His hands were bleeding and his eyes filled with tears as, four years ago, he slammed a sledgehammer into the tiled plinth that held a 20ft bronze statue of Saddam Hussein. Then Kadhim al-Jubouri spoke of his joy at being the leader of the crowd that toppled the statue in Baghdad's Firdous Square. Now, he is filled with nothing but regret. The moment became symbolic across the world as it signalled the fall of the dictator. Wearing a black vest, Mr al-Jubouri, an Iraqi weightlifting champion, pounded through the concrete in an attempt to smash the statue and all it meant to him. Now, on the fourth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, he says: "I really regret bringing down the statue. The Americans are worse than the dictatorship. Every day is worse than the previous day."
His hands were bleeding and his eyes filled with tears as, four years ago, he slammed a sledgehammer into the tiled plinth that held a 20ft bronze statue of Saddam Hussein. Then Kadhim al-Jubouri spoke of his joy at being the leader of the crowd that toppled the statue in Baghdad's Firdous Square. Now, he is filled with nothing but regret.
The moment became symbolic across the world as it signalled the fall of the dictator. Wearing a black vest, Mr al-Jubouri, an Iraqi weightlifting champion, pounded through the concrete in an attempt to smash the statue and all it meant to him. Now, on the fourth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, he says: "I really regret bringing down the statue. The Americans are worse than the dictatorship. Every day is worse than the previous day."
US soldier guilty of Iraq deaths
Iraq Attacks Show Insurgent Resilience
From hope to despair in Baghdad
Death on the way to Basra
-Number Of Iraqi Civilians Slaughtered In America's War on Iraq - At Least 655,000 + +
-Number of U.S. Military Personnel Sacrificed (Officially acknowledged) In America's War On Iraq 3,218
-Cost of America's War in Iraq
$409,364,138,199To see more details, click here.
Furious Event
So let's return again to treachery
And begin where we left off, with astounding loss,
Or confer with the quagmire
Next to the potent stream of scarlet on the eager soil,
Always there to remind us
With the next furious event…
Its face hanging like posthumous honors
Upon the lowering of a hero in harms way
Or, now that failure is indeed in front of us,
Both eyes wide-open as if we’d stumbled into this nightmare.
© 2007 mrp/thepoetryman