The children of Iraq

Layla Anwar
Arab Woman Blues
http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/

I

They are little, and no icons nor statues have been carved or erected in their names...they will forever remain anonymous...but not to me.

I have not seen their faces, but I heard their stories...and every saint has a story.

No wait, I have seen their faces, I have...I have seen your filth and ugliness reflected in theirs...and is that not what saints are made of ? aren't they made of human filth and greed ? Aren't saints the ones who took it all in, absorbed all of you and were eventually salvaged from the human garbage, because make no mistake about yourselves, you are garbage.

Aren't they the ones who witnessed the unthinkable as some training ground to redeem you later, you vermin of the human race ?!

Well I have many stories of saints in the making...and is Iraq not the land of Gods, Goddesses, Prophets and Saints ?

What you are about to read are true samples...samples of your "Democracy, Freedom and Liberty." How I have come to hate these words...they have become like small mirrors in which I see your lies written in blood, authorized and signed by anonymous corpses...living or dead, we have reached a point where the differentiation has become so blur...where it no longer matters, because death sentences are issued daily...and the living are dead.

They hang saints in Iraq, they lynch them at an early age, they penetrate their insides with words...and words become swords, daggers, knives...slashing, beheading, tiny anonymous faces with no names...the slaying of Saints...of little Saints...

She was found thrown away in one of the streets of Baghdad...her name is Rita, like Saint Rita, the Saint who answers your prayers...

She was abandoned in the streets of Baghdad, with her name written on a cardboard, attached to her neck like a dog who was once owned. A three years old dog, puppy, girl, blind...Rita is blind. Totally blind. You bastards, call it in your politically correct jargon - visually impaired - because you are so fucking sensitive arent'you ?!

Well Rita is blind, and she is 3. She is not only blind, she has a severely deformed face, a cleft lip that goes up all the way to her nose...split in the middle, a mirror reflection of how you split us in the middle...in all ways. A small mirror of your own deformities, your soul deformities...

She was feeling her way around, blind, with a cardboard sign around her neck - my name is Rita.

The local police took her to a hospital, the doctors did not know what to do with Rita...the little Saint Rita...she was left in the corridors of a hospital, a hospital that looks and feels like a public toilet, because your whores stole the money, the money for the little Saints...

Little Saint Rita, walked the corridors of this public toilet of a hospital, bumping into broken chairs and beds with no sheets...hungry and waiting for someone to diagnose her condition...her condition of a blind street child, deformed by your toxicity and abandoned because no one can feed her no more in your new Iraq.

I can't go on...your filth is making me dizzy...its vapors are filling my nostrils...the little Saints are poking me...they want to play...let me take little Saint Rita's hand and go smell the flowers...

II

It took me 3 days to dim the image of little Saint Rita, deformed and blind, running lost in a hospital corridor, bumping into broken chairs and bed with no sheets...with her name tagged around her neck like a dog's collar...it took me 3 days...and am wondering how many days will it take me to dim the following image from my mind ?

Yet I know the little saints icons will never be erased from my mind, they will forever remain a torch of truth burning, burning bright, the flames of Truth...

Diyala province, on the outskirts of Baquba.

The US brave boys, the rapists, torturers and killers who crossed oceans stinking of greed and hatred, bombed a lone house made of mud and bricks, in a field, on the outskirts of Baquba. Sunni insurgents - they said.

Troops then encircled the house, taking the mother and father. They were never seen again. The house collapsed except for one room. After some time, when things calmed down, a distant neighbor passed by the field and entered the house, he does not know why, he assumed everyone in the household was already dead.

What he saw, he still recounts with tears. In that one small room, he saw four orphans left behind, emaciated. 3 boys and one girl. The eldest boy was 11, the second 7, the third a 4 year old girl, and the fourth an infant boy in a crib.

No neighbor could take all the children in, Diyala witnessed many massacres and exiles and poverty rates are staggering there. The people decided to rebuild that one room left, collectively provide food and water, and take turns in guarding the children until a "solution is found"...

Some time passed, and a elderly man arrives, claiming to be a distant relative of the family. No one could ascertain the truth of such a claim since the children themselves did not know him, but it seems he looked of "good faith " and the people gave him the benefit of the doubt.

More time passed and one day this distant neighbor decided to pay a visit, the children and the elderly man disappeared...no one knows where to.

More time elapsed, and the neighbor spotted the elderly man and the three boys. He inquired what happened to the 4 year old girl. I shall call her X, the anonymous face. Little Saint X.

The oldest boy, the 11 year old, smiled with happiness, replying - Uncle married her off. Not knowing what this meant.

It turns out that this "uncle", so called distant relative, sold little Saint X to a matron who runs an overseas brothel. She buys the little Iraqi Saints, and after a period of "training", sells them again as sex slaves to the highest overseas bidder.

I don't want to know what the "training" of a 4 year old Saint consists of...I don't even want to imagine it...

But at night, as I lay down, it creeps in my mind...in between my futile attempts at feigning sleep...through the cracks of a bedroom immersed in total obscurity...I imagine and fight the images with pictures of singing sweet lullabies to a sleeping girl, I fight it with pictures of reading a bed time story made of beautiful princesses safely tucked in shiny marbled castles...but the images stay, they persist, a torch burning with your Truth...

N.B: A reminder - official Iraqi puppet government figures confirms the number of little orphaned saints at 5 million since 2003 and the number of street little saints in Baghdad alone at 500'000. The little saints of the "new" Iraq.