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(Reuters Photo) Bodies of victims of violence are seen on the floor of a hospital morgue in Kirkuk
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As violence rages across Iraq, the U.S. refuses to admit that the situation has got out of its control, maintaining that the current quagmire is merely the result of the Shia-Sunni differences. Sami Rasouli, an Iraqi American who helped establish the Muslim Peacemaker Team, was a well-known restaurateur in Minneapolis. Rasouli has returned to his home country, Iraq, to help it recover from the war and U.S. occupation. In an interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, Rasouli gives a different assessment of the situation in Iraq, contradicting that given by the Bush administration and the mainstream media. Amy Goodman began her interview with listing a number of attacks that ripped through Iraq in recent days as well as recently released figures about the civilian death toll among Iraqis. “At least eleven people have been killed and more than 90 injured after a suicide truck bomb attack in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. Among the casualties were children from a nearby school. Meanwhile, two truck bombs exploded in Mosul Sunday, killing two people and wounding twenty-two,” she said. “In other violence, the bodies of nineteen men kidnapped at a fake checkpoint in Baghdad were found today. All had been shot in the head. Meanwhile, six U.S. soldiers were killed over the weekend in roadside bombings south of Baghdad. “The latest bloodshed comes a day after Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain paid a heavily guarded visit to Baghdad market. McCain said afterwards the American people were not being given the full picture of the progress being made in curbing violence in Baghdad. “Iraqi figures estimate civilian deaths in violence across the country rose 15% over February to more than 2,000. More than 600 Iraqis have been killed in the past week alone. Among them were at least 152 people killed in a suicide truck bombing in Tal Afar, the deadliest single attack since the invasion four years ago. Shia gunmen, including police, went on a revenge shooting rampage afterwards, killing at least forty-five Sunni men. “Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Democrats in the House and Senate have pushed through war-funding bills that set timetables for withdrawing U.S. forces. The measures need to be reconciled before they’re sent to President Bush, who has promised to veto them. Amy asked Rasouli to comment on these latest figures as well as the recent attack in Tal Afar, “the worst attack -- having the worst casualties since the invasion of Iraq.” He replied saying: “Well, I heard Senator McCain talking about the progress, which I kept hearing this from the President and the rest of the administration’s officials in the last four years. But speaking about Tal Afar as an example, I was a member of Muslim Peacemakers Teams, among others, accompanied with Peggy Gish and Michele [Naar-Obed] from CPT, or the Christian Peacemakers Team -- this is sometime in January 2006 -- we visited the second Grand Ayatollah in Najaf, Sayed Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim, and he told us this story after we introduced ourselves as Peacemakers. He said Tal Afar is populated by all kind of people that form the beautiful mosaic formula of the Iraqi fabric society, which Sunnis beside Shias -- and by the way, I’m a Shia, and my wife is a Sunni, so this is a normal intermarriage in Iraq within the Iraqi society. “So, sometimes in September 2005, the people of Tal Afar faced heavy bombing from the U.S. air raids, and they had to leave the city seeking refuge. Those are families, women and children seeking refuge -- next city, which is Sinjar. And Sinjar is populated by Yezidis, and falsely known in Iraq as Satanic worshippers. And those Yezidis were ready to receive and offer refuge for the Sunnis and Shias who fled the city of Tal Afar, and they offered them homes, food, mattresses, other needs, and assured them that they would leave if they don't like them to be with them, because they held a different religion. So they left to stay with their relatives, the Yezidis, and allowed the Shias and Sunnis to stay in their homes until the crisis would be over in Tal Afar. “And since then -- actually since May 1, 2003, when the President announced major military operation combat was over -- they still in the state of fleeing their homes -- it's not only in Tal Afar -- across the country. There are over two million Iraqis have got displaced in Iraq in their home own land, became refugees. There are people from Tal Afar that are still in Najaf and Karbala, and we met them, and we tried hard, as the members of the Muslim Peacemakers Team, to offer them refuge, shelter, food and others donated by the Iraqis themselves. They still share with them what they need. And, by the way, Iraqis still are surviving for that Food-for-Oil Program or Oil-for-Food Program. And it's not enough, but they try to survive within the insecurity and hardship conditions of the occupation. Asked about why he returned to Iraq after some three years, Rasouli said… “ Well, the first initial visit, when