Looters are rounded up outside the Central Bank i Baghdad during the chaotic aftermath of the 2003 US invasion. Military victory was quickly achieved but the peace was lost. The only structures and buildings that were proteced during the invasion were connected to the oil industry. This further increased the Iraqi populations suspicion regarding the real reason for the war.
War separated them and war brought them together.
Muhammed hasn’t seen his beloved grandmother Zalokh Sabre in five years. As soon as he sees her in the Baradash refugee camp in northern Iraq he starts to run. When the American President Trump more or less gave Erdogan a green light to invade Syria to attack the kurds desperate refugees started to stream over the border. For the Sabre family this meant that they by chance became reunited.
Iraq, October 2003
The workers at the brick factory close to Najaf earned approximately one dollar per day – unless they were women or children - then they earned less. The country had more than 170 small brick factories employing about 30 000 Iraqis. They worked long days in a toxic environment shaping mud into bricks and fired them in massive kilns fueled by heavy oil that produced an acrid black smoke.
Many of the workers had respiratory problems.
Firas, father of five, thought that his thirteen year old daughter Shahad was dead.
At six in the morning, on march ninth, the family opened the door facing the street. A car approached and exploded. Firas could see his wife Amira and his children Shahad, Fahed and Rahed lie bleeding on the ground. Quiet, still, severely injured.
He grabbed his surviving children and ran for their lives. When he reached an Iraqi military unit they helped him reach a hospital in Erbil. But Shahad survived, but lost her right leg in the explosion. Afew weeks she is reunited with her father and younger sister. The medical staff at Erbil hospital does an initial check on Shahad’s injuries.