July 13, 2008

It is Saturday night in Beirut, restaurants, entertainment places and beaches are totally full, a usual weekend in Lebanon.

My Saturday night was a bit different from the traditional Lebanese weekend? A meeting with ex-member of Mehdi army, recently lives in Lebanon and this is what he told me:

I was a driver, I get $500 each time I drive the 4×4 GMC given to me by the "Army" to "Udhaim" [near Kirkuk]. There in the small city I go to a small house in a very poor district, they give me a large suitcase full of American dollars to deliver it back to Sadr-City - Baghdad. I don’t know how much exactly in the bag because I never counted the money but from the size of the suitcase I can imagine that the total cash is something about 1 Million Dollar.

I also get an open envelope, I looked inside the envelope few times and I saw a paper with a list of names of people I don’t know, but after few travels and looking at the names I once saw few names of people I know in my neighborhood.

After few days, I realized that the list is a death-list, after the people I know are assassinated. I started to check the names in each travel but I never dared to warn anybody in the list.

Afetr Muqtada Al-Sadr announced the reformation of Mahdi Army, they told me that they don’t need me anymore and took away the GMC car from me.

For few weeks I worked as a taxi driver, but the income was too little, so I decided to send my family to Syria and I came to Lebanon looking for job here.