I made -- my mother died back in November 2003, and I wanted to go and offer my condolences to sisters and relatives, and I spent about four weeks there, and I was happy, from one side, to get reunited with my family and their forty nieces and nephews. But from the other side, when I get outside and see the sign of the destruction and what war caused to the people, I was devastated. So I came back. I couldn't function. It took me a year to decide to go back. So I sold my business and tried to be un-obligated to anything else, and I went. “But I wanted to do something, how much this thing I can offer, less or more, it might make little change, so I headed there, but I was surprised to meet members of the Christian Peacemakers Teams in Karbala, working with the Karbala Human Rights Watch center, where I met with them. And it was, for me, like something I found to shape up my mission. And we were all, the Iraqi, at that center, impressed with the work of Christian Peacemakers Team. So that's why we decided to form the Muslim Peacemakers Team. “And since then, the MPT was involved with joint efforts and projects in Iraq, mainly was the clean-up project in the city of Fallujah, where eighteen delegates -- three were Christian, and fifteen Shia Muslim men and women from Najaf -- who committed themselves to go offer the troubled city that faced destruction twice, in April 2004 and November 2004. So we were there and announced help to pick up rubbles, garbage, knocking the doors of the residents to ask for taking away waste. And the people there were touched. They actually haven't seen any garbage collectors for the previous two years, since the war started. So they invited us to pray with them. And we went, and we did. We prayed in the Al Furqan Mosque in the area of Saba Nissan. There were close to 2,000 worshippers, where the Sheikh changed his sermon to a unity. People learned about us, that we were among them, Sunni and Shia worshipping together, same God, having the same holy book, the Qur’an. And about his meeting with the head of the House Appropriations Committee, David Obey, in Wisconsin, Rasouli said: “Actually, the person who organized my meeting, Mike Miles, called his office, and the office staff agreed that we have a meeting with Congressman Obey. And actually, I met him, and he bought me breakfast -- it was nice -- and listened -- he listened to what I had to say patiently. And we had a nice hour, which mostly I talked about sharing with him what I have experienced in Iraq for the last eight months and other stories. The congressman expressed his prior knowledge about what I had to tell him. And as to do anything – About his message to Congressmember Obey around the vote, as some call it, an antiwar vote, “because it calls for a timetable in Iraq; others call it a continuation of war vote, because it further appropriates money for the war in Iraq.” Rasouli said: “Well, what I understood that they presented their bill, and the President presents his bill, and it goes back and forth. But as a result, it looks like the administration is not listening and will not listen and look at the November 7th vote seriously. So I sense that probably the presidency should be offered to the Democrats in the next election, 2008. Amy asked Mr. Rasouli about what he want to “see happen in Iraq right now? And what would happen if the U.S. troops were to withdraw immediately?- A question he answered saying: “The U.S. administration, through its occupation in Iraq, has failed, has failed profoundly, and every day passes by indicates more violence happening in Iraq and more failure for their role. And, actually, I don't know what their role in Iraq is and what are the objectives that the U.S. intends to accomplish in Iraq so far. I see nothing. I see the war as pointless. It caused lots of agony and disastrous result for the Iraqis. An average Iraqi wake up in the morning, whether it’s a child going to school or a farmer going to his farm or a worker going to his work -- and, by the way, there is 65% unemployment rate in Iraq, so not much work in Iraq. But Iraqis are on a blind date. Every day they wake up with brutal death. “We cannot justify the presence of the U.S. troops in Iraq by saying, well, they will -- or they are doing anything good for the Iraqis to prevent such as civil war, so-called fight between Sunnis and Shias. This is not a civil war. This is a political war between who supported the U.S. invasion, which is the current government and its death squads, and the people of Iraq, who resisted, resisted this occupation and is still resisting this occupation. “Iraqis are fed up with the administration allegation, and if there is any civil war taking place, they are saying, we should have it now, rather we have it later, one year later or five years later. Let's have it now and get over with it. Then we will have our country back, we can rebuild it, and we rule it. We are the people that belong to an ancient multi-civilization country. It is Mesopotamia, where Hammurabi set his first code of law; the Sumerian, they came up with the invention of writing; the Babylonian; the Acadian; the Sumerian; and all the civilization that was built around Tigris and Euphrates. |
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