Clips from the Iraqi Reality Show

Among dozens of weeping women and men, Um Mohammed pushed away the weepers and sobbed at her 17-year-old son’s blood and the remaining of his flesh. With unforgotten grief, she was crying hysterically. She was left with two wounded daughters, a newly handicapped son and a cheerless father.

Um Mohammed is my friend’s aunt who lives in Baghdad’s western most disastrous, dangerous and violence-plagued areas, Khadhra. Like all the people living there, Um Mohammed’s family wasn’t spared the bombings and the attacks in a completely lawless neighborhood where armed men move freely like ants.

Two weeks ago, a mortar fell over their house and landed in their daughters’ room wounding the two of them. A week later, another bomb landed in the living room where her 12-year-old son was watching television at night, wounding him seriously. This mortar led to cut one of his legs and some burns on his body. But the third mortar that fell four days ago was fatal. It killed the eldest son, Mohammed.

Mohammed was one of the Iraqi teenagers that had no other place to go to but to stay locked either in their houses or neighborhood. One day, he was with a friend filling their generator with fuel. Electricity absence continues. After they finished, they decided to stand at the main gate of the house. While chatting, the mortar fell, killing him immediately and seriously wounding his friend.

With tears falling, my friend narrated how the situation looked like when he and his family went to his aunt’s house. It has been three years since he went last time to that fallen part of Baghdad. His aunt, he said, lost conscious several times, her daughters were weeping all the time and her handicapped son was lying in bed with wounds from the previous mortar while the father was receiving the people who came for condolences.

“It was scary,” my friend said of the road to Khadhra. “It is dead. There is no life there,” he added. Last Friday was the first day of the 3-day funeral. The victim’s family held the funeral in a traditional funeral tent in front of the house. My friend said they had to attend the funeral before sunset. It’s so risky to drive there after sunset.

We hear such incidents almost everyday. Whoever we see tells us the bad news, simply because there is no good news. “Someone is killed, another is kidnapped, X was robbed, Y was beheaded, a roadside bomb went off, a car bomb exploded”… blablabla….

Few days ago, my sister visited us. Like all other Iraqis, most of the news she had was about how her husband’s family live these days. My brother-in-law’s cousin’s 4-month-old son was wounded by a stray bullet from nearby clashes. My sister said they were sleeping when the clashes erupted in Adhamiya last week in the early morning. One of the bullets reached the small bed of the son. His mother was about to lose her mind when she found her baby bleeding in his bed. Unable to take him to the hospital immediately, the grieving mother had to wait weeping until the clashes were over. They finally took him to the hospital where he had to have a surgery to take out the bullet which, thank God, did not hurt his organs. The family, like many other Iraqis, decided to leave the country. “My son and husband are the only things that I care about now,” she told my sister who visited her few days ago.

Do you think that this is the end? Of course, not. The latest thing I heard was that a relative of my brother-in-law was threatened to be killed unless he leaves his job as a government employee in the electricity ministry. Of course, he can’t quit his job but he had to leave his house and buy another one in another neighborhood.

These are few clips from our Iraqi reality show. This is how we start and end our day.