Dr Salih Ibrahim

A consultant pathologist at St Peter's hospital in Chertsey, Surrey. He left Basra, to come to Britain in 1981

Monday March 15, 2004

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/voices/story/0,12820,1168165,00.html

I wanted to visit Iraq a month ago but my brother in Basra does not want me there because he says people might kidnap one of his daughters as some bandits would know that I could pay the ransom. "You are not welcome in my house", he told me. And this is in Basra, where the British are, and it is supposed to be safer.
The country looks like chaos - but this is to be expected. They impoverished and devastated Iraq for 12-and-a-half years with sanctions and then during the invasion and occupation devastated it further when approximately 50,000 Iraqis lost their lives. My friend Dr Akram Abid Hamoudi, who is now in Manchester, lost 10 members of his family in the bombing of Basra, and I know many doctors who died in the aftermath.

I remain pessimistic. In a year's time it might be worse. As long as American bases are there, there will be armed resistance and troubles. Who pays the price? Innocent Iraqis and young allied soldiers.

And my brother's message to me was "why are you wasting time in the peace movement? The Americans are here to stay".

After I heard about the bomb attacks on the festival of Ashura in Baghdad and Kerbala, I just thought, "I hope it is not the beginning of civil war because we have had enough bloodshed". But Iraqis think it was the CIA and Mossad who fired the mortars at the crowd.

The attacks on the UN, Red Cross headquarters and Iraqi police are new phenomena. These people (the bombers) have been dehumanised by years of sanctions and by the occupation of Palestine and now Iraq.

Iraq is not like Northern Ireland where Catholic kids go to Catholic schools - it is a mixture. I am an example of this myself, being half Sunni and half Shia. Iraqis had intermarried and lived together without fighting for 1,400 years. The problem is because of this occupation by brutal force.

The fundamentalists in Iraq are reactionaries to the Christian fundamentalism of people like [US president George] Bush.

Of course it is about the oil, the real weapon of mass destruction with which we terrorise mother nature. In 20 years' time when the Chinese, French and Americans are fighting each other for the last drop of oil, Israel will blow up the Middle East, then it will be Armageddon. This is what the Christian Zionist fundamentalists want - they think they are helping God. Bush and Blair defame God and democracy.

Bush speaks to God every morning; he says he answers him, he speaks to him like a prophet.

By going after the oil, Tony Blair is acting in the best interests of the British people because oil is running out, imagine how much oil the Chinese will need. However he endangers lives of ordinary British people.

They [the coalition] claim that the hospitals and schools are better but these are lies. I spoke to senior doctors in Iraq who said the hospitals had not improved. One said you could get things if you had money. But he was phoning me for help to get an injection he needed for his pregnant wife.

I wish I could go back and give back some of what I have learned here. There are hundreds of Iraqi doctors in British hospitals. Where I work there are eight consultant level Iraqi doctors. We should be over there.

And they want to give us this US democracy. What? So we can be like when Bush stole the election? Like this, we do not want it.

Iraq now is a fertile ground for al-Qaida. Iraqis are battle hardened-people; more than these young soldiers from North America. Iraqis have been through so much fighting, they resisted their own fellow Shia Iranian revolutionaries for eight years. They will resist the occupier and defeat the American empire with the loss of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives - mostly Iraqis - and mental harm to millions.
Mark Oliver

04.02.2003: Read Dr Salih Ibrahim's first Voices on Iraq interview