Iraqi Vice President’s Brother Is Killed by Gunmen
BAGHDAD, Oct. 9 — Men wearing military police uniforms broke into the house of the brother of Iraq’s Sunni vice president on Monday, chased him onto a neighbor’s roof and shot him in the head, killing him, Iraqi authorities and witnesses said. Amir al-Hashemi was the third sibling of Iraq’s vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, to be killed since spring. His death underscored just how deeply Baghdad has sunk into lawlessness, particularly in its religiously mixed neighborhoods, and was reminiscent of the politically motivated assassinations that have plagued Iraq since the American invasion.
It’s become almost mind-numbingly routine news: another car bomb, another mass-murder, another…yawn…how long ‘til Deal or No Deal?? The senseless reign of terror and death in Iraq has become routinized, just another 10-second aside on the Katie Couric Show CBS Evening News. How many more thousands of innocent Iraqis are going to have to die before the people doing the killing realize they’re running out of potential victims? How long until Iraq becomes an empty shell, devoid of the very population it so desperately needs in order to regenerate itself into the functional democracy that Our Glorious and Beneveolent Leader keeps telling us is just right around he corner?
Sometimes I try to imagine what it must be like living with the constant fear, the terror that accompanies day-to-day life in Iraq. Though I’ve lived and worked in three different war zones, nothing in my experience allows me to even approximate the stress of just making it alive through another day. No matter how much you think your life sucks, no matter how bad you think things are for you, you don’t have to worry about masked men bursting into your house at any time, day or night, and killing you or your family. You don’t have to worry about a car bomb randomly detonating as your head down to your local grocery store. These fears, and so many more, are just a normal part of everyday life for Iraqis. Can you imagine? I don’t think so.
“Mission Accomplished”? Indeed….
