The terrorists in Iraq, with the kidnapping and released videos of a key humanitarian aid worker, may be on the verge of overplaying their hand with the citizens of Baghdad.
Hundreds of disabled Iraqis demonstrated in Baghdad yesterday to demand the release of Margaret Hassan, calling her abductors “neanderthals†and insisting that their collapsed health system needs the British aid worker, kidnapped by insurgents last week.
Mrs Hassan, 59, the Iraq director for the charity Care International, was last seen on a hostage video on Friday, tearfully relaying her kidnappers’ demands that Britain did not deploy troops close to Baghdad. Her plight has moved many Iraqis to anger, unlike the abductions of Western contractors and foreign lorry drivers before her.
“We love her. She built us a hospital,†said Ahmed Jabir, a wheelchair-bound boy at the protest rally near Care’s Baghdad offices. “If it wasn’t for her, we would probably have died.â€
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Mrs Hassan’s Iraqi husband, Tahsin Ali Hassan, attended the rally. Pointing at the crowd of patients, he said: “This says it all.â€
Never mistake my condemnations of the Islamist bastards we are fighting for a blanket statement on Islam or the Iraqi people in general. Much of the muslim world is at a crossroads — to careen wildly towards a loss of any vestige of a humane society or to pull back from the edge and again become a truly civilized people. This protest shows which direction at least some (and I’d wager most) in Iraq want to go. The terrorist “neanderthals†have much to lose with the Iraqi populace in the case of Mrs. Hassan.