IRAQ: Fleeing relief workers leave gap in aid delivery

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/24b908f31fddaf4694578890d6c9882c.htm

BAGHDAD, 2 April 2007 (IRIN) - BAGHDAD, 2 April 2007 (IRIN) - Iraq is the deadliest country in the world for aid workers, specialists say. Treated as Western collaborators by insurgents and assumed to have sectarian bias by militias, they face death on a daily basis in the course of meeting the needs of an increasingly desperate population.

"I cannot stay in Iraq anymore. The situation for aid workers has been getting very difficult over the past few months. We are being targeted so I started look for refuge in a European country or in the US," Samir Marouf, a 33-year-old aid worker, said.

Marouf has been working as volunteer for various aid agencies in Iraq since January 2005. When he began, he never imagined that he would one day receive death threats for helping a neutral organisation feed people in need. Now, he is desperate to get his wife and daughter out of the country.

"One of our colleagues was killed two months ago while trying to deliver aid to a neighbourhood in Sadr City {a Shia-dominated area of Baghdad}. Militants stopped his car and asked for his documents. When they saw from his surname that he was a Sunni Muslim, they took him away. His body was found two days later near the capital. He was going to help their {militants'} Shia relatives but they killed him.

[IndyOp]

1. My heart breaks. I wonder whether any of us deserves to think of ourself as moral. (n/t)

:cry: