Fw: Letter from Baghdad

Looking around at them with anger
Jesus grieved at their hardness of heart...

Mark 3: 4

http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/011905.htm

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Karim A G

To: Karim A G

Sent: Wednesday, January 19, 2005 11:07 AM

Subject: Letter from Baghdad

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20050118-043948-3664r

Letter from Baghdad

By Beth Potter
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
Published January 18, 2005

 

BAGHDAD -- ...At least 26 Iraqis died in various attacks Sunday and Monday -- shootings, bombings and associated mayhem across the country. Attacks around Baghdad and other Iraqi cities have become so common that when a car bomb goes off around the corner it no longer qualifies as big news. It's another day in Baghdad.
    
    Iraqi police officers and military personnel are being killed on a daily basis, and people tend to accept this sad fact as part and parcel of the job of a security officer in a place like Iraq.
    
    Regrettably, the Western media, particularly the American press, seems to place a different value on the life of a U.S. soldier, than an Iraqi's. Attacks against U.S. forces always merits greater attention in the international media that the killing of Iraqis.
    
    Even more regrettably, is the fact that most foreign media fail to give more attention to the way the daily violence is affecting the lives of ordinary Iraqis. According to one international monitoring site, about 15,000 Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion began.
    
    As a South African security guard put it the other day, "We're just visitors here, and we can all go home any time we want. For these people, this is home."
    
    In a particularly grisly and disturbing scene Tuesday morning, morticians rushed around collecting small, bloody body parts on the pavement left from a car bomb in front of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq headquarters near Baghdad University. Pieces of the crumpled hulk of a former white SUV were mixed with dirt and human remains scattered in front of the building, windows were blown out on buildings up and down the block, but the sign on the building appeared unscathed.
    
    The terrified look on a little boy's face was heart-wrenching as his mother pleaded with U.S. soldiers to let her through a cordon about 200 meters away from the bomb site to make sure her husband was alive. The boy said he had seen his father soon after.
    
    Because "only" two people were killed in the blast, the bomber and an Iraqi guard who refused to let him pass the dirt-filled barriers, the "story" did not get much play.
    
    By the late afternoon, a video of eight Chinese workers who were kidnapped surfaced, pushing other events aside. It was just another day in Baghdad.