All I knew during that time was that it was ordinary Iraqis, not the political elite and certainly not Saddam himself, who suffered the most under the sanctions. Our hospitals and markets collapsed. Medicine became more expensive, and flour was cut with gypsum, which is more often used to make cement. The deterioration was most clear to me in the schools. Once Iraq’s education system had attracted students from all over the Middle East, but under the sanctions it crumbled. Teachers’ salaries were reduced to nothing, and so teachers became hard to find, even though nearly 50 percent of Iraqi
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