My condolences

First of all, I would like to send my deep condolences to the family of the Italian journalist who was executed by some terrorists under the name of Islam. Islam should repudiate from their acts and I blame Islamic leaders for not taking a strong stand against them. But I think they are afraid from them, because they have no mercy to anyone standing against their interests.

Today I was listening to the news and I watched another terrorist group who had kidnapped some Indian and Nepalese workers and I noticed that their accents was not Iraqi. I asked my husband to listen to them while they were making a speech and he agreed with me. I think their accent sounds like they were from Saudi Arabia, I don’t know if any Arabic would read this and check the news and see if I was wrong. I hope they were not Iraqis.

We had no electricity for more than 15 hours, first I thought because of the oil pipe lines were hit yesterday, they usually affect electricity, but later I found that only our district has been without electricity since yesterday (9:00 p.m.) till know. We had similar elect. power failures every now and then because of the very old system we had which should had been changed more than ten years ago. Most districts had the same problems especially when the weather temperature get so high. The problem started only this year because of the high consumption of Elect. ( I will write an article about the electricity problems in Iraq in the future).

Thank God we had a lot of alternatives, we had our own generator, we had a subscription with a local generator and finally we had a power inverter which works on large battery and it gives about 500 watt which could operate a fan and TV for few hours, but I feel sorry for those people who could not buy any of these things who are many and they have to suffer a very high temperature reaching sometimes to 50C.

I still feel very nervous every time I don’t have Elec. I can’t do many things without the national elec.( WOW the elec. had just come back now after 15 hours and a half). I wonder how do you feel when you had to plan your life according to elec. not according to what you want and the time you need. I usually wash clothes after midnight because the elec. will be more stable .

I have to wake up 2 to 3 times at night to switch between the generator and the main elec. and the inverter and sometimes more. It is not easy to make my husband wake when he falls a sleep but sometimes I succeed. I have not slept for a whole night for more than a year I’m still dreaming for a continues sleeping night.
Oops....The elec. had shut down again:( .I’m using my husband’s portable instead of my computer to avoid these interruptions.

It seems that Najaf problem has come to an end, but I still hope that they would be able to make Al-sadr disarms his militia and I was wishing that he would be punished for what he had done in the city and pay for the loss of our oil export which stopped because of his threat I think he should be jailed .One of his assistance was captured two days ago with some valuables treasures taken from the shrine that was found in his house but al-sadr insists that he will not go with the negotiations before that person get released because that person is the direct spokesman of his (what a man !). I was shocked when I heard that the police released him and discharged all the criminal claims against him. His followers kidnapped two relatives of the minister of Defense and asked to release that man in order to free those people (they announce this on TV), another thing I think you should know that after Al-khoui (a respectable shiat clerik) had been killed with the person who had the keys of the shrine which we call ‘Kilidar’, the keys of the shrine disappeared and for your surprise they appeared in Al-sadr’s hand! Al-sadr had been accused for killing those men months ago but they could not arrest him till now. What a great law we have!

P.S the elec. is back again now after 15 min.

Thank you all

Thank you all for your comments on my blog. I appreciate them. I will try to make a comment for each in the near future, but this will be a short comment for what I read.

First of all, I would like to thank everyone who offered me his(her) help and support and I’m sure I will not hesitate to ask you when I need to.

Second : Yes, I meant (certain ). It was a typing mistake. Forgive me if it was an unforgivable mistake.

Third: these few lines are written to Susi from calif.:
First of all, it Was not a 3 years as you said. Iraq-Iran war finished on 8th-Aug-1988 . In 2nd-Aug-1990 we invaded Kuwait ,and when I meant one year, I count only 1989 were we live a whole peaceful year.
Second : when you spoke about those who did those terrible mistakes for killing babies and others believe me every nation has their good and bad people and I think those who did this had done similar acts in our country when Baghdad failed.
Third when I said I was happy for not having exams: I don’t know if you noticed my age at that time (I was 14 years old) and it was a superficial feeling at a certain moment.
And finally you said it yourself (a horrible man). Have you seen the way he treated his people, have you seen the mass graves all over the country, because if you have you will not ask.

This one to all who read my blog:
I want to make you know that I’m definitely not a pro-Saddam but that does not necessarily mean that I’m a pro-America.

My fears of Wars

I read a comment in my blog asking about my feelings against wars. So I decided to write this post.

I was three years old when the war with Iran started, I still remember how my father used to hold me up to the corridor where we used to hide away from windows. My leg was broken at that time and I could not move freely. I remember how we used to stand sometimes in front of my bed room’s window and look at Iranian planes in our sky. I was too young at that time but believe me many things are still in my mind .

There was a day I could not forget for my whole life, in Oct. 1987 I was 10 years old that time, standing in the yard of my school waiting for the bell to ring , when I heard a loud explosion (we were hit by a random Iranian rocket). later I heard that a school had been hit and killed many children. I cried a lot that night although I didn’t know any one from them but I imagined myself being in that school. I watched TV that night and was terrified from the scene, mothers and fathers were weeping, blood was everywhere, a scene I could not forget.
Lots of memories are still in my mind from that war, but the Iraq-Iran war is not my subject for this article.

