I mean, I thought - you know, I mean, it was easier to. When I was a child, we had the kind of a Japanese cartoon, "Grendizer," and I thought Saddam, Grendizer and God were manifestations of the same entity. What's going to happen next is something that we were not even able to imagine.ĪBDUL-AHAD: Saddam, for us, was everything. And that was very ingrained in our minds and in our conscience that when the regime collapsed, there was nothing after that. When someone lives in a democracy or a country that allows elections, where faces and leaders, they change every four years, every eight years, it's hard to explain how that one figure that your entire life revolved around, someone whose name was very much synonymous with the country itself - so there was no Iraq and Saddam. RASCOE: And, Rasha, what do you remember about the reaction to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein?ĪL AQEEDI: It's very, very hard to explain how that felt at the moment, how it still feels till this day, to people who have not grown up in dictatorships where there's only one man ruling for decades.
I mean, what is going to happen now? Are we occupied? You know, you stand there with the rest of the neighborhood, watching them. And then you go down to the street, and you see these huge, amphibious armored vehicles - kind of the Marines - and this group of Marines down in your street, in your roundabout, pointing their guns. I mean, imagine you grow up being told that this is the enemy, this is the enemy. So I was really, really, you know, surprised, shocked when my neighbor knocked at my door and said, the Americans are here. I thought part of the south would be occupied.
They joined us for a conversation to reflect, all these years later, on the war.ĪBDUL-AHAD: I personally never thought that the regime would fall so quickly in two or three weeks. RASCOE: Both Rasha and Ghaith would later become journalists, witnesses to the violence that tore their country apart. RASHA AL AQEEDI: We were actually a lot safer when the bombs were dropping in 2003 than we were the few years after in the streets, which is such a dark irony. RASCOE: It was only the start of what will become a long national nightmare, says Rasha Al Aqeedi.
And you wake up next day, and you try to guess what was bombed in the city the night before. You hear the screeching of missiles, and then you hear the bombs. GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD: You cower in your apartment, your bedroom. RASCOE: Iraqi Ghaith Abdul-Ahad remembers that time like this. RASCOE: The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had begun, and explosions thundered across Baghdad. GEORGE W BUSH: My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.
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