this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war
we love and support our troops, just as we love and support the Iraqi people - without exception, or precondition, or judgment
we have no sympathy for the devil.
we acknowledge the power to act that is in us
image and poem below the fold
(RubDMC's daily intro)
This is my final entry filling in for RubDMC. roses and I have been alternating; yesterday's diary is here. Look for the final entry from roses tomorrow, as RubDMC said he would resume the series on January 14.
Every day this war/occupation gives us more images of grief. For this diary, I want to revisit a few older images and offer some personal perspectives.
When I was working on my second entry for this series, I told my husband I had volunteered, what the diary was supposed to be, and how I was having trouble with the "poem" part. He asked if I had seen No bravery. I thought he meant Peace Takes Courage, Ava Lowery's brilliant site, but no, this was something I hadn't seen. Someone had recently posted a link to "No Bravery" on a site he frequents, and he thought it was fairly new. It's actually a February entry on the Contagious Festival, but I missed it at the time (too busy checking the misadventures of Dick Cheney, I guess). If you check the archives, "No Bravery" sits at the top of the leaderboard, with 565354 unique visitors, so I'll bet most dkos members have seen it.
I'm on dial-up, so videos like these load slowly: for a few seconds, the images play, then there's a freeze, and so on. My husband was walking away from the computer after getting the animation going, and I looked back at my screen at the frozen image. "Oh, that little girl..." I gasped aloud. My husband turned back, took a quick peek, said softly "yeah, I know", and walked away again...he didn't want to rewatch it. I'm sure you all know her face,
and the story.
It's been nearly two years since this happened, but no matter how many times I've seen her, and her siblings
in diaries, anti-war videos and collages here, there, and everywhere, these images never fail to deliver an emotional wallop. I know she's not physically hurt...she's covered in her parents' blood, who were killed in a "fog-of-war" incident. This is the face of grief, and of "shock and awe". Indeed, the BBC used her image in this article War takes toll on Iraqi mental health
I have always wondered what happened to her after...did she have relatives to take her in? This happened near Tal Afar, one of those places in the news as a "hotbed of insurgents and Al Qaeda"...is she still alive? The original stories had no names, just the faces. I now have some faint hope for this girl, as I managed to find a story about her brother Rakan, the only one of the children that was wounded.
RubDMC may have covered this, as his page says he's from Massachusetts, and this story in four parts appeared in the Boston Globe, starting here with
Rakan's War.
You now have to register with the Boston Globe to get the whole story, and I will excerpt a few passages of relevance.
First, the incident in more detail:
On Jan. 18, 2005, as dusk fell in Tal Afar, a scruffy city in northwest Iraq, Rakan Hassan was riding in the family car, heading home after visiting his uncle. His father, Hussein Hassan, a clerk in the local electricity office, was driving faster than usual, trying to beat the curfew, because, after nightfall, in a town crawling with insurgents and US troops, anything could happen.
From the back seat, where he was crammed in with three of his sisters, his little brother, and a cousin, Rakan saw the dark figures up ahead, waving.
''Look!" Rakan shouted, pointing.
But it was too late. A patrol of US soldiers, jumpy after recent attacks, thought the worst and opened fire. Rakan says it sounded like pops. The windshield splintered, and something punched him in the stomach. In an instant Hussein and his wife, Kamila, were dead in the front seat, their blood splattering the children in the back.
[snip]
It was the sort of horrifying accident of war that would normally go unrecorded. But Chris Hondros, a photographer for Getty Images, happened to be embedded with the patrol and captured it all in a series of haunting, indelible images.
The children spilled out of the back seat, as the US soldiers shouted ''Civilians!" and realized their mistake, Hondros recounted. Rakan, his spine pierced by a bullet, flopped on the pavement. He couldn't feel his legs, only a searing pain in his midsection.
[snip]
But the scene was hellish: the children's hair mottled with blood; the mournful wailing; the soldiers cursing their mistake. Jilan, Rakan's 14-year-old sister, cried out in their native Turkoman language, ''Why did they shoot us? We were just going home!"
And I had wondered about the soldiers'...you've got to have some sympathy for them too:
The US Army acknowledged its mistake immediately. But the soldiers from the 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division who were involved in the shooting were not allowed to dwell for long on what had happened. They had to focus on surviving a yearlong tour in Iraq. During their deployment, which ended in September, the brigade's 4,200 soldiers suffered heavy losses: 34 killed, 632 wounded. They faced more than 3,000 enemy attacks, including 84 suicide car-bombers, and 1,335 improvised explosive devices. Five of the suicide attacks occurred in the two weeks prior to the shooting of Rakan's family.
