Baghdad survivors, wounds of a war

In a interactive feature, the talanted Farah Nosh gives us the real story behind the war, the people who have lost limbs, loved ones and the ability to lead a ¨normal life¨ in the midst of the Baghdad inferno, that is the usual rhytm of the city nowadays. The phrase ¨a picture says more than a thousand words¨ tends too be overstated at times, but this time it really show´s the power of photo journalism.

In another development, what seems like a 180 degree´s turn around, the sunni politica and religious leadership looks more and more like tilting toward´s a shift in policy on the American troop withdrawal. Amid the sectarian violence, raging and intensifying for every week, they now seem increasingly too look to the Americans for protection. The demands for the Americans to leave, has changed to a demand for a timetable. In the meantime, the shíites seems to view the process of integrating the sunnis into Iraq´s body politic with suspicion, being the principal beneficary of the new political system, they tend to view American attempts to achieve this goal as appeasement of the insurgency, at the expense of the new found democracy. Even the most critical seems eager to let the american troops stay put for the time being, as ilustrated by this comment from the Islamic party official in charge of human rights questions, Omar al Jubouri:

“The problem is that American crimes are only a hundredth of the crimes committed by the militias,” said Omar al-Jubouri, the human rights officer for the Iraqi Islamic Party, a powerful Sunni group that still considers itself the vanguard of political resistance to the Americans. “It’s like one hair compared to all the other hairs on a camel.”

“We want to tell the American people to increase the presence of the Americans here, to control the situation,”
Ed Wong and Dexter Filkins has more on this in today´s New York Times

Farah Nosh, phot journalism in Iraq, Iraq,US troops,Sectarian violence, shiíte-sunni divide, democracy, nation building