Nir Rosen on Iraqi refugees and sectarian slaughter
September 27, 2007 10:56 am IraqNir Rosen, No Going Back, Boston Review, September/October 2007
By early 2007 all my Sunni Iraqi friends were trying to leave Iraq….
Hamid continued: “The American government is stupid. They invaded and gave Iraq to Iran.”
…”God is with us!” he said, “Each Sunni is worth one hundred of them. Sunnis, as few as they are, will return and kill the Americans, Iranians, and apostates.”
…Iraq had no history of civil war or sectarian violence even approaching this scale until the Americans arrived….
I recently spoke to a close Iraqi friend, a Sunni doctor who was desperately trying to get his family out of Iraq…. “You know what makes me crazy?” he asked me. “How they want to pull their troops out.” I was surprised. I thought he had been opposed to the American occupation; I certainly was. “You want them to stay now?” I asked. “Can you imagine what will happen if they left?” he asked. “I don’t know if things would be very different,” I responded. “If they left the government will kill all of us,” he told me…. Before my friend succeeded in obtaining his passport, his father was murdered, his body found in a Baghdad morgue.