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 [NYTr] From Iraq: A Letter to the British People 
 https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20050711/020101. 
 html 
  
 A Letter to the British People from a Daughter of Iraq 
  
 by Iman al-Saadun 
 July 8, 2005 
  
 I'm sending this letter to the British people and in particular to the 
 residents of London. For a period of hours, you have lived through 
 moments of desperate anxiety and horror. In those hours you lost a 
 member of your family or a friend, and we wish to tell you in total 
 honesty that we too grieve when human lives pass away. I cannot tell you 
 how much we hurt when we see desperation and pain on the face of another 
 person. For we have lived through this situation - and continue to live 
 through it every day - since your country and the United States formed 
 an alliance and laid plans to attack Iraq. 
  
 The Prime Minister of your country, Tony Blair, said that those who 
 carried out the explosions did so in the name of Islam. The Secretary of 
 State of the United States, Condaleezza Rice, described the bombings as 
 an act of barbarism. The United Nations Security Council met and 
 unanimously condemned the event. 
  
 I would like to ask you, the free British people, to allow me to 
 inquire: in whose name was our country blockaded for 12 years? In whose 
 name were our cities bombed using internationally prohibited weapons? In 
 whose name did the British army kill Iraqis and torture them? Was that 
 in your name? Or in the name of religion? Or humanity? Or freedom? Or 
 democracy? 
  
 What do you call the killing of more than two million children? What do 
 you call the pollution of the soil and the water with depleted uranium 
 and other lethal substances? 
  
 What do you call what happened in the prisons in Iraq - in Abu Ghraib, 
 Camp Bucca and the many other prison camps? What do you call the torture 
 of men, women, and children? What do you call tying bombs to the bodies 
 of prisoners and blowing them apart? What do you call the refinement of 
 methods of torture for use on Iraqi prisoners - such as pulling off 
 limbs, gouging out eyes, putting out cigarettes on their skin, and using 
 cigarette lighters to set fire to the hair on their heads? Does the word 
 "barbaric" adequately describe the behavior of your troops in Iraq? 
  
 May we ask why the Security Council did not condemn the massacre in 
 al-Amiriyah and what happened in al-Fallujah, Tal'afar, Sadr City, and 
 an-Najaf? Why does the world watch as our people are killed and tortured 
 and not condemn the crimes being committed against us? Are you human 
 beings and we something less? Do you think that only you can feel pain 
 and we can't? In fact it is we who are most aware of how intense is the 
 pain of the mother who has lost her child, or the father who has lost 
 his family. We know very well how painful it is to lose those you love. 
  
 You don't know our martyrs, but we know them. You don't remember them, 
 but we remember them. You don't cry over them, but we cry over them. 
  
 Have you heard the name of the little girl Hannan Salih Matrud? Or of 
 the boy Ahmad Jabir Karim? Or Sa'id Shabram? 
  
 Yes, our dead have names too. They have faces and stories and memories. 
 There was a time when they were among us, laughing and playing. They had 
 dreams, just as you have. They had a tomorrow awaiting them. But today 
 they sleep among us with no tomorrow on which to wake. 
  
 *We don't hate the British people or the peoples of the world. This war 
 was imposed upon us, but we are now fighting it in defense of our 
 selves. Because we want to live in our homeland - the free land of Iraq 
 - - and to live as we want to live, not as your government or the American 
 government wish. 
  
 *Let the families of those killed know that responsibility for the 
 Thursday morning London bombings lies with Tony Blair and his policies. 
  
 - -- 
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