BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — The pain here is choking — it’s a dark, suffocating sorrow.
“They took my husband away in front of me. I found his body in the morgue a few days later. He had multiple bullet wounds and his eyes had been gouged out,” one woman tells me, forcefully twisting a tissue in her hands as if it somehow could ease her agony and erase the chilling memory.
She didn’t want her story told, too afraid that she would meet the same fate as the man she loved.
Her husband’s body bore the “signs of torture.” How many times has that phrase been used? It’s such a common phrase it’s as if what really happened gets glossed over: skin scraped off their bodies, fingernails ripped out, horrifying screams of pain before death.
How many times have we reported death tolls from one horrific bombing or another and not been able to get across that these are lives that literally were blown apart? No matter how hard we in the media try, Iraq remains a nation filled with untold tragedies, the scope of which so often is overwhelming.
And no matter how hard Iraqis try to shield themselves and those they love from the horrors here, more often than not they fail. Yet they keep fighting.
Nahla works at a radio station and is one of those women. She’s tall, slender, elegantly dressed and has a firm handshake. I look at her and it’s nearly impossible to imagine what she’s been through.
“This numbers game, you always think that you are exempt from the numbers,” Nahla tells me, referring to the daily death toll. “You’re pained by them, but you are outside of them.”
Where do they find the strength to keep going?
Some don’t and choose to live out their lives as hollow shells, just waiting for this wretched existence to be over. But so many others refuse to be beaten down, refuse to allow the horror that is Iraq to win and kill their spirit.
“If I want to see Baghdad again from before the war, I have to do my part while the other person will do his part and the other person will do his part,” says Dr. Eaman, a children’s doctor, as her bright smile seems to shine unnaturally in Baghdad’s grim atmosphere.
“This is the dream, and I wish everybody would believe it and it will happen, I’m sure, and this is what is keeping me here,” she continues. “I have been attacked by three insurgents and was going to be kidnapped.”
She now lives at the hospital, choosing to disassociate herself from her 8-year-old son to keep him safe.
FULL STORY
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/03/12/iraq.women/index.html
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