Exile's emotional trip home

Tahrir Swift, of Ridgeway Crescent Gardens, Orpington, delivered much-needed medical supplies and had an emotional reunion with her family and friends in the Iraqi capital.

The journey had its high points but her compelling account of the American occupation tells a more devastating tale of destruction and lawlessness.

At one point, she says: “Just 50 minutes after my arrival, I was washing my face and about to unpack my suitcase when the sound of gunfire started.” We at News Shopper were immediately struck by her bravery at entering a country still tense and dangerous. But we were also so struck by her amazing report we are bringing it to you in her own words.

Background “I visited the Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation Centre- Baghdad, which was the second of its kind in the Middle East. It was looted and trashed on April 19.

“I also visited a health centre in the local mosque where three volunteer doctors offer their services for free. I gave them all the medicines I brought.

“Ibtisam [my travelling companion] and I visited four schools in the deprived Thawra area (as named by the Iraqi prime minister in the 1950s - it was called Saddam City and has been renamed al Sadr City and is inhabited by one million mainly Shia migrants from the southern provinces).

“We would be launching two campaigns, one for supporting these schools and the other for helping the rehabilitation centre get back on its feet. I gave a trusted doctor that works in the centre US$500, which I managed to raise before I left Orpington, towards refurbishing the workshop that produces supports and artificial limbs.

“The centre supports amputees, stroke patients, polio and rickets victims, children with structural problems and deformities, chronic back problems etc.

“All the raw materials and tools in the workshop were stolen, including all materials and chemicals from the x-ray department, all medical equipment, pumps and electrical fixtures.

“Dr Thamer Aziz Abdul Rahman who works at the centre , told me that apart from smashing the furniture and trashing the place, there were two types of thieves.

“First were those who stole electrical power supply material and fixtures such as electrical light switches, plumbing pipes and glass panels - these are hard to track.

“The second type were specialist thieves, who he suspects will sell the loot to the private sector’s equivalent of this centre. They did not steal faulty equipment and opened boxes of materials such as x-ray films.

“The latter type should be easy to track, except that there is no authority in the country at present. We cannot really start sending equipment to the centre until the security issue is resolved. Therefore the donation gave to the centre will go towards purchasing the materials and tools for the workshop, which are available locally.

“I am hoping to get in contact with doctors and health workers familiar with rehabilitation treatment and can help me in this campaign.

“I felt humbled by people serving the society and their communities for free. All teachers are spending their own money to get to their schools. The bare walls of the badly rundown schools are decorated with the teachers’ own work.

“They undertake repairing the text books to keep them in use, provide poor children with stationary and all they have is the blackboards and chalk.

“Children sit in the seething heat on their wooden benches, hanging on every word their teacher says, very eager to learn and improve themselves.”

Report from Baghdad “Get up, it is 4am, time to go” said my companion Ibtisam, as she shook me awake from my two hours sleep on May 31.

There is no going back now, we are on our way to Iraq.

“We set off in a four wheel drive type car, known as GMC. It takes up to seven passengers, but there were only three of us on this trip. Me, Ibtisam and Abu Haidar - an Iraqi resident of Jordan.

“Abu Salwan was our excellent driver, who is meticulous about his care for his car and its cleanliness. The Jordanian road leading to the border, is bumpy. It goes along several small hills. We arrived at the last post before the border to stock up on supplies and food-stuffs at about 7am.

“We got to the border post at about 8:30 am. Our driver’s passport was stamped straightaway. Ibtisam and I being British, went to the other nationalities window in the passport office. Our passports were processed after a reasonably short time. Our fellow passenger however had failed to renew his residency and was asked to pay 1.5 Jordanian Dinars for every day of his 18 months overstay or his passport would be stamped and he would not be able to re-enter Jordan. Needless to say, he chose the latter. This process took an hour-and-a-half.

“We entered Iraqi territories after a series of checkpoints, none of them inspected our luggage. But not before an American soldier, inspected our passports and told us in broken Arabic that we are allowed to go into our country! This was my first lesson in ‘swallowing humiliation’.

“The road on the Iraqi side of the border is absolutely brilliant, very smooth and as wide as the M25. There are a couple of places where bridges across the main road had been bombed, had collapsed and blocked our way. We had to go across the reservations and use the lanes on the other side as a dual carriageway.

“The longest stretch is between the border and the town of Ramady. This took about four hours. We drove past al Khalidya, near Fallujah. It is a mass of greenery and palm groves that sprang up in the middle of the dry flat desert.

“An hour after Ramady, we saw the signs for Baghdad city centre. The road between Ramady and Baghdad was littered with bombed military tanks and burnt out vehicles. We saw 2 burnt out coach-type vehicles.

“‘These were the civilian coaches that were bombed’, our driver said.

“This was very hard for me, as I did not recognise anything I saw. The road was built after my time, the neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Baghdad are all relatively new.

“The first landmark I recognised was Antar Square, with its dusty jagged metal monument, the Adhamiya sports centre where I used to go swimming with my cousins and Omar Bin Abdul Aziz Street that leads to the houses of my relations.

“But even the road system there has changed. Multi-storey buildings are standing where houses used to be. Shops have changed hands and changed businesses. I have lost all the land-marks that used to remind me of where to get off the bus taking me to my uncles’ and aunts’ houses.

“However, we were lucky. People recognised the name of my uncle and told Abu Salwan how to proceed to my cousin’s house.

“Little girls were waiting for me outside, they ran towards me and held up their arms. I asked them, ‘who am I?’ ‘Auntie Tahrir’, they answered.

“That is when I learnt that the whole of al Adhamiya was expecting me. These were my other cousin’s girls, living next door to Thuraiya’s.

