Category — Urgent Appeals

Early on the morning of February 15, 2004, Hiwa went, as he did every day, to the market in Kirkuk where people or companies in need of laborers hired workers on a daily basis. On this day Hiwa wasn’t told where he would be working, but was driven for two hours to the American military base in Tikrit where he worked from 8:00 in the morning till 3:00 in the afternoon. On the drive back to Kirkuk with four other workers, a car pulled in front of their vehicle and exploded. Hiwa only remembers the sound of the explosion and feeling heat. He then fell into a coma for 15 days.

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Buthaina in Amman, Summer 2007

When Cindy Sheehan (co-founder of the antiwar group Gold Star Families for Peace and mother of slain US soldier Casey Sheehan, for whom “Camp Casey” in Crawford, Texas, was named) visited Buthaina with DAI team members last summer, she wrote an appeal for funds that was able to help significantly with meeting Buthaina’s needs. After months in Amman, Buthaina had improved enough to be able to recently return to Iraq - a good thing, because funds her family had raised for her care had also been exhausted.

Our friend Buthaina continues to need our help, as her journey of healing continues.

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Four-and-a-half-year-old Mina’s mother took a medicine called Tinifar - which is now known to cause birth defects - during her first two weeks of pregnancy in early 2003. When the war started in March, there were many explosions in her area and she lost touch with her husband, who was in Baghdad, for 20 days. The trauma of the war and the uncertainty of her husband’s fate made her pregnancy very difficult, but only when Mina was born in October with an opening at the back of her head and abnormal growths in her eyes and ears did the extent of the problem become apparent.

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Just before 8 in the morning in early December 2007, 18-year-old Saba was riding in the bus she and her friends used to get to college in Baghdad when a young man boarded and asked to be taken to a different university. When the driver refused, the young man insisted and then pulled out a pistol and shot the driver numerous times, killing him. The man then turned to Saba and shot her as well. The bullet entered her left shoulder and exited from her back, after breaking several vertebrae and damaging her spinal cord.

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In the summer of 2006 Sahla was in her garage baking bread while her husband and children were out when a car bomb went off outside her home, causing the oven she was using to explode. Sahla’s neighbors heard her screaming and came to her aid, putting out the fire with blankets and calling her husband, who came home and took her to the nearest hospital.

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