As salaam alaykom,

In the last four years I find my mind slipping, not because I am losing my mind but because I am losing what is in it - people, places, the familiar things of home. In the landscape of the mind, we all have places and faces dear to us - the chaos of recent years has been such as to make a shattered mirror of the Iraq my memories reflected.

I am out of Iraq now for some twenty months and it is a hard thing. It is a hard thing because I am unable to speak to people of the reality of the horrors of home - their understanding is either imperfect or else it seems that an injection of truth disturbs the media 'realities' that they are accustomed to receiving and they seem uncomfortable, doubtful even, with learning of things that do not reach their media. So I have learned to be silent and to know what I know and to avoid conversations with those who would need years of teaching to understand Iraqi realities.

It is difficult not knowing what to say, it is difficult even to write of things. Here I will not attempt to outline any kind of political history of the last four years. Instead I will ask you to imagine something - what it is like to be an Iraqi outside Iraq.

First, you will find yourself living in two time zones - the one you are physically in and the one at home. Sleep will become erratic as you try to keep contact with family and with news. Reports of incidents in areas where you have family or friends will create anxiety until contact can be made with loved ones.

'Until contact can be made with loved ones' - there is a hard thing. Because for years, due to raids, jamming of lines, deliberate cutting of lines by authorities to prevent residents of particular districts contacting media or family or friends during 'clampdowns', disruption to lines caused by sabotage and the frequent power cuts which affect Iraqis to this day, making contact with loved ones can take days, weeks or even, in extreme circumstances, months. So you will watch TV or read newspapers and know something has occurred where your loved ones are, but it may be a long time before you receive reassurances that all are safe.

You may not always receive reassurance. Sometimes you will learn hard news even before you can make contact with home. One morning last year I read in a newspaper of the shooting dead of a cousin and it was some time after before I could contact my family. All I could do was pray Surah Yasin where I was and try to be with my people in that way. Another time the telephone rang early one morning and I listened with dread to my weeping sister telling me of the abduction of her son and his friend, taken off the street by armed men. There followed anxious hours, then days, then weeks as family and friends searched the prisons, the hospitals, the mortuaries, the rivers and drains and all the other dumping grounds where death squads leave their victims. There followed prayers and supplications and requests for du3a from all the people we knew. That was several months ago now - the two boys never came home and no trace of them was ever found. They were only 19 years of age.

So the news and the telephone are things that you will learn to be anxious about, day and night, all the time.

You will learn that there is little point in simply hoping for good news. There is no good news. Forget whatever ridiculous spin is issued by occupying forces or their mouthpieces. What there is is misery and terrible human suffering, and it is getting worse. There are food shortages, power cuts, water shortages, shortages of medicines and an exodus of doctors and nurses. There are constant curfews and death comes quickly to many innocents each day at the hands of death squads, bombers and trigger happy occupation troops whose 'force protection' ethic sees them shoot first and ask questions about who they have murdered afterwards. There are daily air raids that seldom feature in the Western media. Hospitals have fallen under the control of sectarian militias and Sunnis in Baghdad are afraid to visit hospitals - they have been dragged from their sick beds and murdered, they have been ambushed and murdered as they visited loved ones, they have been murdered after looking for the bodies of missing loved ones in hospital mortuaries. New 'invisible lines' have had to be quickly learned by residents of cities, towns and villages all over Iraq. These 'invisible lines' are the places that if you set foot outside of them you will be killed or kidnapped - then tortured and killed. There are shops that can no longer be used, schools that are no longer safe places for children to attend, and mosques where worshippers are regularly targeted by snipers, mortar teams, car bombers and assassins. This is the environment that you who are outside of Iraq know that your people are having to live in. Women are afraid to travel, with good reason. Their lives are being suffocated. You who are outside Iraq know these things and you know that such stories are not propaganda because it is your own family and friends who are telling you of them.

And who you knew and what you knew and the world you knew is disintegrating week by week. Week by week you are losing links with your life as you learn of the fate of this or that family. 'Dead', 'fled' or 'disappeared' are common replies to inquiries about old friends and neighbours. Some of the 'fled' have left Iraq altogether, some have gone to join relatives in places they consider 'safer'. Some have been forced out by threats, others dispossessed of homes they lived in for years as a result of new laws passed by those 'returnees' who came back to Iraq under the shelter of American guns and lost no time in enriching themselves.

