By Farah Muhsin Al Mousawi, Bradley Manning Support Network. May 3, 2013.

The day that I left  Iraq, I vowed to dedicate my life to telling the story of my home, my people and how this preemptive war destroyed my country. I left Iraq in May 2003, shortly after the invasion, and my family and I moved to Damascus, Syria, where we sought refuge for more than four years. I remember following the news on Iraq and gathering whatever stories I could get from family or friends who came to visit us in our one-bedroom apartment in Jaramana. It has been more than ten years since I left , but Iraq has never left me, even when I decided to come to the United States, the same country that invaded mine and resulted in me having to leave my home. Living here I became more determined to represent my country at every chance I could, and later I found that not many people in the United States know anything about Iraq beyond what the mainstream media tells them to believe. A lot of people believed that Iraq was all desert, that Iraqis don’t speak English, all women wear the hijab, and some even believed that the invasion was the right decision to make to liberate Iraqis from the claws of Saddam’s dictatorship.

Several myths were cultivated around my home country, the birthplace of the first and most ancient civilization in the world, where language was first written and documented on clay boards, and where one of the early codes of law was written by its ancient King Hammurabi. Many people didn’t know that Iraq has two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, flowing from north to south, feeding its valleys and plains, and that some of its city Baghdad was the capital of the Muslim Empire during the Middle Ages.  

And though Iraq endured dark and harsh years before the invasion, Iraqis today are living in even worse conditions; the sectarian divide is stronger than ever, especially with the current Prime Minister’s ill leadership, which Iran has encouraged to favor the Shia at the expense of the Sunni and other religious minorities. Women’s rights continue to be violated and stripped as the new constitution prevents women from inheriting or owning property, while militias that have strong authority in the majority of neighborhoods and provinces in Iraq dictate how women should dress and where and when they are allowed to leave their homes. The educational system has deteriorated and fallen behind at least thirty years in comparison with where it was before the invasion because of the assassination of many professors and educators, and even more fleeing the country out of fear for their life.

It is precisely for these reasons that I chose to become an activist for peace and an advocate for Iraq and the Iraqi people. I found myself given an opportunity to teach and be taught. One of the opportunities that I received as an activist was speaking in front of members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, where I was asked to tell my personal story in a room full of veterans who served in Iraq. I might have been on the same street with one or two of them in Baghdad and we never knew it. This opportunity opened my eyes and heart to a new reality that was not visible to me as an Iraqi; this reality changed my perspective and fueled my determination to work more for Iraq. I found a large group of men and women who served in a war that they didn’t expect to fight, who had to follow rules that seemed to go against the nature of the noble purpose they were told they’d be serving. They decided to stand up, speak the truth and advocate for peace. The uniforms that I judged them for were stripped away and instead I saw the human beings underneath. I now found myself in a room full of allies that I once saw as enemies.

Farah with Col. Ann Wright and the Iraq Veterans Against the War

While working with my new allies I became aware of the pain and challenges that they all go through during their time of service and even after. After speaking in front of the veterans, I became more connected with them and worked on several projects to tell the story of Iraq from both soldiers’ eyes and Iraqi eyes. One of the crucial things that I learned from this particular experience is how much we all have in common as humans and how politics often tries to separate us by creating imaginary borders, waging wars, and establishing the rhetoric of “us” vs. “them.” The dehumanization of “them” was definitely one of the factors that motivated Bradley Manning to blow the whistle on what he witnessed while he was in Iraq. His realization came after discovering that the war on Iraq was based on a myth and the cost of war was higher than numbers can count in money and human lives. With this understanding, I became more interested in learning more about Bradley, and I read the logs that he uncovered.

Bradley Manning to me is definitely an ally. He is an ally because he witnessed the wrongdoing of the military that was sent to liberate people from the grips of an unjust regime and an oppressive society, yet he saw, as the world saw thanks to him, that innocents were killed for no good reason, and that innocents were called names, and accused of being members of terrorist groups that they despised. What Bradley Manning did was deliver the transparency this democracy lacked in a time when it was desperately needed. People around the world began to question the real reasons behind the invasion.  While the White House was on the one hand excusing its stay in Iraq as a matter of necessity for the Iraqi people and their newly installed democracy, and on the other hand trying to leave Iraq as soon as possible, giving to the people only a pile of destruction and a corrupt government, Bradley Manning exposed the truth as it is.  Bradley followed his conscience in a time when the cries for help from Iraq were quickly forgotten, and because of that, because of his stand against injustice and his efforts to inform the world, and particularly his people. . . the American people, he is a living symbol of truth… and we all would be fools to not stand in support of him and demand his release.

Our new Assistant Campaign Organizer, Farah, was born and raised in Iraq. She has been living in the United States since 2008. Farah joined the Iraqi Student Project in 2007 and is a member of the Civilian Soldier Alliance. This year she is the recipient of the Martin Luther King Junior award presented by the Human Rights Commission in Marin County, California. Farah recently graduated with a degree in Political Science from Dominican University, Marin County, California. She volunteers as a website developer for the Arab American Cultural Center in Silicon Valley translating interviews of Iraqi refugees.

The rest of the staff at the Bradley Manning Support Network is excited to welcome Farah to our team!