Robert Fisk: A lesson in how to create Iraqi orphans........

[JohnyCanuck]

And then how to make life worse for them


Thursday, 24 January 2008

It's not difficult to create orphans in Iraq. If you're an insurgent, you can blow yourself up in a crowded market. If you're an American air force pilot, you can bomb the wrong house in the wrong village. Or if you're a Western mercenary, you can fire 40 bullets into the widowed mother of 14-year-old Alice Awanis and her sisters Karoon and Nora, the first just 20, the second a year older. But when the three girls landed at Amman airport from Baghdad last week they believed that they were free of the horrors of Baghdad and might travel to Northern Ireland to escape the terrible memory of their mother's violent death.

Alas, the milk of human kindness does not necessarily extend to orphans from Iraq – the country we invaded for supposedly humanitarian reasons, not to mention weapons of mass destruction. For as their British uncle waited for them at Queen Alia airport, Jordanian security men – refusing him even a five-minute conversation with the girls – hustled the sisters back on to the plane for Iraq.

"How could they do this?" their uncle, Paul Manouk, asks. "Their mum has been killed. Their father had already died. I was waiting for them. The British embassy in Jordan said they might issue visas for the three – but that they had to reach Amman first." Mr Manouk lives in Northern Ireland and is a British citizen. Explaining this to the Jordanian muhabarrat at the airport was useless.

Western mercenaries killed their 48-year-old Iraqi Armenian mother, Marou Awanis, and her best friend – firing 40 bullets into her body as she drove her taxi near their four-vehicle convoy in Baghdad – but tragedy has haunted the family for almost a century; the three sisters' great-grandmother was forced to leave her two daughters to die on their own by the roadside during the 1915 Armenian genocide. Mrs Awanis' friend, Jeneva Jalal, was killed instantly alongside her in the passenger seat.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/fisk/robert-fisk-a-lesson-in-how-to-create-iraqi-orphans-and-then-how-to-make-life-worse-for-them-773166.html

[gg55]

1. I would rec this story a 100 times if I could.

Ala, I don't have enough posts to do it once. The US has only accepted 466 Iraqis into the US since 2003 ( http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-cogan240107.htm ) , but have been responsible for creating 3.7 million refugees. God only knows how many dead since no one seems to keep a count of that very mportant aspect. Too many American don't give a shit about any of it. I am sickened by this whole "war" based on lies. What is it going to take to understnad that the war machine is not our friend and that those who support it are the evil ones, the real terrorists and must be dealt with accordingly?

[WritersBlock]

3. I recommended the OP & would recommend this reply, too, if I could.

I agree with you completely.

And a warm welcome to DU!

[gg55]

4. Thank you WB. for the welcome and the rec. :)

Be seeing you on the boards, I'm sure. :)

[malaise]

2. Fisk is always excellent

Great read.

[wintersoulja]

5. Thank you John, thank you Hillary

good work Barak.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

6. K&R n/t

[gratuitous]

7. "How could they do this?"

Oil is up to $90 a barrel. And our society is drunk on the Myth of Redemptive Violence. After that, it was easy.