The invasion changed the course of my life and my family’s, writes Times TV critic Lorraine Ali. Twenty years on, its aftermath is still playing out.
The phrase, despite its joyful connotations, was used often during those first few hours of the attack — which the U.S. military dubbed Operation Shock and Awe — by news anchors who struggled to describe the alternately dark and explosive scenes broadcast out of Baghdad. Twenty years ago today, a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq’s capital, dropping bombs in the dead of night, decimating buildings and bridges before our eyes, igniting palm trees like so many angry torches.
The invasion irrevocably changed the course of my life and my family’s, and its aftermath continues to reshape our lives and destinies — from cousins still displaced throughout the Middle East to their children, denied anything but Iraqi citizenship, even though they’ve never been to Iraq.
Cancer took Dad in the late 1980s; ironically, it was caused by schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease caused by flatworms found in the rivers of North Africa and the Middle East. While Baghdad had come back to claim him, his death meant that we — the only American Alis — lost our connection with Iraq, and that chasm grew with the discord of global politics. Hussein’s dictatorship, the Gulf War of the early 1990s, the U.S.
But here I am now, asking: Please don’t forget Uncle Mahdi, or any of the others whose lives were ended and forever changed by a war no one wants to remember.
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