Iraqi girls orphaned by Australian mercenaries

This video says about itself:

Four years after the start of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Everywoman explores the real issues facing women in Iraq today.

The video called Killing of Mary Awanis – Iraq is here.

By Robert Fisk, in British daily The Independent:

A lesson in how to create Iraqi orphans. And then how to make life worse for them

Thursday, 24 January 2008

It’s not difficult to create orphans in Iraq. If you’re an insurgent, you can blow yourself up in a crowded market. If you’re an American air force pilot, you can bomb the wrong house in the wrong village. Or if you’re a Western mercenary, you can fire 40 bullets into the widowed mother of 14-year-old Alice Awanis and her sisters Karoon and Nora, the first just 20, the second a year older. But when the three girls landed at Amman airport from Baghdad last week they believed that they were free of the horrors of Baghdad and might travel to Northern Ireland to escape the terrible memory of their mother’s violent death.

Alas, the milk of human kindness does not necessarily extend to orphans from Iraq – the country we invaded for supposedly humanitarian reasons, not to mention weapons of mass destruction. For as their British uncle waited for them at Queen Alia airport, Jordanian security men – refusing him even a five-minute conversation with the girls – hustled the sisters back on to the plane for Iraq.

“How could they do this?” their uncle, Paul Manouk, asks. “Their mum has been killed. Their father had already died. I was waiting for them. The British embassy in Jordan said they might issue visas for the three – but that they had to reach Amman first.” Mr Manouk lives in Northern Ireland and is a British citizen. Explaining this to the Jordanian muhabarrat at the airport was useless.

Western mercenaries killed their 48-year-old Iraqi Armenian mother, Marou [or: Mary] Awanis, and her best friend – firing 40 bullets into her body as she drove her taxi near their four-vehicle convoy in Baghdad – but tragedy has haunted the family for almost a century; the three sisters’ great-grandmother was forced to leave her two daughters to die on their own by the roadside during the 1915 Armenian genocide. Mrs Awanis’ friend, Jeneva Jalal, was killed instantly alongside her in the passenger seat.

The Australian “security” company whose employees killed Mrs Awanis and her friend – “executed” might be a better word for it, because that is the price of driving too close to armed Westerners in Baghdad these days – expressed its “regrets”. …

“We deeply regret the loss of these lives.” He refused to identify the killers or their nationality. Westerners in Baghdad – especially those who kill the innocent – are once they are known, rich in regrets. But they are less keen to ensure that the bereaved they leave behind are cared for.