They Need our Sympathy

I’ve faced death once before, it was a pretty hard situation. But, frankly I didn’t think about my self or how life is important to me.
The only thing which was terrifying me was what will happen to my mother when she hears that her only son is dead?? How will her life be? I prayed to Allah and I asked the Almighty to make it easy for her.
After the war everybody was worried about their lives, but my mother was worried about the academic year 2003, there was a lot of gossip that there would be no academic year and we could lose that year, eventually we didn’t, we were able to attend our universities. The only thing which terrified my mother was our future.
With the early pictures of Saddam’s crimes, I started thinking not about the victims but about their mothers, how hard was it?? They were not even allowed to mention their sons and daughters.
During the eighties of the last century the price of the black cloth got higher than usual, as most of the Iraqi women had to wear that colour according to the Iraqi tradition during the mourning. Nobody can mention all the awful stories of how mothers are suffering in Iraq, but I remember one of them.
She was lying in her bed, a dark brunet woman dressed in black with a black frock, she looked seventy but she was in her mid-fifties. She was coughing and had a harsh breathing sound, she looked exhausted; however she was a very warm woman, her eyes were giving a very kind look, a look of a “mother”.
After discussing her medical problems and her treatment, we asked her about her life and if she had any problems. Her facial expression was sufficient to understand how terrible her life was, one thing which she mentioned, explained everything” my three sons were killed, I have no body, after killing the last one I couldn’t breath normally” she kept on saying “ however you’re my sons, please, help me to get better”.
After a moment of being quiet, she started reciting their stories, the first one was mugged and killed during the looting after the war, and her second son was a policeman whose station was attacked by terrorists. Her last son was killed in an explosion.
If we listen to the news of our country, we can see that these three events are occurring everyday. However they don’t affect the same family everyday.
Many people might arguer me saying that there are families who had lost five or ten of their members in one occasion, I absolutely agree with them. However, this is not the point behind my story. The main issue which I would like to draw your attention to it is how many Iraqi mothers are suffering now. Who is thinking about them?? Who is going to support them??
Everyday we hear debates about religion and politics, about Sunnis and Shiites , if there was a challenge in speaking, certainly no one could have competed our political and religious leaders .Every Friday , there are hundreds of people with their turbans, most of them are barking from their rostrums trying to convince people that they’re going to heaven and everybody else is going to hell. Thousands of lectures were given about what is right and what is wrong. Millions of dollars were collected to support Al-Mujahedin, to see a larger number of corpses, to hear that we are winning and the others are losing.
But, no one of them tried to do something for the Iraqi mothers who have lost their sons ,no one have said “please stop violence, mothers are suffering” , I’ve never heard about charity organization concerned with helping the violence victims. Can anybody tell me how much did the association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq pay for helping shiyat families or how much did Al-Hakeem paid for helping Sunni families, I don’t even think that they did anything to help people from their own sectors, they’re just trying to prove that they’re patriotic but they are unable to do so.
In western countries, women are doing their best to stop sending their sons to war, they’re not worried about our country, but, they’re worried about their sons, western women don’t need their sons for financial support, as their governments already provide them with sufficient finance when they need so.
Unfortunately, no one do so in my country.
Motherhood was before any religion; however it’s holly in every religion. I don’t know how those religious people deal with their own career, they mention what helps them and they ignore the rest, what will they say to Allah on the Day of Judgment?
Iraqi mothers have been suffering for many years, they bring up their sons to see them being killed for no reason. They need money, they need help, however they don’t ask for such things, they ask for mercy, for sympathy. They need our sympathy