The curse of Abraham: The true losers of the war in Iraq
It would be funny, if it wasn’t so fucking horrible and sad but when people, be they politicians, journalists or armchair experts, talk about the war in Iraq, they, almost invariably, do so in the manner of small boys, discussing the movement of their tin soldiers.
So, there’s talk of surges, of strikes and counter-strikes; the relative merits of the various professional and semi-professional armed troops, the quality of their training, the state of their equipment - and when it comes to questions of morality, there’s almost always that comfortable ritual of arguing who will get to wear the white hat and who will don the black.
Simple stuff, boys’ stuff - and, as happens in the majority of games, people are mostly obsessed by the question of which side is winning.
Still, let’s forget about that side of things, just for a little while. Let’s pretend we are all grown-ups, instead of trying to push around those battle-worn tin soldiers inside one of the biggest sandboxes in the world. Let’s take a look at those who are definitely losing this very bloody war. Remember reading about the rise of honour killings in and around Basra? Here’s a reminder:
“Authorities in the southern Iraqi city of Basra have admitted they are powerless to prevent ‘honour killings’ in the city following a 70 per cent increase in religious murders during the past year. There has been no improvement in conviction rates for these killings. So far this year, 81 women in the city have been murdered for allegedly bringing shame on their families. Only five people have been convicted.”
Basra: That’s where the Brits were boasting that they were doing ever so much better than the Americans did, when it came to winning hearts and minds.
Such a pity, really, that those hearts and minds belonged to Islamist militia types who soon decided that it was much more fun to kill women than to smile politely at a gaggle of silly Brits, who were simply playing a game of soldiers in the sand.
Now, thanks to an article in the Washington Post, we can read that those Kurds, in the North of Iraq, are as efficient a bunch of bloody oppressors as their former scourge, Saddam, ever was. The only difference being that the designated victims of the Kurds are their own wives and daughters.
All in the name of Allah, of course. For no war can ever be truly complete without the alleged support and proud blessings of the God of your choice. In that, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are one. All suffer from Abraham’s curse - or Abraham’s delusion: That it is God Who wants us to slaughter our sons.
Such a pity that, in the real world, there’s never that angel that comes down to stay our hands.
Anyway, back to Iraq - and back to the ones who are really losing that war: The women of Iraq. Read and weep:
“Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl, bounded into her neighbor’s house with an ear-to-ear smile, looking for the party her mother had promised. There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman quickly locked a rusty red door behind Sheelan, who looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl to remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper, then tremble, while the women pushed apart her legs and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade in the air. “I do this in the name of Allah!” she intoned.”
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