Week by week you will learn of buildings and places that have been destroyed. Your memory of the world you knew will become increasingly out-of-date. Mosques, libraries, museums, places of entertainment - destroyed, seized by the returnees, burned out, bombed out or looted. As you read of plunging literacy levels and the as yet unrevealed extent of the looting and destruction of Iraq's cultural heritage it is hard to hope, hard to understand what 'Iraq' your memories are of.

You read of traumatized children, haunted by nightmares of violence, with no structures in place to heal their shattered and terrified minds. You read of children sold into prostitution, of rising drug problems, of children living on the streets, in garbage dumps. If children are a nation's future, what does it all mean for the future of Iraq?

You read of oil legislation passed by a pliant, externally installed 'government' that commit Iraq's oil resources to the ownership of Big Oil corporations, decades of profits for them and no need to employ a single Iraqi or return one dinar of profit for the benefit of Iraq's people.

The worst thing about all you are seeing and reading about is that you knew it would come. And you know it is going to get worse. From the cynical lies that concocted pretexts for attacking Iraq, all through the deliberate sectarianizing of Iraq's new political structures and the careful and calculated exploitation and fostering of sectarian divisions - deepening them and purposefully driving wedges between people - you knew where it would all lead. Death squads and sectarian and ethnic cleansing are the logical outcomes of the kind of divisive political and social engineering that the Americans brought to Iraq.

Iraqis saw it all coming, so why didn't others, particularly those who unleashed their massive violence in an illegal war that has seen hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis killed and maimed? The answer is that they didn't care, they had their own agenda and it most certainly was not one that had the interests of Iraq's people at its heart. Now, to be Iraqi outside Iraq, is to witness an unfolding nightmare that has not yet reached its nadir.

Over a period of years I have lost my wife, the child she bore and our beloved daughter. I have lost my two brothers. I have lost an aunt, an uncle, three cousins and a nephew. All but two died under American bombs and bullets. Two died at the hands of death squads - we presume that was the fate of my nephew and his friend. In addition, the husband of one of my sisters was killed as he rushed home to check that his family was safe following a bombing incident. He had the misfortune to encounter a 'force protection' minded American checkpoint.

My parents are both very ill, in a land without medicines and where what is left of the health service is crumbling apart. My sister is broken in her mind and heart at the loss of her husband and son. Our family has met hard losses - but I know of other families who have met worse. I can honestly say now that I do not know any Iraqis who have not lost someone to the violence tearing our world apart.

If you are an Iraqi outside Iraq you will be mourning your dead and worried sick about your living family and friends. Depending on where you are, your sense of helplessness might be increased as you cannot even post them anything to alleviate their distress - it is still illegal in some places to mail anything to Iraq and the security situation does not allow a functioning postal service anyway.

If you are an Iraqi outside Iraq you will also, most probably, be stranded now following the decision of the new Iraqi authorities to cancel all old passports. Of the millions who have fled into exile, most are Sunnis, although Christians, Turkomen and other minorities have fled in larger numbers too. You cannot renew your passport unless you return to Baghdad where, for a suitable bribe, a very limited number of new passports are being issued. Of course, to return to Baghdad and enter a sectarian-controlled ministry might qualify you not for a new passport but for a place on the death lists being utilized by militias who are methodically exterminating Iraqi educationalists, scientists and other professionals in the orgy of assassinations that is effectively 'dumbing down' Iraq's community leadership. It is no surprise that the majority of such assassinations are of individuals opposed to the attack on Iraq and subsequent occupation. Shi'ite, Sunni, Christian and secular-minded Iraqis united in opposition to the invasion are no less united in being candidates for assassination. It is all quite methodical and not at all as chaotic as some reports might suggest.

So, to be Iraqi outside of Iraq is to see things, worry about things, and learn of new horrors, day and night, week on week, month on month, year on year. It is to be in a permanent state of anxiety. But Ya Allah, it is as nothing compared to the stress that those IN Iraq are having to endure all the time.

