Mohammed of ITM went to get his hair cut in the Ba'athist stronghold of Adhamiya (the neighborhood in northern Baghdad that juts out into the Tigris on the east bank). He reports that it is one of the few areas in Iraq where " no one dares to say that what happened was right" for fear of retribution from the Ba'athist gangs.
In Baghdad, as elsewhere, barbershops are a place to talk politics. Mohammed overheard the client ahead of him say to the barber that the list of "agents and spies" (meaning anti-Ba'athist informers) on 20th Street had grown to 250. Choosing his words carefully, Mohammed remarked that the "honest people" (Ba'athists) must be dwindling in numbers and losing support.
Mohammed goes on to say:
"I smiled inside as I remembered the days of Saddam when we couldn’t dare to speak fearing Saddam’s agents who seemed to be everywhere. I was living a somewhat reversed picture from the past and it was a bit amusing. I went adding, " I don’t think it’ll take a long time before things get better" This phrase could be interpreted in 2 different ways but still no one dared to approve of what I said. People here are still afraid of a very small criminal group that is capable of everything and believe they’re the only ones who are right and who have honor while all the rest are cowards spies who should be killed without hesitation.
This was the way Saddam and his assistants used to think. They thought that if they had to sacrifice 24 million Iraqis for the rest to live "honorably" then that was what they would do with clear conscience."
Read the whole post here:Land of Spies
This is good news indeed. As always, don't hold your breath for BBC and CNN to report it. They're still weeping over the downfall of their genocidal hero, Saddam Hussein.
