By Vijay Prashad on June 5, 2024
In the wars against the Iraqi people the concussions of US bombs destroyed the water and sewer lines in Baghdad. photo; Bill Hackwell
In their apartment in Baghdad, Iraq, my friends tell me how they were impacted by the horrors of the illegal war imposed by the United States in 2003 against their country. Yusuf and Anisa are members of the Iraqi Federation of Journalists and both have experience as freelance journalists for Western media companies that came to Baghdad in the midst of the war. The first time I went to dinner at their apartment, in the well-located Waziriyah neighborhood, I was struck by the fact that Anisa – whom I had known as a secular person – wore a veil over her face. “I wear this scarf,” Anisa told me later in the evening, “to hide the scar I have on my jaw and neck, the scar I got from a gunshot wound from an American soldier who panicked after an IED [improvised explosive device] went off next to his patrol.”
Earlier, Yusuf had taken me around the city of New Baghdad, where in 2007 an Apache helicopter had killed nearly twenty civilians and wounded two children. Among the dead were two journalists working for Reuters, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. “This is where they killed them,” Yusuf tells me as he points to the square. “And this is where Saleh [Matasher Tomal] parked his minivan to rescue Saeed, who was not yet dead. And this is where the Apaches shot at the vehicle, seriously wounding Saleh’s sons, Sajad and Duah.” I was interested in this place because the whole incident was recorded by the US military and published by Wikileaks as “Collateral Murder”. Julian Assange is in prison in large part because he led the team that released this video (he has now received the right to challenge in a UK court his extradition to the US). The video presented direct evidence of a horrific war crime.
“No one in our neighborhood has been left unscathed by violence. We are a traumatized society,” Anisa told me in the evening. “For example, my neighbor. She lost her mother in a bombing and her husband is blind from another bombing.” The stories fill my notebook. They are endless. Every society that has suffered the kind of war faced by Iraqis, and now Palestinians, is deeply scarred. It is difficult to recover from so much violence.
My poisoned land
I am walking near the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam. Friends who are showing me around point to the surrounding fields and say that this land has been so poisoned by Agent Orange (a herbicide) released by the United States that they don’t believe food can be produced here for generations. The US dumped at least 74 million liters of chemicals (mostly Agent Orange) on Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, focusing for many years on this supply line running from north to south. The spraying of these chemicals reached the bodies of at least five million Vietnamese and mutilated the land.
Vietnamese journalist Trân Tô Nga published Ma terre empoisonnée (My Poisoned Land) in 2016 as a way to draw attention to the atrocity that has continued to plague Vietnam more than four decades after the United States lost the war. In her book, Trân Tô Nga describes how in 1966, as a journalist, a U.S. Air Force Fairchild C-123 sprayed her with a strange chemical. She cleaned herself up and moved on through the jungle, inhaling the poisons dropped from the sky. Two years later her daughter was born, who died in infancy from the impact of Agent Orange in Trân Tô Nga. “The people in that village there,” my guides tell me, naming the village, “give birth to children with serious defects generation after generation.”
Gaza
These memories return in the context of Gaza. The focus is often on the dead and the destruction of the landscape. But there are other enduring parts of modern warfare that are hard to calculate. There is the immense sound of war, the noise of shelling and shouting, the noises that seep deep into the consciousness of young children and mark them for life. There are children in Gaza, for example, who were born in 2006 and are now eighteen, who have seen wars at birth in 2006, then in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021, and now, 2023-24. The intervals between these big bombings have been punctuated by smaller bombings, just as noisy and just as deadly.
Then there is the dust. Modern construction uses a number of toxic materials. In fact, in 1982, the World Health Organization recognized a phenomenon called “sick building syndrome,” which is when a person falls ill due to the toxic material used to construct modern buildings. Imagine a 2,000-pound MK84 bomb falling on a building and imagine the toxic dust flying around and staying both in the air and on the ground. This is precisely what the children of Gaza are breathing now as the Israelis drop hundreds of these deadly bombs on residential neighborhoods. There are now more than 37 million tons of rubble in Gaza, much of it filled with toxic substances.
All war zones remain dangerous years after the ceasefire. In the case of this war on Gaza, even the cessation of hostilities will not end the violence. In early November 2023, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimated that the Israelis had dropped 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, equivalent to two nuclear bombs (although, as they pointed out, Hiroshima sits on 900 square meters of land, while Gaza’s total square meters are 360). By the end of April 2024, Israel had dropped more than 75,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, the equivalent of six nuclear bombs. The United Nations estimates that it would take 14 years to eliminate unexploded ordnance in Gaza. That means that people will continue to die from this Israeli bombardment until 2038.
On the mantelpiece in the modest living room of Anisa and Yusuf’s apartment is a small Palestinian flag. Next to it is a small piece of shrapnel that hit and destroyed Yusuf’s left eye. There is nothing else on it.
Vijay Prashad is a historian, author, journalist, activist and executive director of Tricontinental, Institute for Social Research
Source: El Viejo Topo, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English