Liberated from Hussein, “Back to Holy Land”

The road to Baghdad was littered with dead bodies on Wednesday.

In war the dignity of human beings sometimes reaches lower than humanly manageable. Do these fallen soldiers know what they died for? Who will honor these nameless heroes?

Stray dogs were busy scavenging around trucks and trains struck by missiles and bombs. Children were playing in the rubble looking at the dead bodies with blank stares. We could barely guess their ages.

We crossed the Kuwait border on Tuesday at dawn and drove through the south of Iraq. We departed Kuwait at 4:30 a.m. and arrived at the Sheraton Hotel, near the east bank of the Tigris River, flowing through the center of Baghdad at 9 p.m. It took 16 hours to make the 600 km journey.

Iraqi soldiers and elite Republican Guard troops had previously engaged U.S. forces on this road which connects Sharfwan with Baghdad. The war is over, but the damage of the war still can be seen on this road along which some people are already making their pilgrimage.

Usam Jawart (26) was plodding along the dusty, endless two-lane road from his hometown Al Samawa. It had already been two days since he left his home. He was heading towards Karbala, a holy site for Shi`a Moslems. He, however, still has a week left to reach his destination.

Under the Sunni-led Saddam Hussein`s regime, Jawart had never been able to visit the shrine of Al Hussein, the most highly regarded saint of the Shi`a. It will soon be the saint`s first birthday since the collapse of the regime, so Jawart decided to visit the shrine, located over 300 km from his hometown.

Other Shi`a Moslems who were also heading to Karbala like Jawart also filled the road between Al Samawa and Baghdad. It looked almost like a “third path”, between the still horrors of life and death.