January 27, 2003

Iraqis plea for west to liberate homeland
Jeevan Vasagar

Among the hawkish chorus backing war against Iraq, there is one voice that is rarely heard; the voice of those Iraqis living in the west who believe the countries they found refuge in can save the country they fled.

Iraqi exile Sama Hadad is a passionate advocate of western intervention in Iraq.

She was born in Baghdad but deported with her mother when she was 12 hours old.

Now 22 and a medical student at a London teaching hospital, Ms Hadad believes fellow Muslims who have spoken out against war are making a mistake.

"That's tragic because it's a total misunderstanding of the situation," she said. "It comes from a lack of knowledge of what Iraq is really like.

"The Iraqi people are faced with a constant struggle, an ongoing war that will never stop until Saddam Hussein has been got rid of.

"Although they have got the intention of wanting to protect the Iraqi people, by standing in the way of any intervention they will be keeping them in the hands of a system of eternal oppression and murder."

Sama's mother was deported to the Iranian border because she was suspected of being a member of a religious opposition group. If Saddam is removed, she will be "on the first plane" back to Iraq.

"I've lived for five months in Iran, six years in Syria, six years in Greece, eight years in Canada, and three years in London," said Ms Hadad, who speaks in Canadian-accented English.

"I'm 22 and I've never felt at home anywhere I've lived. My heart is in Iraq.

"And whatever system will be there, Iraq is going to need help to stand up on its own two feet. It will need professionals and people with degrees to go back and help it."

At the Dar Al-Islam foundation, a mainly Iraqi mosque in Cricklewood, north-west London, she was echoed by other young Iraqis.

"In the 1991 uprising we received more bombs from Saddam than we had from America," said Ali al-Shami, 23, who left as a refugee after the uprising. "I look at it this way. We are faced with two choices. If Saddam stays for the next 20 years we will have more and more people killed. I would rather have a war now than in 10 years' time have a million people killed."

The Iraqi community in Britain dwells mainly in a corridor of north-west London stretching from Ealing to Wembley.

It was reckoned to number 15,500 in the 1991 census, but is likely to be far bigger given the numbers who fled following the Gulf war.

The worshippers at the Dar Al-Islam mosque are Shia muslims and there is tension in Iraq between the Shia and the Sunnis, of whom President Saddam is one.

The Shia feel they are discriminated against. Saddam City, a Baghdad slum which is home to 3 million Shia Muslims, is regarded as the most likely to rebel if there is war.

The imam of the mosque, Hussain Al-Shami, spent four years in Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghuraib prison because he was a supporter of an Islamic scholar who opposed the regime.

He has scars on his ankles where he was beaten, and his wife Naima is still imprisoned.

But for all his suffering, he is cautious about war. "We are against war but against Saddam at the same time. It is a very sensitive balance but if we do take war into consideration, it would only be for the purpose of removing Saddam.

"The people who attend this mosque have a lot of suspicions about the US because of what the US did back in 1991, so they don't know how serious the Americans are about this whole matter."