The Other Side

“The sky turned orange and then white. The walls shook and the windows blew in. My daughter was screaming. I covered her with my body and prayed. When the bombing paused, we ran into the street. Our neighbor's house was gone. Just gone. There was a crater where their living room had been. We found their youngest daughter's shoe three blocks away.”

“They told us to leave, but my father could not walk. We stayed. They used white phosphorus — we could see it burning through the night like rain made of fire. My cousin's skin melted. That is the only word for it. The doctors had nothing. No medicine, no clean water. We wrapped his burns in bedsheets soaked in river water. He died on the third day.”

“We were celebrating. There was music, dancing. The children were playing. Then the planes came. They hit the house, and then they came back and hit the people who were trying to rescue survivors. Forty-two people died. Women, children, the elderly. The Americans said we were insurgents. We were a wedding.”

“I am a doctor. I have seen what American weapons do to human bodies. Cluster bomblets that tear children apart. Depleted uranium that poisons the water and soil. In Fallujah, we documented birth defects at rates higher than Hiroshima. Babies born without brains, without limbs, with organs outside their bodies. Nobody in America sees this.”

“The coalition said they were liberating us from ISIS. But the liberation killed us too. My street was hit by an airstrike on March 17. Over 100 people — families sheltering in basements — were killed in a single building collapse. We could hear survivors screaming under the concrete for three days. We had no equipment to dig them out. The smell lasted for weeks.”

“It was a wedding. My uncle's son was getting married. There were maybe 100 people celebrating. The bomb hit the women's area. Thirty-seven people died — most of them women and children. My aunt, my cousins, the bride's sisters. The Americans said they were targeting Taliban. There were no Taliban. Only a family celebrating.”

“The first strike hit the main building at 2:08 a.m. Patients burned in their beds. Staff tried to move the wounded, and then the plane came back. Again. And again. For over an hour. We called NATO, we called Kabul, we called everyone. The coordinates of our hospital had been shared repeatedly. They knew exactly what they were hitting. Forty-two people died — patients, doctors, nurses, support staff.”

“American soldiers came to our house in the night. They killed my brother, my cousin, and three women — two of them were pregnant. Then they dug the bullets out of the women's bodies with knives to hide the evidence. They told the media it was an "honor killing" they discovered. We knew the truth. It took years for anyone to believe us.”

“My mother was in the field picking okra. The drone hit. My children were nearby. My daughter Nabila, who was nine, saw her grandmother blown apart. My son Zubair had shrapnel wounds all over his body. When I took them to America to testify before Congress, only five members showed up. Five, out of 535.”

“Napalm is the most terrible pain you can imagine. Water boils at 100 degrees; napalm generates temperatures of 800 to 1,200 degrees. My clothes burned off. My skin burned off. I was nine years old, running down that road, and all I could think was: I am going to die. I spent fourteen months in the hospital. Seventeen surgeries. But the scars inside were worse.”

“I was eleven years old during My Lai. I watched American soldiers shoot my mother while she held my one-year-old brother. They shot her and then shot him. Then they threw their bodies into a ditch with hundreds of others. I survived because I was buried under the dead. I lay there, covered in my mother's blood, not moving, for hours.”

“My husband was exposed to the chemicals during the war. Our first two children were born healthy — before the spraying. After the spraying, I gave birth to three children with deformities. One could not walk, one could not see, one died at age four. The Americans sprayed their poison on our forests and our water, and three generations later, our grandchildren are still being born with missing limbs and tumors.”

“The school had 400 children inside. The missile hit the building next door — a power station, they said — but the blast destroyed the school wall. Twenty-three children died. My daughter lost both legs. She is seven years old. She asks me every day when she can go back to school. I don't know what to tell her because there is no school anymore.”

“I am an engineer. I opposed the regime. I went to the 2022 protests for Mahsa Amini — I was arrested, beaten. And now America bombs us and says it is for our freedom. My apartment building was hit because it was near a telecommunications center. Eleven of my neighbors are dead. Is this freedom? We wanted change, but not like this. Never like this.”

“We left with nothing. My husband carried our baby and I held our son's hand and we walked. The highway was cratered from bombs. Cars were burning. There were bodies. My son saw things no child should see. We walked for two days to reach my sister in Kerman. Now there are 200,000 of us here, displaced, sleeping in mosques and parking garages.”

“The bus was full of boys coming back from summer camp. They were between six and eleven years old. The bomb — a 500-pound American-made bomb, a Lockheed Martin MK-82 — hit the bus directly. Forty children died. Forty. Their backpacks were still on their backs. We collected the pieces of our children from the street.”

“They bombed the funeral hall. Over 1,000 people were inside mourning. The first bomb hit and people tried to run. Then a second bomb hit the people fleeing. One hundred and forty people died, 600 were wounded. This is called a "double tap" — they hit once, wait for rescuers, then hit again. The Saudis did it with American planes, American bombs, American intelligence.”

“NATO said they were only targeting military sites. But our neighborhood was flattened. My family's home — destroyed. Fifty-three people in our district died from the bombing. After Gaddafi fell, it got worse. The militias came. There was no law, no police, no state. We went from dictatorship to chaos. Ten years later, we still have no functioning government.”

“I am a journalist. I have photographed the aftermath of 60 drone strikes. For every militant killed, there are 10 or 15 civilians. I have photographs of children's bodies, of women pulled from rubble. The Americans count every dead male over 15 as a "militant." My nephew was 16. He was a student. They called him a militant because he was old enough.”

“It was a jirga — a peace meeting. Tribal elders had gathered to settle a dispute over a chromite mine. There were over 40 men sitting in the open. Everyone in the area knew about the meeting. The drones hit them directly. At least 42 people died, including tribal elders who had been working with the Pakistani government. The CIA called them all militants.”

“My husband was a farmer. He was in the field with two other men when the airstrike hit. The Americans said they killed al-Shabaab fighters. My husband had never held a gun. He grew sorghum. His friends were farmers too. No one came to investigate. No one apologized. No one paid compensation. Three farmers dead, and the Americans moved on to the next strike.”

“I was collecting water from the well with my daughter when the explosion happened. The house nearby was destroyed. A woman named Nurto — she shared my name — died along with her two children. The youngest was three months old. We pulled the baby from the rubble. Already gone. AFRICOM said they killed two terrorists. They killed a mother and her babies.”