Monday, August 13, 2007

A drop of blood

It is 3’o clock in the morning…It is a dead street in Baghdad. The sound nobody likes to hear echoes in the distance. Sirens fill the dead silence. Without the need of a second warning, dim lights appear in the shelters across the street. Time is ticking and every second counts. They will arrive soon and any soul in sight stands no chance of survival. People bustle to gather their belongings and burry themselves beneath their trapdoors. The earth begins to vibrate as the monsters approach. The sound and smell of the caspers casts terror in everybody’s hearts. The tension in the air increases as well as the vibrations. In a matter of minutes, silence creeps again.

Standing beneath a broken shelter, are two young children. A brother of 7 and a sister of 5, still in their night clothes and dazed at the happenings of the early morning. A man gathering his last minute belongings notices the two aloof. He knows he must call them and shelter them or else their fate will be mortality. He screams at6 the top of his voice trying to signal the two to run across the road and to his shelter before the “insurgents” arrive. They are in eye distance and time is limited. The man dropping his belongings runs across the street to collect the children. He picks up the little girl, takes the hand of the boy and starts running…They are close, very close.

Without warning, without reason (bang bang bang, dhoof dhoof dhoof) is heard. Shrill screams of pain and drops of blood of two innocent children touch the soil…the man lays unconscious. Soon, chaos breaks out in the dead street but nothing can be done about the pool of blood in which two young lives rest.

“16 people killed and 70 wounded in an insurgent attack”, reads across all the media. However, no mention is made of the injustice of these killings, rather an excuse for them. Does it not move you to know that while you laugh and play and while your baby brother or sister enjoys the taste of an ice-cream, two innocent young children have become victims of a brutal killing? Are you not angered to know that blood was spilt of two young children on their own soil?

You and I take for granted the luxury we have and too often forget the sufferings of the one’s who will share our future. These are children being killed. Children like you and I. One in every eight Iraqi children die before their 5th birthdays due to violence or related issues such as lack of food, clothes, shelter or family. (Point in essence)

Whether these killings are being carried out by insurgents, occupiers or freedom fighters the result remains unchanged in the end. Death after death, child after child. Why are the cries of these children not heard! Why are we sitting back and watching this happen. Our futures stand dented by the loss of these innocent lives.


Take a stand now! We are all, as children, part of this war, whether accept it or not and in time it will affect us all, sitting here in our safe, comfortable classrooms or in a war stricken Iraq. Fight against this TODAY, for every minute we waste, is another child’s blood in the soil.

By: Aamena Khota

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