Pacific Views

Who Should You Call?

River @ Baghdad Burning tells of the harrowing night at her aunt's house when the Iraq Security Forces conducted a neighborhood raid. The neighborhood is a mixed neighborhood which Shites, Sunnis and some Christians, but one thing it no longer has is many young men.

Last time they had raided my aunts area, they took away four men on their street alone. Two of them were students in their early twenties- one a law student, and the other an engineering student, and the third man was a grandfather in his early sixties. There was no accusation, no problem- they were simply ordered outside, loaded up into a white pickup truck and driven away with a group of other men from the area. Their families haven’t heard from them since and they visit the morgue almost daily in anticipation of finding them dead.

...[This time t]hey took at least a dozen men from my aunts area alone- their ages between 19 and 40. The street behind us doesn’t have a single house with a male under the age of 50- lawyers, engineers, students, ordinary laborers- all hauled away by the ‘security forces’ of the New Iraq. The only thing they share in common is the fact that they come from Sunni families (with the exception of two who I'm not sure about).

River wonders who should they call when the security forces that are supposed to protect them are also the ones who conduct the midnight raids that haul people away into a blackhole where few if any ever re-emerge. So who does one turn to when the predators and the protectors are one and the same?

Posted by Mary at February 12, 2006 12:33 PM | Iraq | Technorati links |