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Before and after liberation

3 comments on Before and after liberation

Before and after liberation
: Iraqi blogger Omar reports from the small town outside of Bashrah where he will be practicing dentistry:

The sewage system is incomplete, garbage is everywhere, communications are difficult, the people are simple and peaceful but are really poor, the whole town looked like ruins. In other words; people there are still living in the 18th. Century.

These areas seemed to be suffering from neglect for decades, and one would think that the government might be unaware of the presence of this town, but this is not true. Those towns and villages were not only isolated from the rest of the world , but from the rest of Iraq as well.

Those people were being abandoned (on purpose) and punished by orders of the dictator, and this applies also to many other areas all over Iraq.

The people there have always showed their rejection to the Ba

3 responses to “Before and after liberation”

  1. Sandy P. Avatar
    Sandy P.

    Well, this info from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, kind of refutes Diana’s view that sanction caused the Iraqi peoples’ misery.

  2. Jeremy Avatar
    Jeremy

    The first paragraph sounds like Arkansas…

  3. Swopa Avatar
    Swopa

    Then again, there’s this on Basra from Zeyad:
    I read today in the papers an account of the murder of Bashir Thomas Elias, an Iraqi Christian who ran a liquor store in Basrah. It was Christmas Eve and he was heading back home from the market to celebrate with his family when someone shot him in the head and walked away amid onlooking Basrawis.
    There were about 200 licensed alcohol dealers in Basrah before the war, today there is none, and we were there to see for ourselves. Most of these stores were looted and burnt during the last few months and the rest were forced to close under murder threats from hardliners and Shi’ite extremist groups such as Hizb Allah (The party of Allah), Intiqam Allah (The revenge of Allah), and Munadhamat Qawa’id Al-Islam. These groups are powerful and influential in Basrah and already have many of their members in local municipal councils. Faysal Abdallah a leader of one of these groups stated that Allah will reward the virtuous who seek Shahada fighting vice in his name but he described these summary executions of Iraqi Christians as ‘unacceptable behaviour’.
    Basrah is populated by 100,000 Christians. About 2000 of them have already left their hometown and migrated to other cities such as Baghdad and Mosul, the rest are living in fear for their lives. Some of them are wondering if they were not better off with Saddam and the secular Ba’ath in power.
    “Our daughters are persecuted in college” said Wisam Abdalahad a store owner in Basrah. “They are being intimidated by their teachers and professors and told to wear Hijab“.
    Sounds like some people are still waiting for the “after liberation” part to come true . . .