occupation kills

Epilogue

Cry for me. I'm in pain. Two days after I left Iraq, poppa's best friend was kidnapped by uniformed officers. Two days after that, his family paid a ransom of $50 000 USD. Two hours after that, his body turned up in a dumpster. He was shot twice in the head after being tortured. The family said they knew he'd be killed, but wanted the torture to stop, so they paid.

Grandma told me that poppa and his best friend were interchangeable - any hitlist that had one would have the other immediately after. She had to tell me because poppa's in hiding now. Momma took the kids and ran in the other direction.

I left the country today through the treacherous highways of Iraq. In 1990, my mother drove us down this same road as we ran away from Kuwait after it was invaded by Saddam and his subsidiaries. It was the third time my mother was made a refugee - the first was in 1948 with the invasion of Palestine and the creation of the Israeli state; the second was in 1967 with the annexation of the West Bank by Israel; and the third was this, with the invasion of Kuwait by the Iraqis. For me, it was only number two.

When I told my mother I'd be leaving Iraq along the road she can never forget, she sighed with the pain only a mother can ever understand. Fifteen years after her children escaped from its clutches, the road would have another chance at one of them.

Everybody's dead. I've been trying to call the family in Fallujah with whom I stayed last year for months now. Finally today - the day before I am to leave - I called again and got through. I asked to speak to Mohammed - the eldest son of the house.

The old woman on the other

I get this look sometimes. This exact look. The eyes squint. The brow furrows, and the head starts the slowest of shakes. It's like he's trying to say to me "What planet are you from?" I gulped awkwardly and my voice cracked like a prepubescent boy as I nodded. "It's a proven scientific fact", I said. The look remained, and I gulped awkwardly again.

Hisham's car was randomly targeted and riddled by what he told me were a hundred bullets. Four of them found his chest, legs and arms, and so he came to us. After he was stabilized, it was my task to go and find out if any "slow killers" had been missed and to do a check to see how he was doing. In the course of our conversation, Hisham told me that he smoked a pack a day, and had smoked that much since his teens. I told him that cigarettes were harmful to his health, and that he was at risk for all sorts of heart problems, strokes, and cancers in the long term. That's when Hisham - two bullets and a dozen pieces of shrapnel still inside him - gave me The Look.

I woke up drenched in sweat (which I don't particularly mind). There hasn't been electricity for hours, so everything and everybody is hot. At least once a day, somebody in the house marvels at how I always sleep with a blanket in the 50-degree days (when I nap) and 30-degree nights. People here shower twice or three times a day as a result of the continuous sweating, and I'm something of an unhygienic weirdo for only getting around to it once most days, and only sometimes twice.

At the ER, I'm worse dressed than everybody else, even though I never dress this well in Canada: black dress pants and a tucked in shirt. Even the janitors are immaculate in their dress, and it's not surprising to see any given man shine his shoes during a shift. The women look equally immaculate and beautiful. It seems to me that dressing well is one of the ways of maintaining dignity regardless of how poor the person is. An old man who was unimaginably poor but carried this dignity once told me that he would rather commit suicide than leave his house looking like me.

A woman (age: 17-19?) came into the department today, two days after overdosing on a bunch of pills. She was declared as at least vegetative and at most brain dead by one of the junior doctors, and I was told to go counsel the family (i.e., tell them what would come of their girl), since I have developed a reputation already for being patient with families and answering their questions (something most doctors won't do regardless where they are in the world). I hadn't examined her, but while I was explaining why she was breathing, I showed the family all the signs of massive brain damage that I could remember - Doll's sign, fixed pupils, absent reflexes and so on. I continued explaining what this all meant at the bedside of the patient when, about 20 minutes later, the brain-dead/damaged woman got up and asked what was going on. She would go on to make a full recovery.

There was a massive explosion this morning that shook the windows so violently that they were about to break. I didn't wake up to it. Grandma woke me up to ask me if I heard the explosion while the sound of gunshots was ringing out. A few AK shots interspersing many M16 shots and heavy weapons. I told her that some resistance fighters probably ambushed an American convoy. The 19 year-olds from Tennessee or wherever were probably freaking out and shooting up everything in their vicinity while the resistance fighters were probably choosing their shots carefully. I then kicked over and went back to sleep while she fretted away.

I was in a crowd of five thousand people marching, and only two prayers went through my mind, each one overtaking the other: 'Please God, if somebody has to die, let all these people die so I may live'; and 'Please God, if somebody has to die, let me die so all these people can live'.

I was petrified at the thought of Baghdad's suicide bombers finding the crowd an irresistible target, and so I prayed. My ambivalent prayers started hours before when I boarded the first protest bus, which was headed to the outskirts of the green zone where the protestors would congregate, pray, then march on the gates of the green zone. I had stupidly assumed that the bus would try to make its way to the protest inconspicuously. However, each bus was flying flags of protest and cloth signs that read "Stop state terror please" and other politely radical messages. The buses also traveled in a large convoy of flags and signs. Oh, and I'm sure that guy with the bullhorn chanting anti-occupation, anti-US, anti-Iran and anti-Iraqi government slogans wasn't making us less conspicuous either.

A man can only handle so many deformed penises, messed up scrota and men and women screaming with the pain of kidney stones before he decides that urology is not his life's dream. With that sentiment, I went running from surgical urology and towards the

The doctors of "Medicine City" in Baghdad (the largest medical complex in the city) are on strike. Many reasons are cited, including the lack of oxygen (still no oxygen!), terrible equipment shortages and poor working conditions. However, the real reason for the strike is what happened yesterday and the day before yesterday.

A member of the Iraqi Police (IP) came into the emergency room (ER) shot. Apparently the doctors did what they could, but the officer still died. When the other policemen found out, they beat the doctors, breaking the jaw of the doctor in charge at the time of death. They also trashed all the equipment they could, broke as much glass as possible, and shot up the ER.