I still remember the afternoon when I was in my office at Kurdistan TV in the city of Erbil in the Iraqi Kurdistan region (where the time zone is eight hours ahead of the United States) when I saw CNN broadcasting live smoke rising from one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City Like anybody in the world, at the beginning I thought it was an accident. But after the second plane crashed into the second tower, eyes did not blink as silence and surprise opened the mouths of everybody in my office.
And the rest of the story is known to everybody. America was under attack. And I was extremely sad to see pictures of destruction and mass killing of civilians - again. It reminded me of the traumatic attack on Halabja Town, where more than 5,000 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed on March 16, 1988, by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Tens of thousands died in later months and years, suffering from wounds from chemical weapons.
The Kurdistan Regional Government, the Kurdish leadership of the political parties in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Kurdish people, quickly joined the rest of the free world in condemning those terrorist attacks against the symbols of the free world in the United States. However, it was not surprising that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein did not condemn the attacks, since his regime was accustomed to mass killing and persecution of his own civilians. As an Iraqi Kurdish opposition journalist, the tragic scenes of destruction in New York and Washington made me feel that things will not go as they used to before the attacks and that America will react, just as it reacted when Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941.
It is necessary here to remind readers that Kurdistan was free from Saddam's control since the glorious uprising of the Kurdish people in Iraq in 1991, in the wake of the first Gulf War, when Saddam's army was forced out of Kuwait by the U.S.-led international coalition. The Kurdistan region of Iraq has since launched a democratic experiment that became an example of democracy in a volatile Middle East that is plagued by dictatorships and suppression of minority rights.
Members of Saddam's Ba'ath party, as their media propaganda suggested, expressed jubilation after the attacks. Relatives living in Baghdad told me that some Ba'ath party members even named their newly born male babies Osama, after the head of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization Osama bin Laden, to prove to the Saddam regime that they are sincere anti-Americans.
As a journalist, I followed up on the ensuing events. I also reviewed the past events prior to the Sept. 11 attacks and concluded that the U.S. administration during the 1990s did not do enough to protect its citizens. The Feb. 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center, the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the Aug. 7, 1998, bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and the October 2000 USS Cole bombing in Yemen should have given enough reason to the former Clinton administration to take necessary measures in and out of America to secure the safety of its citizens and interests.
These terrorist attacks took the lives of hundreds of Americans and non-Americans, mostly civilians, and yet the former administration did not take the necessary actions that might have prevented the Sept. 11 tragedy.
The Department of Homeland Security, whose staff I avoid looking at when walking on the streets of Washington because of their scary and suspicious eyes, should have been established long ago, before the Sept. 11 attacks. I believe that the U.S.-led war on terrorism has so far been successful, and I personally believe that terrorists are now much weaker than thought to launch another major attack against any U.S. or Western country. So, the above attacks against the United States were all signs that terrorists and their supporters, one of them Saddam Hussein, were thinking about continuing their attacks.
Some Americans say that there is no proof linking Saddam and the Sept. 11 attacks. But I would like to remind them that before Operation Iraqi Freedom, as Saddam felt that the United States was serious in tracking down terrorists, he started to liquidate the witnesses and the links between his regime and al-Qaeda. In August 2002, Saddam killed the notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu-Nidal in Baghdad. The Iraqi regime at that time said that he committed suicide, but this was one of the lies that even the na?ve people in Iraq and the Middle East did not believe. Saddam was trying to hide his ties to terrorist organizations.
Unfortunately, because of the long history of bloodshed in the Middle East, the reaction of the streets in the Middle Eastern countries, most of whose governments are undemocratic and oppressive, were apathetic in general, if not happy. The natural reason for this is because of the general feeling in the Islamic world that Washington's policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian issue is unfair. That issue is also a main reason behind anti-American sentiment in the Middle East and the Islamic world.
I believe that part of the ongoing war against terrorism should be some sort of aggressive pressure by the White House on both the Israelis and the Palestinians to urge them to revitalize the peace process and save the region and the world unnecessary bloodshed and headache. As an Iraqi Kurd, I wish that both the Israeli and Palestinian nations would reach a peaceful solution as soon as possible, so that the world attention would then shift to other issues in the Middle East, such as the Kurds, who are oppressed and denied natural rights in the areas they have inhabited for thousands of years, as well as effecting changes toward democratic systems in the entire Middle East.
