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War
in Iraq leaves families bereft
by
Rana
Sidani, IFRC
ElectronicIraq.net, 24 July 2003
Abed Hamoudi holds a picture of his family, 11 of whom died
when a rocket hit his Basra home
BASRA
- Abed Hamoudi is 72 years old and he will see his family again. But not
as he knew them.
His wife, his son, Wisam, his two daughters, Zeinab and Ihab, and his
seven nephews and nieces: Nourelhouda, Zeinalabidin; Ali; Moustafa; Ammar;
Hasan and Zeina. They were killed on the last day of the conflict in
Basra.
Since 5 April, when they died, Abed has been living only in his dreams,
where his family is still with him in a place where there is no time, no
war, no tragic end to their lives. But on the fifth of August, four months
later, Abed must transport their remains from temporary graves in Basra to
Najaf, the holiest site for Shiites in Iraq.
In his dreams, as he carries them in his arms on their final journey, they
will remember how he tried to pull them with his bare hands from the
rubble of their family home, a home that was transformed into a tomb.
"Will they feel my presence? Will they hear the sadness in my voice?
Do they know that my love for them is in each breath I take?" Abed asks
in a low, melancholic voice.
He remembers exactly how it happened. "It was 5:45 in the morning on
that fateful Saturday. Six rockets struck our street in the Touwisa
district of Basra. One explosion destroyed the room in which they were all
sleeping." he explained.
"We had gathered there because we thought it was the safest room. I
had filled it with sand bags."
What remains of Abed Hamoudi's house
The
walls and all the heavy sand bags crashed down on the entire family.
"I managed to rescue my daughter Dina and her two sons Ali and Hamza,"
he said with mixed emotions of pride and pain. "But eleven died under
the rubble, because a second rocket hit the building next door, burying my
last hopes of pulling them out alive."
Abed stood aside when the Iraqi Red Crescent came to help with the rescue.
His despair had begun and his energy had left him.
His son Akram, a doctor and director of Basra's Teaching Hospital, then
arrived on the scene, just in time to witness his own 17-year-old son,
Zeinalabidine, taking his last breath.
"And then," Akram recounts, "we retrieved the bodies of my
two sisters, my mother, my three children, my nephews and my nieces. All
dead."
In his professional capacity, Akram had to check if they had any pulse
left and arrange for the bodies to be transported to hospital. Then, as a
relative, he had to wash each of them according to the Islamic tradition,
and bury them.
"I did all this alone because my father could not bear the
situation" he noted. Doing it, Akram did not shed a single tear. But
once he started burying them, one after the other, he finally surrendered
to his emotions.
"Psychologically, I had been preparing myself for the inevitable with
my elderly mother and father. But to bury four of my five children? To
bury my sisters and brother who were not yet 30 years of age?" Akram
asks of no one in particular.
 Leila Abbas registered her son as Missing with the Iraq Red
Crescent, despite having seen him die
The
Hamoudi family may cherish dreams of their lost loved-ones, but in their
grief they know they must accept the raw fact that they are dead. Leila
Abbas refuses to believe that her oldest son Abbas died during a rocket
attack in the southern city of Nasiriya.
At the peak of the fighting, she witnessed with her own eyes the horror of
her son's broken body after a rocket had struck him. Leila's husband
buried the boy's body in the family's name.
"My husband is crazy. That was not my son," she wails.
In spite of the fact that Leila Abbas, alongside her husband, bore witness
to her son's untimely death, she went to the local Iraqi Red Crescent
branch and registered him as "missing".
And every morning since that day, Leila Abbas has presented herself at the
IRCS branch to ask if anyone has found him. "I know what my son looks
like. The body I saw was not his. He will return, I am certain."
Leila repeats this heart-breaking mantra to anyone who will listen.
"If you see a 12-year old boy, with black hair and dark eyes, who
goes by the name of Abbas, please tell him that his mother is waiting for
him."
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