AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean it’s just been introduced? I mean, there is a sense in the media in this country that this is age-old sectarian, almost tribal hatred.

FAIZA AL-ARAJI: Oh, my God. Yeah, they are trying to tell you another story. The reality is there. We are brothers and sisters. We are Muslim, my dear. This is the identity of the nation. We are Muslim. But they are trying to divide the people, to go to the sub-identity, to make a cause of fighting or to provoke the people against each other. And we refuse it.

AMY GOODMAN: Eman?

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: Well, the reality is that it never happened in the history of Iraq for thousands, six thousands of years. It never happened, a civil war or these kind of distinctions. It is true that there are in Iraq, there are Kurds, there are Arabs and Sunnis and Shia and the Christians and many other minor religions and groups. But it never happened that we fight each other. No. At all.

FAIZA AL-ARAJI: And a thing I said yesterday, in the history there is fighting between the regime and the Kurds or the regime against the Shia. But it doesn't mean it is civil war. It is something between, you know, for political reasons. But the media here is investing these actions to tell you another kind of stories.

AMY GOODMAN: I saw you both yesterday at the Community Church in New York where you were speaking along with Medea Benjamin and Cindy Sheehan, talking about the conditions in Iraq. Eman, you have been documenting human rights abuses.

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: You live in Baghdad?

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: I live in Baghdad.

AMY GOODMAN: What have you documented?

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: Well, I worked mainly on the bombed cities, the refugee camps. I also worked on the missing, a very big issue in Iraq now, that I don't think people here have any idea about. I worked on the detainees. These are the things that I worked on.

AMY GOODMAN: The missing?

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: The missing. Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: Well, people are -- people disappear in Iraq. People are -- especially men -- arrested, and you don't hear anything about them later. For example, in the first – in the first era of the war, between March 20 until April 9, when the Iraqi state fall down, people disappeared. There are eyewitnesses that these people were taken by the American troops. Some of them may be killed. Some of them may be in jail. But now, they don't exist.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, how do you find out? I mean, if you want to find out if someone has been jailed, what do you do?

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: There are eyewitnesses in the place that he disappeared, and they say that “We saw him, he was injured and was taken in an American tank or vehicle,” or “He was taken,” simply. We go to the – and there is a very important point. There are prisoners injured who are released and they say that in our -- in our room and the place, we have this man and they give his description. Many things that no one else would know. Only the person who was with him.

AMY GOODMAN: The American authorities in the U.S.-run prisons will not tell you?

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: We go to the American military bases, to the prisons, and we ask about these people. They deny them.

AMY GOODMAN: They deny that they are there?

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: They deny they exist in that prison. For example, we have a story of a man. He was supposed to be in prison in Umm Qasr, you know, Camp Bucca in the south, deep in the south.

AMY GOODMAN: Camp Bucca is named for a fireman who was killed 9/11 in New York.

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: Yeah, but for Iraqis it is a very big prison. It is a camp where tens of thousands of Iraqis are arrested for three years now. So, people come from there, and they say, “We know this man, we know this man,” etc. And we go there. Sometimes even the American themselves, they say – the American authorities, the American officials, they say, yes, they put list of names. And when we go back, we ask about them, they say, “No, we didn't do that.” And we show them, I have a paper, I have a document, of one of these men. And now he's denied.

I don't know the number of these people. The number is between 5,000 to 15,000. But I had a meeting with a general called General Brandenburg in the Ministry of Justice. And he said that he has records of that period. And he asked me to give him the names that I'm looking for. And I did. But when we had the meeting, and we had a date to go and to talk about these people, to give him the names, he did not show up, unfortunately. I'm still waiting for an answer. They said, in the Ministry of Justice, they said that he's changed. Now, there is another one, called Garner. But I didn't meet him yet. And I'm looking forward to meeting him and to give him the list of names about – and the stories of these people who disappeared.

I mean, this is a very big tragedy in Iraq, because there are families, mothers, wives, children, who are waiting to hear about their loved ones, if they exist, if they are dead, if they are alive. They simply – they simply won't answer. That's all. All the answers.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you even move around in Iraq?

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: We can move around, but it is very risky. It is very dangerous, especially if you go to dangerous places. I mean, I go, for example, to the places that are bombed. And I have faced death many times. I was almost shot many times. But it is risky. But, I mean, we have to go. We have to see these people. We have to listen to them.

AMY GOODMAN: Even to come here, that required you traveling the road to Amman?

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: Yes. Yes. It was difficult.

AMY GOODMAN: And you were issued the visa in Baghdad or in Amman.

