[Peace-discuss] Yesterday 1/03 News-Gazette

[Jan & Durl Kruse]

Journalist: Iraq would be safer with U.S. exit
By Paul Wood

Thursday January 3, 2008

URBANA – Remove American guns and Baghdad won't be safe – but it will  
be safer, an Iraqi journalist says.

Salam Talib, who is visiting the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media  
Center this week, was the Iraq affairs correspondent for Free Speech  
Radio News from 2003 to 2005, and the founder of a short-lived  
newspaper, Confrontation.

He is also the founder of the Computer Learning Mobile Project, created  
to teach computer skills to disabled Iraqis. (Talib lost the use of his  
legs from polio at age 1; he gets around on crutches.)

Talib graduated from Iraq's Mustansyria College in 1999 with a degree  
in communications, electronics and computer programming. He is now  
living in San Francisco, going to graduate school.

Talib, 32, said he has never experienced Iraq at peace. He lost two  
brothers and many friends to recent violence, and saw the horrors of  
Saddam Hussein's reign in the 1990s.

One brother was jailed for three years under Saddam.

"He was in two prisons, one of them just a warehouse. He was tortured,  
his fingernails removed," Talib said.

The brother initially was not charged with anything, though he was  
arrested for seeking security papers for his fiancee.

"After that, we bribed them to put him on trial," Talib said. "It was a  
show trial. He was given three years."

Life in Iraq "has now changed from a dictatorship to a war zone," he  
said.

After U.S. troops came to Iraq, Talib started his newspaper. He chose  
not to use professional reporters and editors, because most were  
"parrots of the government. I didn't want to learn from them."

Confrontation survived for about eight issues, Talib said, finally  
closing for lack of funds, and for concerns about the security of the  
workers.

After that, he worked as a translator and driver for foreign  
journalists. Then he started his radio career, eventually filing 500  
stories.

While attending graduate school, Talib continues to keep a close eye on  
his homeland, finding some things that encourage him and others that  
don't.

"I got an e-mail today. A friend was killed. He died at the funeral of  
a friend – killed by a suicide bomber in a funeral home in Baghdad."

He no longer keeps a tally of those he's lost.

"I stopped counting at 46. It has become normal," he said.

"Iraqis are between American troops and the people who want to shoot  
American troops. They also want to shoot Iraqis they think are  
collaborators," he said.

He believes the violence would decrease somewhat if U.S. troops left  
Iraq.

"As much as you move guns out of Iraq, you have less shootings," he  
said. "The U.S. military are the biggest gun owners in Iraq, along with  
helicopters, jets and tanks."

Still, that alone, in his opinion, would not solve Iraq's problems.

"I would like to think that the people will run Iraq. But the area has  
a long history of dictatorship," Talib said.
  Find this article at:
   
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/2008/01/03/ 
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