http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/05/25/untold.stories.damon.iraq/index.html"He was cut to pieces," he said. "His hands and feet were chopped off. And he was decapitated."
For a long time, Iraqis would say that it was "outsiders" that were carrying out such atrocities. The truth that is so hard to accept for many is that that often was not the case.
Iraqis turned on each other, neighbors slaughtered neighbors, friends betrayed one another. It was the sheer degradation of society on a shocking and utterly petrifying scale.
Now that there is a semblance of so-called stability, we can start to put a face and name to the victims and begin to try and understand and impart the horrors of what millions of Iraqis lived through and tens of thousands died from. It is only now that we can begin to comprehend the magnitude of what Iraqis went through.
The political and military leadership speak in positive overtones. We're watching U.S. troops fulfill a timeline to "end the war," so desperate is America for some sort of ending.
But it is not over. For Iraqis it's far from over. In many ways it is just beginning.