Karaih Hamoodi, killed by George W. Bush and Tony Blair, aged 70
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Karaih, who died on April 5 from a missile that landed on her home, was the matriarch of the Hamoodis’ extended family, a respected clan of professionals from Basra. She gave birth to 12 children; two died at birth, and the surviving 10, six boys and four girls, stayed close to her all her life. The eight-bedroom family house that she shared with her husband Abid was the focal point for the extended family, who came together most evenings for dinner.
Karaih was born in 1932 in the city of Misam, which was previously known as Amaara. Her father worked as an environmental health officer and her mother looked after her six children: three daughters, of which Karaih was the youngest, and three sons. All have died except for her youngest brother, Hamid al-Baseer, who was born blind, and is now famous in Iraq as a poet and author. It was Karaih whose job it was to teach him to read.
Karaih’s husband Abid was her second cousin. While her background was middle-class, Abid came from a very poor family, and he was the only member of his immediate family who worked. They married in 1950, and moved to Basra so that he could take up a post as safety officer for British Petroleum in the same year. Karaih had her first child in 1951.
Like most of the Hamoodis, Karaih was a moderate Muslim, a Shia by birth who did not use the faith as a badge of identity. “These definitions of Sunni and Shia only came into being with the new regime in the 70s - nobody in Iraq was worried about them before,” says her son Sudad, now a British national living in Manchester. Karaih had visited Sudad regularly in England, and loved to travel: she first visited Europe in 1969 and had been back a number of times since.
In the years following her marriage, Karaih had three servants: one to cook, one to clean, and one to help look after the children. Her life was devoted to looking after her children and her husband, and when she died she was holding two children in her arms: her grandsons Amaar, 3, and Hassan, 9.
She was known and loved throughout Basra, with a huge circle of friends. Her funeral, and that of her son, daughter and seven grandchildren - all of whom died in the missile attack - continued for over a month, with a stream of people coming to the house to pay their respects. Her family remember her as an extremely happy person who was one of the most honest people in the city: it was said that she could be trusted with anyone’s money, gold or secrets.
With three of her sons living in Manchester, Karaih had a lot of affection for the British people, but little for the British government. “She hated Tony Blair,” remembers Sudad. “She knew that if Blair and Bush started war, she was going to die.”
In the first week of February, Karaih asked Sudad to visit her in Basra, saying that she wanted to see him for 24 hours. “She said that she wanted to see me before she went. All her life she never put the television on. She had started to watch the news for the first time. She knew that she was going.”
While never being involved in politics, Karaih also hated Saddam. She always told her family that she could not wait for the day that she would see him go; as it happened, she went before him. On April 5 at 5.30am, two missiles hit the Hamoodi’s family house. Karaih’s husband Abid had gathered his family to sleep in a storeroom at the back of the house, believing it was the safest place to be.
There were no windows to the three-metre-by-three-metre room, which was protected by two layers of walls. The room was buried by rubble after the blast. It is most likely that Karaih, along with her son, her daughter and seven of her grandchildren, died from suffocation. Abid succeeded in pulling their daughter Dina, and two of Dina’s three children, out of the rubble.
Wissam Hamoodi, killed by George W. Bush and Tony Blair, aged 41
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Wissam, the youngest of Karaih and Abid Hamoodi’s six sons, was his mother’s favourite. He still lived at the family home at the time of his death on April 5, but was preparing for his marriage to Maiada, a doctor he had met through friends.
Wissam was born in 1962 and grew up in Basra, where he stayed all of his life. His brothers remember him as a shy and reserved child who did not like to mix with large groups. He preferred to make a few close friends. The day after he was buried, one of them stayed by his grave from morning until nightfall.
Beyond playing football with his nieces and nephews, Wissam spent most of his time inside the family house. With three wars in Iraq over the past 20 years, he was kept busy getting water, filtering it, finding basic provisions and maintaining the house.
After his elder brothers left home, Wissam stayed behind to look after his parents, and his mother was strongly opposed to his forthcoming marriage. Because of the dangers of moving across the city, Wissam’s fiancee Maiada did not know of his death until the day of his funeral.
Wissam studied at Jumoria school, a local primary school, and at Dahrir High School before going to Makazai high school, considered one of the best schools in Basra. He worked as an air-conditioning engineer, and had recently retrained in information technology to be a computer technician. Although not a staunch Muslim, he had started praying regularly since war began to look likely.
When the missiles hit the house, Wissam was holding two of his brother Akram’s children: Zina, 12, and Moustafa, 13. They died with him. Next to Wissam was his sister Zina, who survived after being pulled out by her father. The surviving family “cannot make eye contact with each other now”, says Zina, a university teacher. “We just start crying all the time.”
Ihab Hamoodi, killed by George W. Bush and Tony Blair, aged 32
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Ihab, who died alongside nine members of her family on April 5, qualified in January as a consultant gynaecologist. A lifelong resident of Basra, she worked at Basra teaching hospital, one of the best hospitals in Iraq, along with her husband; her sister Dina, a biologist whose two-year-old son Amaar was also killed, Dina’s husband Mohammed Abdul Qadar, a consultant neurologist, and her brother Akram, the hospital’s director, who lost four of his five children in the attack.
Ihab attended Jumoria primary school before moving to Ashaar school for girls, then studied medicine at Basra University and took her diploma at Baghdad University. She married in 2002, and gave birth to her first daughter, Noor Al-Huda, in November. Her family remember her as honest and kind, and always wanting to help the poor people of her city. “Before she got married, she never brought her wages home,” says her brother Sudad. “Because she lived in the family house, she didn’t need anything, so all her wages went on people who needed money.”
Ihab and her husband had recently bought a new house and a new car. The house was near the Hamoodi’s family home, where the couple ate most evenings. In the days after her death, the couple’s house was looted and emptied. The thieves took all their photographs, as well as their marriage certificate. Ihab’s husband does not have a picture of his wife; all that is left is a video made of the wedding by Sudad. He has promised to make a copy of it as soon as he returns to Manchester.