“I was greeted with the news that the electricity had just been cut off in my honour! My cousin Thuraiya, who I was intending to stay with, had gone to the funeral of her uncle who died of a heart attack at the age of 53, in the early hours of the morning.

“It is difficult to know whether he could have been saved had there been an ambulance in service, or had their neighbour who volunteered to drive them to hospital had enough petrol in his tank. Or indeed had there been any doctor who had managed to make the journey to the hospital and stayed there.

“By the time they got to see a doctor it was nearly three hours after the attack - he was dead. The doctor insisted on seeing original copies of his identification which further delayed producing his death certificate. He was buried in the garden of his house temporarily.

“There is little doubt that the fierce fighting in his neighbourhood near the ‘fast road’ to Baghdad throughout the war had its toll on his health.

“I was just amazed, by the way my cousin Thuraiya, spoke about his death in a matter-of-fact fashion. “His doctor told him he has to take it easy”, she said. But surely he was not working during the war?

“From the day I arrived, till the day I left Baghdad, I did a great deal of listening. Everybody wanted to tell me about their worries and grievances. But they were also throwing questions at me: ‘When will they form a government? When will the reconstruction start? What about law and order? When can we go back to work? What should we do?’ “It is like in Saddam’s time when they were isolated from the rest of the world, they think that just because I come from abroad I have a better idea of what is going on in the minds of the Americans.

“In al Adhamiya (a traditionally Sunni area) like in al Khamiya (traditionally Shia area) and parts of al Thawra (area for poor Shia migrants from the provinces), the men stood shoulder-to-shoulder to protect the schools, hospitals and banks in their neighbourhood.

“Just 50 minutes after my arrival, I was washing my face and about to unpack my suitcase when the sound of gunfire started. The Imam of Abu Hanifa mosque was calling ‘Allahu Akbar’ with alarm in his voice; it was too early for the late afternoon prayer.

“He then started to recite Quranic verses. Cars going towards the Abu Hanifa square were turned back by the residents outside Thuraiya’s house. This went on for just over half an hour. We could hear the sound of gunfire just over 1km down the road from where we were. We also heard a couple of thuds.

“Thuraiya was reciting the Quran and looked quite worried. ‘Last time the Imami called in alarm, was when a bunch of armed looters attempted to break into the local bank. The locals arrived with sticks and stones, but they outnumbered the armed looters who then decided to run for it’, she said.

“There was a great deal of hustle and bustle and many helicopters flew overhead, the scene was apparently quickly cleared, the area around the mosque was sealed and searched.

“The news came from people present at the scene that three American soldiers and two Iraqi passers by (23-year-old Omar Rzouqi Al Qasab, who was on his way to the mosque and Abdul Wahab Al Ubaidi, a man in his 50s who suffers from epilepsy also on his way for prayer) were killed when the tank outside the Abu Hanifa mosque was attacked. Abu Hanifa shrine is inside the beautifully built and sparsely decorated mosque revered by Sunni Muslims.

“The news on al Jazeera stated that one American soldier was killed - no mention of the Iraqi casualties.

“Several days later, I spoke to Umm Mohamed, a widow in her 60s who lives with her daughters, her son’s widow and two grandchildren - a resident of Al Sifina.

“She told me how American soldiers hours after the attack on the tank, went down her road banging on people’s doors and in some cases smashing them, but did not conduct any searches.

“‘We were terrified, my two daughters were shaking with fear, my grandchildren were in their mother’s arms. We stayed inside our house, not daring to even breathe, until they went away, we cannot lock our door anymore they smashed the lock.’ “I met Umm Ahmed, a single mother-of-six, who bakes bread in her clay oven and sells it for living. Both she and her teenage son are in need of simple operations, but she cannot envisage being able to afford it. Each operation is likely to cost US$115. Umm Mohamed earns about US$1.50 a day.

“In recent years Saddam has frozen salaries of all government employees, including doctors and teachers. Schools ask the parents to pay for any building repairs and maintenance and hospitals ask patients to pay towards any operation, treatment and accommodation costs.

“Another woman told me: ‘Saddam is gone, the sanctions are lifted, this should be a cause for celebration but we are not happy or jubilant. We are apprehensive and very worried about the future. How long do I have to barricade myself and my daughters at 7pm every night, wondering whether I would be alive the next morning? When are we going to have our peace of mind? When are they going to give us our normal lives back? The Americans say reconstruction cannot start because it is not safe, but who is supposed to provide us with security?’ “All people I met in the health centres, schools etc. had only been paid US$20 sine the end of the war. Electric batons and tear gas were used on pensioners queuing up to collect their pension.

“All people I met, are convinced that a prohibited weapon was used in the last battle for the airport. This is corroborated by the fact that the airport was sealed by the Americans and the area was closed for three weeks after the battle.

“One eye-witness said all buildings are intact, but the dead bodies of the soldiers would just 'collapse and melt away' when touched.

“A teacher at the local primary school who lives near al Adhamiya telephone exchange - a modern telephone exchange which only started operating three months before the war - said it was hit by five missiles. She said after the fourth missile had landed, ‘we found dead cats, birds and all the insects disappeared’.

“It was undoubtedly bombed by bunker-busting missiles with depleted Uranium. All houses around the complex were either badly damaged or half demolished.

“That is another thing, I did not see any signs telling people to stay away from the bombed buildings. In fact in some of the government buildings that were bombed, families who became homeless during the war are living in the parts that are still standing, not realising that the whole area is contaminated.

“My uncle’s widow - an orthodontist - told me: ‘Anyone wishing to do research on different types of cancer, should go to al Mansour children’s hospital next to the city hospital in Baghdad, where very rare cases of cancer are being diagnosed. The hospital is full of children sick with cancer.’”