Iraqi Mother Vows Revenge on US: How She Lost Her Husband and Her Sons

Um Saad, a middle-aged woman living in the Sunni district of Khadra in west Baghdad, blames the Americans for the death of her husband and two of her sons and threatens revenge.
"They are monsters and devils wearing human clothes," she exclaims vehemently. "One day I will put on an explosive belt under my clothes and then blow myself up among the Americans. I will get revenge against them for my husband and sons and I will go to paradise."

Just as the White House and the Pentagon were trumpeting the success of "the surge" – the dispatch of extra American troops to Iraq last year – and the wire services' claim that the country has enjoyed "months of relative calm", Um Saad saw Saif, her second son, shot dead as he opened the door of her house.

Iraq is still convulsed by violence and security has only improved compared to the height of the sectarian civil war in 2006 and early 2007 when 65 Iraqis were being killed every day. By this February the number of dead had fallen to 26 a day though this has risen to 39 in March so far.

The misery of people like Um Saad is the cumulative result of years of war. Dressed in dark robes, sitting in the bare sitting room of her modest house in al-Khadra, this 49-year-old woman tells how her family was slowly destroyed. "I am not educated and I only went to primary school," she says. "I married an air force pilot called Latif and we had three sons and one daughter."

Latif was stationed at Bakr airforce base at Balad, north of Baghdad, during the 1990-91 Gulf War and was killed in an American bombing attack. "I didn't get support from our uncles and aunts so we lived on his pension and we sold a car, a Chevrolet Malibu, he had been given by the government because he was a pilot," says Um Saad.

Her eldest son, Saad, wanted to enter the military academy just like his father. Um Saad said she did not want to lose him and instead he went to the police academy and had graduated as a police lieutenant when Saddam Hussein was overthrown in April 2003. She wanted him to resign. "After the fall of Iraq the police were the second target [of Sunni guerrillas] after the Americans." Counterpunch