Famed Blogger Leaving Iraq
Via IraqSlogger: Riverbend, the famed Iraqi blogger who has transfixed English-speaking readers with her sensitive, introspective, and brutally honest chronicling of life in the war zone on her Baghdad Burning blog has announced that her family will finally flee Iraq in hopes of safely surviving the war in a foreign land.
I remember Baghdad before the war–one could live anywhere. We didn’t know what our neighbors were–we didn’t care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it–depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night.
…There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country, simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends… And to what?
About two million Iraqis have already fled the country, and continue to leave at a rate of 100,000 a month. Another 1.7 million Iraqis have been driven out of their homes by sectarian violence. This internally displaced population is expanding by 50,000 each month, and the UNHCR predicts it could reach 2.7 million people by the end of 2007.
All told, nearly 4 million people out of a prewar population of 26 million have become either refugees or internally displaced. Almost one out of every six Iraqis has fled their homes since the U.S. invaded in 2003.
For more about Iraqi refugees, see my previous posts:
‘The disaster is happening now’
1.8 Million Iraqi Refugees- USA Has Accepted 400
Trapped in Iraq
The USA Needs to Help Iraqi Refugees
April 30th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Yikes. Don’t tell the repugies over at ASP/ASM about this development. It will blow their narrow minds and cause them to dredge up a whole slew of new posts telling folks how fucking splendid the war effort is progressing and how many God damn new friends we’re making in the process.
April 30th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
The good news is we aren’t finding out ten years latert what really happened in Iraq like we did in Vietnam. Thanks to people like Riverbend, Kevin Sites, the BBC, Al-jazeera and uncounted documentarians, bloggers and independent truth seekers, we know what a fiasco it is. We also know exactly who’s responsible. Too bad the people responsible don’t care about the truth- and not just in Iraq.