Fatima Jbouri Should be Dead
This is enough to break your heart…
Nine months old, underweight, malnourished, fatherless and half Sunni, half Shiite, she already had enough deadly handicaps growing up in Saydia, a battlefield suburb that has become one of the worst sectarian killing zones in Baghdad.
On July 25, a death squad shot her mother and uncle — each three times in the head — in their dilapidated half-finished squat. E.J.K.’s, in American military shorthand: extrajudicial killings.
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Fatima is a Shiite name. (The Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima married Ali, who Shiites believe should have led the Islamic world instead of the Sunni Caliphate.) But the widowed mother and uncle were Sunnis, and the baby had their surname, Jbouri.
Painful experience had already taught Major Yerkes that Sunnis would not be safe in the health care system because it is under the control of Shiites loyal to the Mahdi Army militia.
In the two months before Fatima’s discovery, the major had handed over three Sunni insurgents to Iraqi policemen for medical treatment, only for them to be killed on arrival at the hospital.
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[Major Yerkes] was asked if he was content with Fatima’s happy ending.
“It’s not really happy yet, is it?” he said. “She is alive. We don’t know where she is going. Call me in a couple of months.”
May Fatima live long enough to see a peaceful Iraq one day.
