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From the Front Lines
September 15, 2006 5:44 PM
Senior foreign correspondent Jim Sciutto blogs from Baghdad:
It sounds like a cliché to say the violence in Iraq touches everyone. But in Baghdad, it’s chillingly true. I learned today that Omar, our assistant cook here at the ABC bureau, hasn’t seen his father since he was kidnapped eight months ago. He’d worked as a driver for a security company, until one day gunmen seized him and more than 50 other employees -- the entire staff. They haven’t been seen since. I was telling one of our drivers the story and he told me his brother was kidnapped in the same attack. Then, at lunch, our cook described how his son was taken last year; he paid a ransom to get him back.
This is increasingly the disturbing rhythm of life here. And the more I see it, the more I’m amazed to watch Iraqis like Omar keep at it. It must take a lot of hope and a resilient sense of purpose.
But it’s proving too much for many. Driven by fear and violence, Iraqis are leaving the country in droves. By some estimates, this is now the largest movement of refugees in the world today, most to neighboring Syria and Jordan: 14,500 in 2002, 213,000 in 2004, 801,000 last year, according to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. The drain is worst among professionals. An estimated 40% have left.
September 15, 2006 | Permalink | User Comments (1)
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It's so bizarre to think that it's real, that it's happening on this planet as we speak. It's so tempting to think that it's somehow all fake, that it's just words on a page or voices on TV.
That there are bombs exploding here, on this same Earth on which I live, that people are going about their lives in fear of sudden, unexpected death, every day, only a plane's ride away. I fly to Japan all the time. I could be in Baghdad in half the time. But the end result would be far, far different.
I don't know what to do with this knowledge, only to marvel that it isn't happening to me, right now.
I really don't want to believe that it's real.
Posted by: nicholas robinson | Sep 24, 2006 10:01:48 PM
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