Riverbend Has Left Iraq

Riverbend, the Baghdad blogger, and her family have left Iraq. They are now refugees in Syria:

Thursday, September 06, 2007
Leaving Home...
Two months ago, the suitcases were packed. My lone, large suitcase sat in my bedroom for nearly six weeks, so full of clothes and personal items, that it took me, E. and our six year old neighbor to zip it closed.

Packing that suitcase was one of the more difficult things I’ve had to do. It was Mission Impossible: Your mission, R., should you choose to accept it is to go through the items you’ve accumulated over nearly three decades and decide which ones you cannot do without. The difficulty of your mission, R., is that you must contain these items in a space totaling 1 m by 0.7 m by 0.4 m. This, of course, includes the clothes you will be wearing for the next months, as well as any personal memorabilia- photos, diaries, stuffed animals, CDs and the like.

The family's trip out of Iraq was postponed twice, once because of a nearby explosion and curfew, and again when their driver's brother was killed.

There was one point, during the final days of June, where I simply sat on my packed suitcase and cried. By early July, I was convinced we would never leave. I was sure the Iraqi border was as far away, for me, as the borders of Alaska. It had taken us well over two months to decide to leave by car instead of by plane. It had taken us yet another month to settle on Syria as opposed to Jordan. How long would it take us to reschedule leaving?

Finally the day of leave-taking was set, and Riverbend said good-bye to family they were leaving behind and to their home.

I knew then as I know now that these were all just items- people are so much more important. Still, a house is like a museum in that it tells a certain history. You look at a cup or stuffed toy and a chapter of memories opens up before your very eyes. It suddenly hit me that I wanted to leave so much less than I thought I did.

The frightening part of the trip was getting through two checkpoints manned by masked men and being in the presence of so many vehicles, wondering if one of them would blow up. They crossed the border into Syria.

The Syrian border was almost equally packed, but the environment was more relaxed. People were getting out of their cars and stretching. Some of them recognized each other and waved or shared woeful stories or comments through the windows of the cars. Most importantly, we were all equal. Sunnis and Shia, Arabs and Kurds… we were all equal in front of the Syrian border personnel.

We were all refugees- rich or poor. And refugees all look the same- there’s a unique expression you’ll find on their faces- relief, mixed with sorrow, tinged with apprehension. The faces almost all look the same.

The first minutes after passing the border were overwhelming. Overwhelming relief and overwhelming sadness… How is it that only a stretch of several kilometers and maybe twenty minutes, so firmly segregates life from death?

Riverbend writes English beautifully, I have been reading her posts since August, 2003. A link to her blog is there on my sidebar. In the beginning, she was a vibrant young woman, with her sense of humor intact, even though her country had been invaded. I have watched her mood gradually turn dark as, month after month, year after year, the situation in Iraq worsened. At the end of her time in Iraq, there was a dullness and dispiritedness about her posts that made my heart ache. Then she announced that she and her family were leaving Iraq. That was in April of this year, with no word since then. I worried about her when she went for long stretches without posting, fearing the worst.

What relief I felt when I read at Juan Cole's Informed Sources that she had posted again and that she and her family made it safely out of Iraq in July. So very many have not.

Cole says:

Riverbend the most well-known Sunni Arab blogger of Baghdad , is no longer a Baghdadi. Like some 2 million other Iraqis, she is now a refugee in a neighboring country (she is in Syria, where there may now be 1.5 million Iraqis; there are some 800,000 in Jordan). Her family had decided that it was just too dangerous to remain in Baghdad, where Shiite militiamen have been ethnically cleansing them. Clearly, they were afraid of a home invasion by the Mahdi Army. She is lucky to have gotten out a couple of months ago. Syria just decided to tighten up visa requirements for Iraqis trying to flee there. Al-Hayat reports that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had been apprised of this decision earlier.

We have caused the catastrophe in Iraq, and it seems to be the war without end. Yes, we brought down the evil dictator, but are the people of Iraq better off now? The war has lasted longer than WWII. It's time to end the American occupation of Iraq. It's time to bring the troops home.

Yes, there will likely be worse bloodshed once we leave, but there will never be a good time to leave. It is not in our power to improve the situation, so why not leave now?

Once the troops leave, we must do what we can for the Iraqis by giving humanitarian help and assisting them in reconstruction. We cannot abandon them, but we must no longer occupy their country.