For Many Iraqis, Hunt for Missing Is Never-EndingThe past year of dizzying violence here has produced thousands of Iraqis like Ms. Rashid — sad-eyed seekers caught in an endless loop of inquiry and disappointment. Burdened by grief without end or answers, they face a set of horrors as varied and fractured as Iraq itself.
Has my son or husband or father been killed by a death squad, his body hidden? Or has he been arrested? Is he in a legitimate prison with his name unregistered, or trapped in a secret basement jail with masked torturers?
Missing a dear one can be such a nerve-wracking experience...I can only imagine. I remember thinking with horror during childhood of scenarios when little children went missing...and reports that such missing kids were sold into organized gangs who maimed them and forced them to beg...those were frightening thoughts and I banished them from my mind as soon as they intruded...You live in such a penumbra between fading hope and increasing despair...not knowing where to turn to, anguished, desperate, lurching each day between hope and unhope...
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Almost every day, we in the United States receive news of US soldiers dying or being wounded in Iraq...we also gradually are made aware by stray articles of the terrible deformities and bodily wounds that the survivors are bearing...this is a bloody war as any...there is once again a story of excruciating pain, pointless bloodshed, relationships asunder, futile patriotism and heroism gone wrong...
But it is not the point of the war (or pointlessness) that I am dwelling on here...I am wondering at how we continue to live our merry lives despite so much of avoidable distress around us...an ex-President dies a natural death and we lower the state flag...there is "official" mourning...but what of those who suffer because of the war? Who is mourning for them...? Not this country...
