MOSUL, Iraq, 29 April 2003 — A group of American soldiers, visiting an Iraqi school, ask how they can help restart classes, pay teachers’ salaries and provide badly needed equipment. It should be a simple meeting. The soldiers genuinely want to help and the 16 women teachers in the northern Iraqi city are desperate to get the school functioning after a three-week war and the chaos that followed.
But discussions quickly break down as most teachers end up railing against the US-led invasion of their country launched on March 20. Some even refuse to talk to the Americans.
“I refuse to help the Americans. They bombed our country. Why? Why?” said Nidal Haider, the school’s deputy headmistress, shaking with anger and frustration.
Then she turned to one young soldier and shouted: “Go away from our land! Go away!” It was one small incident in one small school in Iraq, but highlighted the enormity of the task facing retired US Gen. Jay Garner, the man charged with rebuilding Iraq and winning the trust of the Iraqi people.
As he met prominent Iraqis in Baghdad yesterday to talk about the country’s future, US-led forces are wrestling to help restore utilities and health and education services and get the country back on its feet. They face widespread skepticism.
In the Mosul school, almost all the teachers say they are glad Saddam’s rule is over, but none seems prepared to thank the US forces who ousted him.
Instead, they are convinced the Americans are in Iraq to seize control of its oil and neutralize another enemy of Israel.
Iraqi tribesmen near the Syrian border denied yesterday that they had given sanctuary to Saddam Hussein’s wife and daughters — but said that if they did arrive and ask for protection, they would get it.
The tribesmen said relatives of several senior Iraqis had passed through the northern region during the war. But they refused to say who they were, or where they had gone.
Some media reports have said members of Saddam’s family fled to Syria during the war and were later sent back to Iraq, where they were being sheltered by the Shamar tribe.
Arabic channel Al-Arabiya quoted sources as saying the group included Saddam’s wife Sajida, and his three daughters — Raghd and Rana whose husbands he ordered killed in 1996, and Hala, whose husband Jamal Mustafa Sultan Al-Tikriti surrendered to US last week. Ahmed Al-Faisal, a Shamar tribe sheikh in Rabia, dismissed the reports.
