The Killing Fields of Baghdad: The Case of Hillary, Layla, and "Little Deer"

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35798-focus-the-killing-fields-of-baghdad-the-case-of-hillary-layla-and-qlittle-deerq

On June 27, 1993, just after 2 a.m. and two years after the end of the Gulf War, US Tomahawk missiles reduced the home of Layla al-Attar, the Director of the Iraqi National Museum and a leading advocate for women artists in the Middle East, to rubble and ash. “There was no warning,” said her daughter, Rema. “We were sound asleep. We heard an explosion and felt the walls shake. We tried to get out but we couldn’t do it. The whole house collapsed on top of us.”

Rema, or “Little Deer,” was blinded in one eye by the 1993 bombing. She left Baghdad soon after and underwent extensive face surgery in Los Angeles and Canada before moving to the Bay Area. She was 19 when “the bombs changed everything,” she said. “I was very deep under and no one could hear me. I was dying by the time they got through. They didn’t get to my parents for another two hours. It was two hours too late.”

<snip>

According to The New York Times, Layla al-Attar and her husband were “found dead under the debris” after one of the 23 US cruise missiles launched by former president Bill Clinton “blasted craters as deep as 30 feet in Al Manour, an exclusive residential area.”

Many who mourned the death of Layla al-Attar believed the Clintons’ silence was clearly a political choice, not to call attention to the killing of such a prominent woman, a leader in the art world of the Middle East. Others believed it was a not “collateral damage” as Clinton claimed. It was the second time the artist’s house had been hit. It had been demolished two years earlier during another US attack and had just been reconstructed. The fact that it was hit for the second time made many Iraqis suspicious that it wasn’t an accident, but that the artist was targeted as an official of the Iraqi government.

One exiled Iraqi artist, who runs a corner deli in San Francisco and who asked to remain anonymous, told me recently, “The killing of Layla was very simply the result of the passing of the torch of the same policy from Bush to Clinton. I don’t know for sure if they meant to kill Layla, but the Clintons certainly didn’t express a peep of regret. But then the Clintons are famous for putting political pragmatism before truth and humanity.”

“[Bill] Clinton bragged about his first big bombing that killed Layla, and his wife was silent about it,” the anonymous Iraqi artist lamented. “Layla was a women of peace, an artist who made beauty, who was known throughout Europe and the Middle East as a peacemaker. She was someone who could have helped bridge the gap between our countries, and Hillary Clinton was silent and still is. Now she’s running for president, bragging about a policy that still kills about a thousand Iraqis a month.”

[840high]

1. kick

[dreamnightwind]

2. K & R, the more we know about neocon policy (by Repubs AND Dems) the better. - eom

[bjo59]

3. Thank you so much for posting this.

[countryjake]

4. Kris Kristofferson "The Circle", Paintings by Layla Al-Attar

Last edited Sun Mar 20, 2016, 12:34 AM - Edit history (2)

(on edit, I've noticed that the date of that US missile strike, the day that Layla was murdered in her bed and Little Deer was blinded, that night that our nation's government put the blood of innocents on all of our hands, is wrong on this video.

So, here's another one (exactly same song) that's correct, which also shows much more of the mothers of the disappeared in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, along with Layla Al-Attar.

Posted for all those in this World who long for Peace


(and thank you for posting this story, eridani!)

[msongs]

5. bernie needs to stop voting to fund this sort of thing but he won't nt

[Hiraeth]

6. welcome to ignore.

[countryjake]

7. Uncle Sam Regrets...

"collateral damage"