Carles Grau Sivera
Baghdad (EFE).- “The invasion left the country full of orphans. Those young people now can’t even remember their father’s face,” says Ali, one of many young Iraqis who grew up amid the shelling, dead bodies and chaos caused by the US occupation of Iraq now twenty years ago.
The young man lost four of his uncles, while his wife’s father was also killed in the violence that followed the invasion.
“I always have to remind my wife that her father was a fantastic person, because she doesn’t remember anything about him. This is what the Americans took from her, ”she laments to EFE.
Although there is no exact count of the number of civilian casualties in Iraq during the US occupation, various studies estimate that the number ranges between 100,000 and half a million dead.
A childhood marked by violence
In the legendary Al Mutannabi street, a huge open-air bookstore where rivers of ink and blood flowed side by side during the invasion, Ali paints temporary tattoos with a modest brush.
A young client approaches him and, among the designs Ali offers, he chooses to stamp an AK-47 assault rifle in the center of his arm because “it is what we know,” he assures EFE.
The violence and chaos that followed the US invasion, the clashes between Iraqi militias and US troops and, later, the sectarian war that broke out in the country between 2006 and 2008, were the environment in which the Baghdadians grew up.
The trauma of an entire generation
Twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq, every young Iraqi has the same childhood memory: the sound of explosions, hundreds of corpses strewn on the streets of Baghdad, and the daily fear of never seeing their parents again. They went out to look for water or food.
“Ours was a childhood that was far from innocent. We couldn’t go out on the streets or have good food, we saw people die every day before our eyes,” Alaa, 28, told EFE from a humble cafeteria in the center of Baghdad, where she has met with her friends to smoke a “shisha” (water pipe).
His classmates listen to him carefully and agree when the young man assures that, at the age of eight, his life was summed up in “seeing how people were being killed in the streets every day” and witnessing a “rain of rockets” that did not stop in the capital of Iraq.
Blood, shots or car bombs at all hours became the norm for children who every day received a call or a visit from someone informing them that one of their relatives had lost their lives.
Sarmad, 27, recalls that when US soldiers entered Baghdad in early April 2003, “they were good to the children, giving out sweets and playing” with them, acts he sees as a “way to clean up their crimes.”
“Yes, they killed Saddam (Husein), but they left us in a worse situation. We do not see that anything has gotten better, ”he laments.
no future
Like many other young people, Sarmad believes that “life is extremely difficult because of everything that has happened in Iraq” and assures that he is not capable of achieving his dreams in a country ravaged by decades of conflict, in the process of reconstruction and in which the corruption of the ruling class has impeded its development.
From Al Mutannabi, Aliya, a 29-year-old who sells bracelets, said that “life before the US invasion was better” because, at least, “you knew you could come home alive every time you went out the street”.
The traumas that remained with her as a child are an indelible mark. She still dreams of her the first time she saw the bloody corpse of a neighbor lying in the street, when she was only nine years old.
“Of course all these conflicts have affected me, I have been very patient, but I can’t take it anymore. I work with the goal of getting out of here, because to be honest there is no future in Iraq anymore and I would never try to start a family here ”, she asserts.
Aliya is reminiscent of before the invasion, when she could go to school and have a safe life, despite the fact that “Saddam was unfair and killed people.”
“I really believe that if the Americans had not come and invaded Iraq, we would be much better off now,” he says.