The war with Iran finally came to an end after eight years of bloody fighting. I was so happy looking for a bright future where no more blood or fears, I even don’t know who was the winner of that war. I had that feeling for only one year when we invaded Kuwait and had another big war. This time I was 14 years old preparing for a mid year exam when my mother woke me up that night telling me that the war had started. I don’t want to lie at you, but I felt happy that moment because I didn’t have to study for the exams which were supposed to be started two days after that day. I was not thinking about the future that time just living my days, we had good and bad times. All the neighbors were gathering every night just to kill time, me and some friends used to play cards and domino. I was more cretin that this time the goals are more cretins and specific and this war will not kill innocent people . Again I was wrong. The Americans hit Al-Amirya shelter and burned and killed hundreds of people and they were sure it was a shelter. I was unable to see the pictures because we did not have electricity that time but I saw it later on TV and it was more horrifying than you can imagine. A neighbor of our lost her sister, her father, and seven other relatives on that hit.

I thought that they will kill Saddam in that war and everything will be over and we will be able to go on with our lives but I was wrong again. America did not kill Saddam for its interest and above that there was the sanction which we suffered from for more than 10 years. There were lack in medicine, teaching materials and many other important things and a gain the one who paid for this was us. My cousin lost his son who died of cancer because of the lack of medicine and do you know how old was he? only six years old. He died two years ago and those were very hard days. I wish I can forget them.

Then we came to this war and I built many dreams after it. I thought that peace will come finally. America did what they wanted and I thought we came to an end for our wars and fears, but again I was wrong now we have different kind of fights and terrorism which causes much more harm. I believed that America brought their war against terror to our country to fight them here. They brought them from all around the world to our country and they made a lot of mistakes when they came to our country and again we paid for all these.

I believe there is no winner or loser in wars, except on paper and the innocent people from both sides are paying hard for it. I hope this will come to a good end and I wish I can dream for a better future for my daughter this time and I hope it will not take long (before I become a granny).

Bad Luck

Today was a misfortunate day for me. I started working in my blog early in the morning so that I can have a good speed internet connection( through the phone), but the internet was not working very well especially with my blog. I wanted to change its template but I could not. so at the end I put the first template I could download instead of the one I wanted.

In the evening me and my husband went to a new internet café near our house and we rented two computers. I was so happy at the beginning because everything was going as I wanted. I downloaded some lessons for Flash that helped me in web design (I started designing few web sites and I want to learn how to add animation to them). Anyway, I finally wanted to put these lessons into the flash RAM when I discovered that my computer’s Windows is 98 and not 2000 and it cannot see the flash RAM. My husband tried to copy my files to his computer because his computer’s windows is 2000 but the network did not work. Finally we asked the man in the internet cafe to bring us a disk so I can copy my files on it. I was shocked when I heard that they did not have a disk! can you imagine an internet cafe had nothing you can to take your work out from it. Any way I believed that today was my bad day and I was making my way out when the man in the internet came and refused to take the money for the rental of the two computers we had rented. We asked him to take at least one computer’s rental but he insisted not to. That was the only good news in my story. I came home and willing that tomorrow I will be able to go to another internet cafe and download what I want .

Mredi Army*

I do not know if the negotiations will have a positive or negative result but I think they gave Muktada Al-sadr what he wanted, they gave him the fame that he wanted. He is now on almost all news and newspapers headlines and I think he doesn't deserve anything of it.

Many Arabic news channels show him as the hero of Najaf and he is the only one from all the shia's clerics who stands against the occupation strongly. All the people I know from Najaf city are fed up with his militia and what they have done in their city. They said that they are out from our city and they imposed themselves here by power.

I think if Al-sadr controls the situation, it will be worse than in the days of Saddam, at least Saddam won't make us return to dark ages. Al sadr has his own religious court and his own laws and the one who want obey his rules will be punished and maybe whipped. Women are forced to wear head scarf (hijab) and his followers are annoying Christian people in Basra. you can't talk against him in public because his followers are every where and if they heard someone doing so, he will be punished. I heard in the news that his court even had given death penalty against some policemen .

Most of his militia are form the poorest, uneducated low-class shias. Many of them are gangsters and criminals and they did most of looting that had happened after Baghdad failed.

Have you seen any of his spokesmen whose age is above 40, what experience they have to decide the future of the country. I think this militia should be terminated or they will cause problems every now and then.

I blame Iraqi clerics for the way they are dealing with those problems. I am not against them in religious fatwas. They helped a lot in protecting many important places from looting and they helped in returning back many stolen things. They helped a lot in uniting shias and sunis. But I blame them for the last Fatwa they issued against those who will fight against al sadr militia. Why haven’t those clerics issued similar Fatwas when Al mahdi Army attacked police stations and killed many policemen and mutilated them in Najaf. Aren’t those policemen Iraqis working hard to establish peace to our country. If this shrine is holly to them, they can fight outside it and not hide in it.

This is my point of view I wanted to share it with you.

* Mredi is a big place in Al-sadr city were stolen goods are sold.