My name is Farrah and I'm a 32-year-old Iraqi wife and mother and I'd like to briefly tell you my story. I am hypothetical because the U.S. military will otherwise censor me from you, but I am based upon many real Iraqi women and our stories are real.
Two years ago, my 6-year-old daughter Leyla died from cholera after drinking polluted water. She began vomiting, her legs cramped, she had diarrhea and her temperature soared. To save her life, we rushed her to the hospital but we had to wait hours for a doctor because life threatening diseases are common here.
And there are few doctors and nurses because many have fled Iraq. Medicines are in short supply because most of it goes through government officials who trade it on the black market.
While we waited, Leyla died in my arms. Tens of thousands of children die like this, in the arms of their loved ones.
This happens also because in Baghdad we have electricity only four hours a day. There isn't enough to run the turbines to clean the water or process the sewage, nor even run the lights or electricity. Our summer temperatures can be 120 degrees and we try to avoid heat stroke. This alone is a killer of children and elders.
My husband hasn't had a job in three years because outside of government work which officials often set aside for family and friends, our unemployment is 50%, twice what you had during the Great Depression. He makes money selling scrap metal in the black market which he hates doing because some customers make weapons from it. But we don't have a choice. We must eat and have a place to live.
We have two other children, ages 7 and 10 and we home school them, for many teachers have fled Iraq. There is no trash pickup, so we are forced to live in filth. To buy gas, we wait for hours in long lines and pay high prices. Yet Iraq has one of the world's biggest oil supplies and gas used to be plentiful and cheap before the U.S. invasion in 2003.
We hated Saddam Hussein but our economy was solid and unless we were political, we were safe and crime was low. Everything worked, people had active social lives and tourists came. We were a first world nation.
Now we have a government that operates only in or near your ultra-secure Green Zone, a city within a city so your and other foreign officials don't have to live like we do. Our government, which you keep in power only travels in Iraq under heavy security, with top officials having secure motorcades as large as your president's.
Our lives are a living Hell. As an Iraqi, I have no voice in America but if you are an American, you do. Please speak for us and end your war and your occupation of our nation. Let us form a friendship with you, one of mutual respect and compassion, one based on what you would want for your family. Thank you.
Farrah
Dear Reader, The U.S. has actually already lost the Iraq War because it has lost the hearts and minds of the people by destroying their nation as it killed and injured many of them and it set off a civil war, which even now is right below the surface. Many of their women and children suffer from post traumatic stress disorder and the core of their society, most of the well educated people, have fled Iraq. What's left is a U.S. puppet government that can't even deliver basic services like medical care and electricity, nor even police protection, and is rife with corruption.
Dick
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