No More Victims - News Archive

TO MOST AMERICANS, the war in Iraq began the night of March 19 when the first $18 million GBU-31 “bunker buster” was dropped on a residential compound near Baghdad University with the hope of eliminating Saddam Hussein in one tidy strike. But for most Iraqis, the bombing started years earlier. In the case of an Iraqi woman named Um Haider, war arrived at her doorstep in earnest one morning in the winter of 1999.

It was shortly after 9 a.m. on January 25, 1999, the day before midyear school exams. The weather was gray and cold with occasional streaks of sunshine. All morning Um Haider — a schoolteacher herself — had been sitting at the kitchen table helping her two oldest kids prepare for the test while the two younger kids, Haider, 6, and Mostafa, 4, amused themselves nearby on the floor of the two-story cement-block house in Jumeryiah, a working-class slum at the north end of Basra. (more…)

ONTARIO, Calif. - The truth is sometimes lost in the translation. Especially when an Iraqi boy visiting the United States for the first time is asked what he wants to be when he grows up, and answers with the candor of a child.

“I want to be a pilot,” 8-year-old Mustafa Dinar said in Arabic, “so I can fly a plane and drop bombs on Americans.”

Ikbal Fartous was stunned by her son’s frankness, so when she translated for the news media in this strip-mall suburb east of Los Angeles, she censored his words. She said only that Mustafa wanted a bike. And he did. Mustafa had mentioned the bike after saying he wanted to bomb Americans. (more…)

9-year-old boy wounded in a 1999 bombing attack in Iraq is now in Southern California, ending a years-long struggle by a Hollywood screenwriter and other Americans to bring the boy and his mother to the United States for much-needed medical care.

As NPR’s Mandalit del Barco reports, Mostafa’s odyssey began four years ago, when his Basra neighborhood was hit by a U.S. cruise missile that strayed off course. Mostafa’s brother Haider was killed, and Mostafa was sprayed with shrapnel. (more…)

On January 20, 1999, Mustafa (who was four-years-old at the time) was playing outside his home with his six-year-old brother, Heider, in the Al Juramya neighborhood of Basra in southern Iraq. At 10 in the morning, an American cruise missile landed in the street in front of their home — an artifact of the no-fly zone bombing that the United States has carried out over the last twelve years. Mustafa’s brother, Heider was killed instantly, and Mustafa was seriously injured. Two of his fingers on his left hand were blown off, he had a serious head wound, and much of his body was filled with shrapnel from the exploding missile. (more…)