An unlikely survivor in Baghdad's carnage

[ProSense]

An unlikely survivor in Baghdad's carnage

By Stephen Farrell Published: August 13, 2007

BAGHDAD: Fatima Jbouri should be dead.

Nine months old, underweight, malnourished, fatherless and half Sunni, half Shiite, she already had enough deadly handicaps growing up in Saydia, a battlefield suburb that has become one of the worst sectarian killing zones in Baghdad.

On July 25, a death squad shot her mother and uncle - each three times in the head - in their dilapidated half-finished squat. EJKs, in U.S. military shorthand: extrajudicial killings.

Fatima's 7-year-old brother fled and flagged down a joint patrol of the Iraqi National Police and U.S. soldiers. The Iraqis found the bodies and collected Fatima's siblings from neighboring houses. But the 7-year-old kept asking, "What about my sister?"

Outside, in the garbage-strewn yard, they found the whimpering baby, hidden under a metal sheet in oppressive heat.

Fatima survived. She is in the U.S. military's 28th Combat Support Hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Nurses say she weighed less than half the normal weight of a 9-month-old, but she is recovering well.

The identities of the killers, like their motives, remain a mystery. Saydia, a middle-class district, was once a peaceful home to both Sunnis and Shiites, residents say, but has degenerated over six months into a lawless free-for-all. Hundreds of families have fled, and many fell victim to killing squads from both sides of the sectarian divide. "Whichever car happens to be driving past," sighed one U.S. officer. "Whichever car."

<...>

Such is the unconstrained sectarian bloodlust that even a baby is assumed to be a target. And such is that bloodlust that Major Andy Yerkes, an American police adviser who happened upon Fatima in an Iraqi police station the next morning, decided that the girl also needed yet one more piece of luck: not to be sent to an Iraqi hospital.

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A "mature civil war"

[ProSense]

1. Kick! n/t

[ProSense]

2. Kick! n/t

[karlrschneider]

3. I absolutely get the horrific outrage here but just how the hell can a baby be "half Sunni and

half Shiiite"?

Isn't that somewhat like claiming a kid is "half Baptist and half Methodist"? What utter fucking insanity.
:grr: :mad:

[ProSense]

4. I guess that would make this a

civil war between the baptists and the methodists.

[karlrschneider]

5. Perhaps. Doesn't it actually amount to that sort of situation?

Look, fundies are fundies regardless of how they pronounce the name of their imaginary deity(ies). And that is what makes them so despicably dangerous.

[libodem]

6. I don't think the sectarianism

was as pronounced in Secular old Iraq. I think moderate people did intermarry kinda like they do here. We have lots of interfaith marriages here. People do do that sort of thing even in Muslim countries. It's not unheard of. It's just that we have escalated the violence in criminal gangs and rival Shiite militias, Sunni insurgents, infiltrated police forces and infantry, and the sectarian tribes,. There is a crisis of 8 million needing food and water! 190,000 AK47's, are missing, in the population and there is never any accounting anywhere. FUBAR

[karlrschneider]

7. I think you are absolutely right. When misery is visited on a populace, it's natural for them to

find a scapegoat and unfortunately the closest faction becomes suspect. The power of rage decreases rapidly as the target becomes more distant.