MURDER OF MY FATHER, JANUARY 1ST 1974
Forty years ago today my father was murdered in a street not
far from our house in Baghdad when he was run down by a car driven by Ba’athist
henchmen of Saddam Hussein and the notorious Nathum Kizar. I was a Ph.D.
student in Britain at the time and one night, three months later, my mother and
sister were thrown out of our family home, all our possessions were looted, and
my mother and sister were forced into the back of an army truck and taken into
Kurdistan and eventually abandoned with only the clothes they stood up in!
Eventually my mother and sister reached Iran. My wife and children cannot
understand why no one has been brought to justice for these crimes against a
defenseless family forty years ago and why nothing has been done to investigate
this in the decade since Saddam was overthrown. Such crimes, based on the
ethnicity of families, were committed against thousands of other Faili Kurds
yet Ba’athism continues while Nazis who committed similar crimes against Jews
some thirty years before have been punished and indeed are still being pursued
throughout the world and brought to trial.
