The Divide

On Sunday I spent the day in two Yazidi villages in west Ninewah province. Here they have nothing. Along the dusty roads, beige clay houses blend into the landscape. There is no running water or electricity. Now they have less than ever. More than 400 people were killed last week in four coordinated truck bombings. The stories were endless as the U.S. military that helped me get here rushed me from one bombing site to the next. The landscape was scarred and the women chanted, cried and fainted in grief in this ancient religion they will chant and mourn from sun up to sun down for a week.

The U.S. Army captain who I rode with told me about the day of the bombing last week. He treated one child after the other all the while thinking of his own baby girl. I commented on how cute the children were as they followed us around and for a moment he broke away from the sadness.

“Some of these Yazidi women are real lookers,” he said as a graceful young woman passed us. Her eyes were piercing green, her hair a brownish blond and her skin a beautiful, deep brown from days in the hot sun.

Sadness hung low in the villages of Tal al Azizziyah and Sheikh Khadar, known in Arabic as Qahtaniya and Adnaniyah. The children who told me their father’s were dead didn’t weep. I don’t know if they understood that these men would never come home, if their homes survived the blasts. As I pulled my camera out one boy, Salam, put his arm around his friend, smiled and posed for the shot. Moments before he'd told me that the bombing threw him into the air and killed his father.

In the center of Tal al Azizziyah the devastation was the worst, and I felt small among the destroyed remnants of people’s lives. It was a mangled green tricycle and the tiny flip flops that brought me to tears. Then the men began to shout as they pulled out a piece of a woman’s body from the rubble. The stink of the dead is something you never forget no matter how many times you smell the pungent odor.

A few hours later I was back at the U.S. military base in Mosul about 75 miles east of the villages. The Black Hawk lifted us up and took us away from this misery. Suddenly we were in another world. Here I could pick up an espresso or an iced latte at the Java Hut while surfing the net for $2 an hour. Outside the cafe, people dipped Lipton tea bags into hot water and played chess in this gray oasis surrounded by towering walls. Gravel carpeted the ground. In the trailer, where I slept, a powerful air conditioner was a refuge from the 130 degree heat.

At the dining hall they served lobster and steak and posters advertised Salsa night and a fashion and talent show the next week. Albanian soldiers huddled together at their tables, U.S. soldiers at another and the Iraqi interpreters stuck together like cliques in a high school cafeteria. I chuckled at the name of a jewelry and carpet store, Pop’s and Omar’s. The Pop’s made me think of southern cooking, a sign I might see in Texas. Omar brought it back to Iraq.

As I ate baked chicken followed by Baskin Robbins ice cream (not a lobster fan) I felt a pang of guilt. Each house in the two villages would receive some wheat, sugar and rice. Soon that would run out and the dead would still be gone.

Comments

[rf]

Thanks for reporting on the tragic Yazidi village bombing. From all appearances, it looks like they are victims of racial/religious persecution.

It boggles the mind to think of an explosion that could level (according to News & Observer) over 1000 homes. If this isn't genocide with a WMD, then what is? Anywhere else in the world, this would be front-page news.

Could you perhaps suggest some entity or group where donations could be sent to directly help the Yazidis?

Thanks-

[bill]

Al Qaeda, insurgents are murderers, thugs. Why murder innocent civilians? For the publicity. Why isnt the world at large outraged? If police recruits in Europe, North America were murdered simply for being recruits, if day laborers were slaughtered while trying to work, if teachers and doctors were singled out and executed, we would be outraged.
In the Middle East, we care not. Instead, the thugs make their point,and innocents die. Partly because its effective, it buys publicity without outrage.

[lance]

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