Mike Ferner

Early in my second trip to Iraq I visited Abu Hanife, the largest Sunni mosque in Baghdad, with members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams to hear about what had happened there during the invasion and battle for Baghdad less than a year earlier, in April 2003. The mosque sustained mostly exterior damage during two days of fighting, and much of that had been repaired by my visit. However, a new “addition” to the mosque consisted of a cemetery with some 50 graves of men, women, and children who had been killed in the battle or in subsequent shooting afterwards. It was also at this mosque that Dahr Jamail’s translator, Abu Talat, witnessed an attack by U.S. troops on November 19, 2004, and called in a report to Dahr while the raid was ongoing.

One day, men from the village of Abu Hishma came knocking on the door of the CPT apartment in central Baghdad, asking them to come to their village to witness and investigate the deaths of the two young men reportedly killed by U.S. troops. I accompanied the CPT group to the village about 50 miles north of the capital.

“Inside the Red Zone” contains a chapter called “On Their Way to Abu Ghraib” which describes an Army raid in the middle of the night to round up “suspected terrorists” in this hamlet outside the town of Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. Approximately 80 men, virtually every male in Abu Siffa, were taken prisoner. As resistance continued over the following weeks, the Army raided the village twice more. The results of those two subsequent raids, along with other photos of Abu Siffa are here.

Al-Jazeera, a little village with the same name as the TV network, consists of about a dozen homes. It is located outside Ramadi, about 70 miles west of Baghdad, and is where the “Incident Near Ramadi” took place, as described in “Inside the Red Zone.”

If your vision of Iraq’s capital city comes solely from the corporate press, you probably think it is populated only by car bombs, blood, and mayhem. While that is unfortunately becoming much too common, Baghdad is still home to over four million people who try to make a living for their families and go about their daily lives with dignity.