![]() ![]() Away from the western analysts’ discussions of how this assassination will affect the re-election or impeachment of President Trump, or from the moral question of whether manhunting is a legitimate tool of foreign policy, life has become even more treacherous for millions in the Middle East. Happy at the death of a menace but “nervous” and “scared” is how some I spoke to in the region summarised their reaction to Suleimani’s killing. To state that such interventions are dangerous is not a detachment born of an anti foreign-intervention principle. ![]() The victims will be America’s Arab proxies, be they nations such as Saudi Arabia and its allies, or military factions In real terms this instability means more bloodshed, more refugees, more children whose lives change for ever overnight. It’s always a difficult balance to strike, between happiness that a cynical tyrant such as Saddam or Suleimani is eliminated, and the fear that the intervention could save lives in the short-term, only to ultimately accelerate instability. And those people who would suffer most would be her own, not the well-armed and well-armoured liberating forces. All that mattered to her was that, ultimately, more people would suffer and the situation would become impossible to contain. Her intuition cut through all the legal, political and moral questions. It is now three decades since that moment, and after the assassination of Iran’s military chief Qassem Suleimani last week, this child’s words echo. One angry girl, who had lost weight rapidly through anxiety since she’d arrived, stood on a desk and shouted, “It’s going to get more messy! The whole world is going to get more messy!” It was confusing, then, that when Operation Desert Storm – the military campaign by the United States and its allies to reclaim Kuwait from Saddam – began in January 1991, the majority of these children were fiercely opposed to it. They all refused to countenance the possibility that they might never return. ![]() One harrowing detail they repeated was that Iraqi troops entered a hospital and ripped baby incubators from their electric sockets. We clustered around them as they told us the stories of the invasion – stories that have since become woven into the popular mythology of Saddam’s brutality. These were Saddam’s refugees: the children of Sudanese expats working in Kuwait, who had grabbed what they could and fled the country. Slowly they began to open up and tell us who they were. One child spent her entire first week at the back of the class looking vacantly out of the window at the school gardens, tears silently streaming down her face. For the first few days they mostly sat quietly in class, unable to adjust to the new academic material and seemingly not interested in making friends. Halfway through the term they arrived, bewildered and dressed in what were clearly swiftly and randomly put-together clothes – shoes a size too big, dresses a size too small. A few weeks after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, several new Sudanese students appeared at my school in Khartoum. ![]()
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