Fault Lines : Iraq: After the Americans – Part two

[youtube http://youtu.be/3HRm0tlt4OY?]

In keeping with Barack Obama’s presidential campaign promise, the US has withdrawn its troops from Iraq and by the end of 2012 US spending in Iraq will be just five per cent of what it was at its peak in 2008.

In a special two-part series, Fault Lines travels across Iraq to take the pulse of a country and its people after nine years of foreign occupation and nation-building.

Now that US troops have left, how are Iraqis overcoming the legacy of violence and toxic remains of the US-led occupation, and the sectarian war it ignited? Is the country on the brink of irreparable fragmentation?

Correspondent Sebastian Walker first went to Baghdad in June 2003 and spent the next several years reporting un-embedded from Iraq. In the second part of this Fault Lines series, he returns and travels from Erbil to Fallujah to find out what kind of future Iraqis are forging for themselves.

The Womb of Murder

by Amal Hanano

We all like to believe that we control our destiny and that we create our futures with our choices, but there are some decisions in life that are made for you, some things you cannot be held accountable for, for instance where you are born and into which family. Will you be the child of a tyrant or the child of a future revolutionary? Will you be the son of the tortured or the daughter of the torturer? These matters are the luck of the draw, written in our books of fate long before we took our first breaths, while we were still cocooned in our mothers’ wombs. But sometimes you hear such an extraordinary account about fate that you wonder, does destiny taint us before birth to draw the trajectory of our future lives? The following is one of those accounts:

read here

 

Amal Hanano is a pseudonym for an Syrian American writer. Follow her on Twitter@AmalHanano