Baghdad bloodshed holds no fear for last of Iraq's Jews

AFP ^ | August 11 2006 | Patrick Fort

[jmc1969]

In his worn sandals and gray spotted shirt 82-year-old Brahim -- one of the last Jews in Baghdad, perhaps the last -- seems tired but undaunted by the violence raging around him.

"They came to take me away three years ago and wanted me to leave," said Brahim, explaining that well-wishers had wanted to evacuate him to safety in the chaos following the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Old, but wiry and alert, Brahim remains determined to stay put.

"Why should I leave? Why change? I always lived here. I do not want to shift," said Brahim, running a hand through his thin, disheveled white hair.

Brahim lives close to the main synagogue of Baghdad, in the centre of the violent Iraqi capital where sectarian Shiite-Sunni bloodshed has left thousands dead in the past few months.

Iraq's health ministry said about 1,850 Baghdadis were killed in the month of July alone, while the UN last month reported that around 6,000 Iraqis were slain across Iraq in May and June.

Meanwhile, many tens of thousands more have fled the country or moved to areas where their ethnic or religious group is in the majority.

Those displaced are not just the Shiite and the Sunnis, staying in mixed neighbourhoods of Baghdad, but also people from the minority communities such as the Christians and the refugee Palestinians.

As a Jew, however, Brahim has nowhere else to go in Iraq. Today, he is almost all that is left of one of Mesopotamia's oldest communities.

He lives in a poorly maintained apartment. The shelves and the table are virtually empty and the electric installations are decaying with wires hanging from the ceiling.

Baghdad's main synagogue, standing behind a high beige brick wall, is located on a commercial street perpendicular to a large artery of the capital.

[Uncle Miltie]

I demand the right of return of all Iraq's Jews.

And Irans, Yemens, Jordan's, Lebanon's, Egypt's, Morocco's, etc.