Thanks to the photographer, Christopher Hondros, Rakan got help:
But if Rakan had plenty of company in his misfortune, he was also more fortunate than most. Hondros's dramatic pictures appeared in Newsweek magazine and The Times of London, drawing attention to his plight.
And Hondros, deeply affected by what he had witnessed, tried to interest others in Rakan's situation. His friend, Marla Ruzicka, an American humanitarian worker in Iraq, took up the case. At 28, Ruzicka was an idealist with a practical streak, an accomplished schmoozer who knew how to get officialdom to take an interest in Iraqi civilians, especially children, injured in the war. By April, she had lined up a doctor in San Francisco to help Rakan, and was cajoling US diplomats to help get him into the United States. On April 12, Ruzicka sent a plaintive e-mail to two State Department officials, begging them to speed the visa.
''If we don't get him treatment soon he may never be able to walk again," she pleaded.
Four days later, as she awaited word on the visa, Ruzicka and Faiz Ali Salim, her colleague at the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up on the road to the Baghdad airport. The bomber was targeting a US military convoy.
Someone else took up the cause:
Sitting in front of his computer in his Rockland, Mass., home, Adam Burnieika, a 57-year-old disabled postal worker suffering from throat cancer, read a news account about Marla Ruzicka shortly after her death. Moved by Rakan's situation, and by Ruzicka's compassion, Burnieika typed out a three-line letter to US Senator Edward M. Kennedy, enclosing the news story, and urging him to finish her job.
[snip]
Of the hundreds of constituent letters that arrive in Kennedy's Boston office every week, this one was plucked from the pile and made it all the way to the senator's hands. Kennedy, who has opposed the war in Iraq from the outset, said his reaction was personal, not political.
''This one got to me," he said, sitting in his private office on the third floor of the Capitol Building.
Eventually Rakan made the trip to the US, and received five months of treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In the next installment,
As healing begins, a painful decision, we learn the names of his siblings:
''I just showed him this picture," said his uncle, Falah Abbas, who accompanied him to the United States. The dog-eared snapshot showed Rakan's parents, his older sisters Intisar, Sosan, and Jilan, his younger sisters Samar and Rana, and his baby brother, Muhammed. Rakan's parents were killed and he was wounded when US soldiers, fearing an insurgent attack, opened fire on the family's car by mistake. His siblings escaped injury in the shooting, but were badly traumatized.
In the third installment, Restless patient, agonizing choice, more information on his family: Nathir Bashir Ali, Rakan's brother-in-law, had taken custody of Rakan and his siblings. They live in Mosul.
In the final installment, At homecoming, a gift elicits wonder, there are several references to the worsening situation in Iraq ; Rakan doesn't know how bad things have been getting and he wants to go home. The final article is dated March 1, 2006, and at that time, Rakan and his siblings were safe and alive in Mosul. Now I can only hope that the little girl...Samar or Rana...is still alive, but I wonder if she has been able to recover from the trauma of witnessing the death of her parents. She isn't the first orphan of this war, and unfortunately, she won't be the last.
And now the poem; again, there's a personal story here. I found an unfamiliar book on the shelf this week. It's a 1927 third edition of "Now We Are Six", by A.A. Milne. I don't know how old Samar or Rana is, but I'd estimate six or seven at the time of "the incident".
The book has an inscription , "To Beth, from her 'Cottie'."
I knew "Beth" only as Elizabeth, my mother-in-law. She was already 70 when I met her, getting frail and bent. We don't know all the details of her life, but she had several major life changes. Born into "landed gentry" in the English countryside, she was a child of privilege; then she was a young woman in London during WW II; married a rich but much older man and had two sons; the marriage failed, she divorced, found a new love and followed him to Canada; married again, another son, another divorce; she moved several times in Canada too, until her death 3 years ago. Throughout all the changes, the moves, she kept this book...once, she was "Beth", and she had her "Cottie", (probably a nanny or perhaps a favourite aunt), so I think this book reminded her of a happy childhood. This poem is one of many in a book of an ideal childhood, and I only wish that this poem could apply to all the lost children.
Buttercup Days - A.A. Milne
Where is Anne?
Head above the butterups,
Walking by the stream,
Down among the buttercups.
Where is Anne?
Walking with her man,
Lost in a dream,
Lost among the buttercups.
What has she got in that little brown head?
Wonderful thoughts which can never be said.
What has she got in that firm little fist of hers?
Somebody's thumb, and it feels like Christopher's.
Where is Anne?
Close to her man.
Brown head, gold head,
In and out the buttercups.
If I could only wave a wand and replace the bombs and bullets with buttercups, and find the lost children there with wonderful thoughts in their heads...