Wednesday, August 15, 2007

JAM: The Terrorist Human Shields

“I cry all the time,” he said just before he set off. “I wish I was outside Iraq where I would not have to be afraid.”

I shook his hand. He returned to his post. And I felt useless. What could I do for this man? There are so many with stories like his in Iraq.

“What kind of country is this,” Feris said to me in a trembling voice, “where people do this sort of thing to their own people?”

Meanwhile, or at least so it appeared, I was safer at that outpost because the Mahdi Army was there. They did not want to hurt their own people with rockets and mortars. Moqtada al Sadr’s infiltrators and sympathizers enveloped me in a force field.

Iraq is a strange country. Where else can American civilians like me be protected by terrorist human shields?