"You destroyed Iraq. I had to wait for my companion, the Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, to translate these words, but the thunderous look on this middle-aged man's face already told its own story. We were standing on Haifa Street, one of Baghdad's main thoroughfares, which runs along the west bank of the Tigris, and he had just been told I was British."
"They promised that Iraq would be a heaven, he said of the US-UK occupation. He then told a familiar tale: of being kidnapped by the sectarian militia, who flourished after the 2003 US-led invasion, and being tortured so badly that he could barely walk. We had come to Haifa Street to retrace Abdul-Ahad's steps on a gruesome day 21 years ago."
An Iraqi on Haifa Street accused Western forces of destroying Iraq, describing kidnappings by sectarian militias and torture that left victims barely able to walk. Haifa Street became known as Death Street, ideal for urban warfare and snipers, where a 2004 attack by two US helicopters struck a gathered crowd, scattering bodies and dismembered limbs as a journalist photographed men dying and survivors pleaded to show the world American democracy. The 2003 US-led invasion plunged Iraq into chaos, resulting in an estimated 300,000 violent deaths, roughly two-thirds of them civilians, and the West's failure to reckon with that catastrophe enabled later atrocities in Gaza.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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