Its just getting worse. We are again in a police state. We have armies, police and all kinds of intelligence institutions around us. We have SWAT. We have anti-riot. Its all kinds of security institutions around us.
And on top of that, I see the women in my country getting much weaker. I see an epidemic rise in certain kinds of birth defects. And when we try to organize womenwe sent women from my organization to a town in Haweeja. We were surprised to see hundreds of children that had birth disabilities. We see things in Iraq that weve never seen in our lives.
I also see young women, orphans of war, female orphans of war, that are being trafficked. And the state absolutely has no obligation towards them. The young women who are being trafficked come to our organization and to our shelters. They dont even have the right to citizenship in Iraq. We are speaking here about tens of thousands of orphans of war who are absolutely not being taken care of. Neither the Iraqi government nor the U.S. experts in Iraq do anything about it.
Right to Heal campaign is really U.S. soldiers coming together with people from Iraq, civil society from Iraq, to say the struggle is connected. Its really a natural relationship for us to join together because were dealing with the aftermath of the same invasion and long occupation. And I think that its only right for U.S. servicemembers to acknowledge the people of Iraq and Afghanistan as were demanding our right to heal.
It really shifted dramatically just based on my interactions with the people in Iraq. Going there initially, I guess I believed the hype in the draw-up to the war and felt like we were doing something that was necessary for the safety of our country. And then, hearing the story shift from weapons of mass destruction to liberation of the Iraqi people, that wasnt what I was seeing there. Thats not what I was experiencing. And it really made me question the war.
And I think soldiers just dont necessarily feel like they have an outlet for that frustration, so spend a lot of time talking to each other about the situation, wondering why are we here, why are we making these sacrifices. The people in Iraq dont want us here. But I dont think they necessarily feel empowered to speak out publicly.
I experienced sexual assault from my now ex-husband about two days after coming home from my last deployment to Iraq. And I didnt report it. I didnt do anything about it, because I didnt have any community outside of the military. And my community in the military, the people I worked for and I worked with, I didnt trust them. I didntI didnt believe that I could get help. And I had also heard stories and rumors about other women who were raped, and the talk was always that it was their fault, that they were somehow in the wrong. And I just didnt feel like I fit into that category, so I was really in denial about the sexual assault.
When Maggie is sent to Iraq or Kuwait and told to kill Iraqi people, or the original mission is about that, and we are there to receive the killings, we understand that the orders came from somewhere and that she is as much as a victim as us Iraqis. And asin the same situation, in the same token that we were put together and set as enemies against each other, we decide now that both of us are victims, and were going to both put hand in hand and try to heal from the sufferings that we had in the last decades. Its not only just one decade. But the Iraqi people, our lives, our futures have been devastated, and there is no compensation nor reparation in the Iraqi government or in the U.S. government. So our alternative now is to work together.
We came back tothey brought me back to the U.S., and were trying to work together as to holding the U.S. government responsible, accountable for what they did in Iraq and what they did to the Iraq Veterans Against WarI mean, the veterans when they were in Iraq, and also to pay reparations to Iraq, just like they forced the Iraqi government to pay reparations to Kuwait. There, the U.S. government needs to be held accountable for the thousands of children who have come to life with no organs, with no limbs that are working, with a brain that is underdeveloped. The mothersI met a mother in the town of Haweeja who has four disabled children. Whos going to be responsible for her for the rest of her life?
the Organization of Womens Freedom in Iraq, has been documenting the toxic legacy of the U.S. militarys presence in Iraq.
The town of Haweeja is right next to a U.S. military base. And these people live only a few miles away from the field where there was daily ammunition training. And now we understand theres something called DU. And it was released in the air, and the mothers were breathing it. In a town that has a population of 100,000, 109,000, we found 600 children who have the same birth defect. And some of the families who come from, lets say, religious backgrounds have decided that they cannot have children anymore. Theyre abstaining from getting children because they are living a big crisis, and they have no solution for it.
And the Iraqi government does not pay any social insurance for handicapped or disabled baby, because our law, which was written in Saddams time, says a child has to be over 12 years old to be paid any social insurance. And all these children are less than 10 years old. They were born in the times when there was ammunition training in that U.S. military base. So the mothers, hundreds of mothers in Haweeja, absolutely have nobody to refer to, nobody to be responsible of them. And the children, some of them not only have lost their limbs and their brain, but they also lost their parents in the battles between the U.S. and the local people. So, a kid who was called Ahmed, and he is in one of the pictures in the Right to Heal campaignyou can see it on the website. You will see that he had not only lost his limbs and his arms, he has nobody to take care of him. Both parents were killed. This is the legacy of the U.S. occupation on Iraq.
http://righttoheal.org/
http://www.ivaw.org/
as an organization, we did this fact-finding mission, and now the Iraqi government has set us some conditions to be registered for our legality. They tell us, “You cannot shelter women. You cannot have political work.” So this is the kind of democracy we have in Iraq.
Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Womens Freedom in Iraq. She splits her time between Toronto and Baghdad, and she recently returned from Iraq. Together with Veterans for Peace, she is working on the Right to Heal campaign.
Maggie Martin, former U.S. Army sergeant. She deployed to Iraq in 2003 and in 2005 before leaving the military in 2006 and joining Iraq Veterans Against the War, where she is director of organizing. Together with Yanar Mohammed and other groups, she is working on the Right to Heal campaign.