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: No, in Amman, we don't go to the Green Zone, we don’t go to the American embassy in Baghdad. It’s inside the Green Zone, and they do not issue visas. You have to go to Amman to apply first. And then, you have to go back to Baghdad to wait for two, three, six weeks, and then you are sent an email or you hear from them and then you go back and you get the visa, if it is granted. So, this is how it works.

AMY GOODMAN: Faiza Al-Araji, you are also a civil engineer. What about the so-called reconstruction of Iraq? We’ve last heard that in the upcoming budget, the only money that has been requested for reconstruction now is for prisons.

FAIZA AL-ARAJI: Yeah. We have heard a lot of stories about reconstruction during the six months or the first year after the war. And we were living inside Baghdad and watching for them, as an example, for the campaign of maintenance of the schools. We have heard about huge budget for the contractors from Bechtel or other American companies. But the reality on the ground that the final thing that they paid it for subcontract and subcontract, then – and a subcontract, a Iraqi one, he got it for $2,000 for each school just to put painting and to maintain the broken glasses. This is the only thing they have done. But maybe they are sending you the message or the story that we put new furniture and we put the new computers and everything was fancy. No, this is not the truth. The reality is something very different, you know?

I have to see a lot of our – to hear about - because I'm engineer, I am in touch with engineers and with contractors. The contractors are not qualified people. If you – I am working with water treatment systems, and the people who are coming with their papers of the specification for the water treatment package for a village or a town, he don't know what is written in the paper. Why should they give him the contract? Why should they give him the priority? Because he is a friend of them. Because he is working in the -- maybe in the military bases, building for the American military force. So they trust him. And they give him the contract. He is ignorant. He don’t know what is going on, what is inside the paper and he -- but they give him a huge amount of money. And when he come to ask me about the prices, I can't give him, but I can understand he got a big budget for this small piece. And by the time I can understand there is a lot of money have been spent for the big construction of Iraq. Something like this.

But the reality is something on the ground, that is something is like this. And you buy something in this budget, but you are the price -- the real price is this thing. So you can see the money of the Iraqis have been disappeared. This is the kind of – if we are talking about the reconstruction and the corruption in the ministries and everywhere, it is a familiar story now. And what about the corruption of the billions of dollars of Iraqi people who have been out of the banks?

AMY GOODMAN: We are going to end by asking what you think the solution is, to both of you. What's the solution?

FAIZA AL-ARAJI: What's the solution? What's the solution, my dear? There is chaos. If you turn your face from this direction, from – there is a lot of problems in Iraq. How could you -- can imagine to start? What is the first step to stop all of this? The first step is, help the Iraqis to have national unity government, to make a kind of reconciliation between them after the last election, to get a good government, a real government which is – who us representative of the Iraqi people. This is step number one. Step number two, train -- give training for the police Iraqi men and for the soldiers to help their people, not to arrest them and kill them and to campaign or to move with the American occupation force to kill Iraqi people. We need something new, strong, to trust them. And then the other step, that we can ask the troops to go out, to pull out the troops from Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: Eman Khamas, do you think that U.S. troops should leave immediately?

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: Yes. The occupation should end immediately.

AMY GOODMAN: What would happen then?

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: What would happen? Iraq would be free, would be really liberated. Iraq is now occupied.

AMY GOODMAN: The press describes it as it would immediately descend into civil war.

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: No. I mean, it’s not going to be like that. I mean, you have to plan it in a way that, you know, guarantee that there will be no civil war, as you said. There is the U.N., there is the Security Council, there are the peacekeeping troops. There are many things that they can work out to, you know, follow this security vacuum, so that it wouldn’t, as you say, go into civil war. But the occupation should end immediately. It’s something wrong. It’s wrong for the Iraqis, for the Americans, for the world, for peace, for the international law. Everything. It’s wrong. It has to end now. Immediately. And then – and we Iraqis, we can work things out. We are capable of that. And if we kill each other, it’s our problem. It’s not the American’s problem. But we -- I'm sure that we are capable of taking care of ourselves.

AMY GOODMAN: We will touch base as you travel around the country in this International Women's Month, and I thank you very much for being with us.

EMAN AHMAD KHAMAS: Thank you.

FAIZA AL-ARAJI: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Hopefully, the two other women who are supposed to be a part of your tour will also eventually make it here. I hear Mother's Day is now their goal. Well, we have been speaking with Faiza Al-Araji, who is a civil engineer and blogger; her blog AfamilyInBaghdad.blogspot.com, and we will link to it at DemocracyNow.org, and Eman Ahmad Khamas, who is a journalist, translator, and activist, a member of the Women's Will organization.

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