WHY WE EXIST
Less than one week before the (Checkpoint One-assisted) safe arrival of one family, the head of household, an Iraqi Interpreter working with the US Armed Forces in Baghdad, received a chilling phone call from a number registered to the cell phone of a friend, colleague, and fellow interpreter. The voice on the phone was not, however, that of his friend, but it spoke a simple phrase: “You’re next.”
The tortured, lifeless and barely identifiable body of the colleague was found not long afterward, dumped on a Baghdad street. Techniques almost incomprehensible to the mind were utilized as torture… A power drill had plunged deep into the body dozens of times, and the flesh on his back had been burned off with an electric heater. The ultimate price, paid by yet another interpreter at the hands of insurgents and terrorists—their vengeance and retribution against those who align themselves with the Americans.
PUBLICATIONS OF INTEREST
Taliban Say They Killed 4 Afghan Interpreters
Betrayed: The Iraqis Who Trusted America the Most
Hounded by Insurgents, Abandoned by Us
Allies Left Behind? Iraqis Who Helped U.S. Feel ‘Betrayed,’ Marked for Death
Iraqi Interpreter: ‘Now I have no future’
Translators Dying by the Dozens in Iraq
Interpreters used by British Army ‘hunted down’ by Iraqi death squads
Interpreters executed for ‘turning their back on Iraq’
Iraqi Translators: Visas Or Death?
Iraqi translators feel ‘abandoned’
Iraqi interpreters risk their lives to aid GIs
International Federation of Interpreters Press Release – Assassinations of Iraqi Interpreters
Denmark airlifts 200 Iraqi translators and relatives
Senator Wyden et al to Secretary Gates
IRC REPORT
IRC REPORT – Iraqi Refugees in the United States: In Dire Straits