Brothers and Sisters, I have met anger, I have met pain, I have met blow after blow. I see all the injustice and all the horror and day and night I pray for an end to it. But I have learned a lot about prayer over the years. It is not some 'instant fix'. I meet people, Muslims included, who say "Peace will come soon! Have faith!"

Peace is not going to come soon. I have faith but I am not stupid.

Peace can only come when those criminals who set this horror in motion are held to account and made to abandon and abort their schemes to control Iraq and make a garrison of it for themselves while they loot our resources and menace other lands.

And it is not our anger that is going to make them do that. It has to be the anger and disgust of their own people who they deceived into supporting the attack on Iraq. There are enough Iraqis willing and able to resist the occupation for however long it takes. The anger of Muslims worldwide should not become the excuse it has become to some malign political figures - a pretext for branding Muslims as dangerous, as threatening, as 'an enemy within', wherever they are.

I will tell you what my prayer is. I want our revenge to be the happy lives of our children's children. And that requires effort on our part, effort that has nothing to do with thoughts of anger and violent revenge. Such thoughts are a poison and lead only to misery and entrapment by cynical state intelligence services. They lead to the demonization of Muslims and to a shift in focus from the real reasons behind the attack on Iraq. They do us no good at all and are seized upon by enemies of Islam as justification for their prejudices.

We need to be organized and educated. We need to reach out to those in the Western world who can hold their criminal politicians to account. It is they who must put their house in order or we can expect the destruction of our homes for years to come. And we need do no more than speak the truth. Ignorance and lies were the principal weapons used to fabricate the case for war. And the lies continue with every military press release issued from Iraq, with every 'spun' news report and every suppression of Iraqi casualty figures. They continue while rumours of 'withdrawal' are accompanied by the daily frenzied construction of enormous military bases in Iraq. They continue even as the ink is drying on documents that sign away control of Iraqi oil revenues and place them in the hands of Big Oil corporations.

We will not influence decent people in the West by shouting at them. We will not obtain influence by presenting ourselves as a threat. We will not make a safe and secure future for our children and our children's children if we permit ourselves to be wrongly branded as 'a suspect community'. And it is a label we can and should refuse to accept.

Because we are not the people of the lie. We did not deceive anyone into supporting butchery. We did not forge and fabricate false 'evidence'. We did not stand before the world and guarantee the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents by the cynical manipulation of the media. We did not foment hatred of any people.

So we should not lose, by foolishness, the strength of the truth we hold. Many in the West still do not have the truth of what was done and what is being done in Iraq. Their criminal politicians are not going to tell them. Their media may have rediscovered some degree of objectivity, but it cannot be relied upon to give priority to a message that people in the West need to hear.

So when we pray we should not expect instant miracles, we should acknowledge that to please Allah we must do what we can and we must do what is right. In Iraq we have to some extent lost our voices as we are scattered around the world and those who would try to speak out have often been brutally silenced. I think of all the voices I will hear no more and cannot endure the thought that their silencing was for nothing more than for the designs of cynical men.

You can all still speak for those silenced voices. You can all tell the truth to everyone you know. You can organize, you can lobby, you can educate. You can make yourselves heard. And along the way you can earn respect for yourselves and for your families and your communities as people who still value the truth. When you encounter spin, bury it with facts and truth. When you encounter smears and attempts to demonize you, do not show anger but again present facts and truth. Do not be distracted, do not lose focus, and do not allow those who made puppets of their own people to make puppets of you.

I suffer in my mind and in my heart each day. But I do not wish anyone to pity me, for Allah helps and comforts me. I do not wish anyone to be angry on my behalf, for anger will not cure the injustices visited upon my people. I do not wish anyone to seek revenge in my name or the name of my people. For nobody is entitled to our grief but us and nobody has any right to cause grief to others using our grief as an excuse.

What I want is your prayers and your help. I want you to set aside time to make a special du3a for the people of Iraq, and ask Allah's mercy for them in each of the severe problems that they are facing. And I want you all to replace our silenced voices by raising your own voices as voices of truth in the world. And if you can do that, for even a little time,

jazakallahu khayran.

Ahmed.

Source: MPACUK Exclusive

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