Cindy Sheehan’s protest strikes a chord with Iraqis
By Borzou Daragahi
BAGHDAD: Khalda Khalaf feels Cindy Sheehan’s pain. She’s been there, too. Her 28-year-old son, Majid Khalid Kabi, died fighting on the opposite side in the same months-long stretch of clashes in 2004 between Shia militiamen and US soldiers in which Spec. Casey Sheehan perished.
“Of course she’s a mother, and just like our people are hurting, she’s hurting too,” says Khalaf, a 52-year-old resident of Baghdad’s Sadr City, the poor east Baghdad slum district where Sheehan died in April 2004. “Just as she wants America out of Iraq, so do we.”
Cindy Sheehan, the well-known anti-war mom who is due to lead thousands of demonstrators converging on Saturday on Washington to protest the ongoing US war, has become a minor celebrity in Iraq, too. The same satellite television networks that bring quick, often gruesome coverage of Iraq’s ongoing violence to Iraqi television screens, also give regular updates on Sheehan’s lengthy vigil outside President Bush’s Texas ranch.
Forty years ago, Ho Chi Minh and his top deputies kept a close eye on US public opinion and the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War. Now on the streets of Baghdad, Najaf and Mosul, even ordinary Iraqis have heard of Cindy Sheehan and formed opinions about her and her movement.
“I sympathize with her and her cause, but I don’t think that the American administration will be affected by such a thing,” said Hassan Hashim Mahmoud, a 32-year-old government employee in Najaf.
Television and newspapers have reported the upcoming marches. And footage of her speaking before previous rallies on the Arabiya, Sharqiya and Al-Jazeera television stations has made Iraqis aware of the anti-war movement in the United States. Even poor families like Khalaf’s know about Sheehan via ‘news’ videos distributed by political parties, such as Muqtada al-Sadr’s movement, for whom Majid Khalid Kabi died in August 2004 in Najaf. To some Iraqis, Sheehan’s stand at Bush’s ranch and her continuing opposition to the war make her a hero.
“The president doesn’t have the credibility to face the US soldier’s mother who was killed in a war that many in US say was a fatal mistake,” columnist Muthana al-Tabaqchali wrote in the Iraqi daily Azzaman, which the US embassy here considers hostile to the American mission in Iraq.
“Sheehan was a lady who stood like a lioness with her lofty staff in front of the president,” he wrote. “She collected all her strength and motherhood to face the strongest president in the world to tell him enough!”
Others, however, view her with cynicism.
“This might be a part of a political game, like when pictures of prisoners’ abuses in Abu Ghraib prison were published, just to harm President Bush’s reputation,” said Hameed Shabak, 35, a Mosul resident.
In front of the Faqma ice cream shop in Baghdad’s Karada district, Fathel Saad, a silver-haired professor of philosophy and theology at Babel College south of Baghdad, debated a friend about Sheehan while finishing up an ice cream cone.
“I think she is misguided,” Saad said. “What the Americans have given Iraq is the greatest gift: the freedom to think.”
His friend, Fares Mukhlis, a schoolteacher disagreed. “This is a brave woman standing up for her principles that are correct,” he said.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service
