say you’ll be home at five and it is six, you are dead,” he said. They had met and fallen in love during the first Gulf War after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1991. He’d helped her with her broken-down car during an air raid. He saw her again in a flower shop. This time, her mobile phone wasn’t working. He helped her fix it, and she asked him why he wasn’t married. He jokingly asked her if she’d marry him. She said yes.
Khamael and her husband Mohammed were Shiite Muslims and targets for Sunni extremists in their al-Qaeda controlled neighborhood. She said it would just be a matter of time before the Sunni extremists would take her life. They sent their two teenage daughters to live in Syria. At school in Baghdad the girls were called separationists and Safawis, the Arabic word for the Persian Safavid Empire, and now a common label for Shiites that implies they are part of an Iranian conspiracy to take over Arab Iraq. But Khamael was determined. She would not be forced out of her home and her neighborhood just because she was a Shiite.
Khamael’s body was found with a drill hole and bullet wounds on each side of her head and a cracked skull. She’d duck out after curfews for a story when only insurgents, militias and security forces roamed the streets. She hated those that killed in the name of Islam.
In Iraq and Palestine, if a mobile phone is switched off for an hour or more that means the phone owner is dead. That is how Mohammed knew she had been murdered. “If you say you’ll be home at five and it is six, you are dead,” he said. They had met and fallen in love during the first Gulf War after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1991. He’d helped her with her broken-down car during an air raid. He saw her again in a flower shop. This time, her mobile phone wasn’t working. He helped her fix it, and she asked him why he wasn’t married. He jokingly asked her if she’d marry him. She said yes.
Khamael and her husband Mohammed were Shiite Muslims and targets for Sunni extremists in their al-Qaeda controlled neighborhood. She said it would just be a matter of time before the Sunni extremists would take her life. They sent their two teenage daughters to live in Syria. At school in Baghdad the girls were called separationists and Safawis, the Arabic word for the Persian Safavid Empire, and now a common label for Shiites that implies they are part of an Iranian conspiracy to take over Arab Iraq. But Khamael was determined. She would not be forced out of her home and her neighborhood just because she was a Shiite.
Khamael’s body was found with a drill hole and bullet wounds on each side of her head and a cracked skull. She’d duck out after curfews for a story when only insurgents, militias and security forces roamed the streets. She hated those that killed in the name of Islam.
posted by Peter de Krassel's Custom Maid Politics at 8:06 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home