Iraqi policemen look at the wreckage of vehicles after a bomb attack in Baghdad March 1, 2006 — Iraq has become too dangerous to stay in. Once I got to the Iraqi borders, I panicked when I saw the numbers of Iraqis leaving, as if there were no tomorrow — huge numbers waiting in long, endless lines. It could take you 48 hours at the Iraqi-Jordanian border to have your passport stamped and your car checked. It's a scene that I wish I had never seen.
I moved to Iraq fifteen years ago. I was so young and I didn't know much about it, but I was so eager to explore the country I later started referring to as "home." A few months ago, I had to leave — a decision I had thought I would never take —because it became simply too dangerous to stay in anymore. Since the 2003 war and the beginning of the occupation, the security situation, among other things, started deteriorating.
"Divide and conquer" is perhaps the oldest trick in the book and the occupation has been using it in every way since the very beginning. The US occupation's strategy was to support Shiites and Kurds and favor them over Sunnis in forming an Iraqi government, and, in the same time, apply all possible kinds of oppression and attacks against Sunnis. The Occupation hoped, in this way, to create internal clashes between different sects in order to keep everyone too busy to care about the occupation or demand its withdrawal.
Iraqis were no longer Iraqis; they became either Sunnis, Shiites, or Kurds — in the media, in the political process, in the news, and everywhere. Since the war, when people ask me, "Where are you from?" and I say that I am from Iraq, another question automatically follows: "Are you Sunni, Shiite, or Kurdish?"
An attitude that was totally adopted by mainstream media in the West, making it look like a fact that there is no such thing as Iraq but rather only a number of groups fighting on its soil, a soil that happens to cover one of the largest oil reserves in the world, a soil that had one of the oldest civilizations in history.
