But American warplanes and war plans followed her to Iraq years later, under a US president who was the son of the president who bombed Iraq when we still lived in Kuwait. This time they reduced Babylon, that once splendid, sophisticated, ancient civilization, to nothing. They made beggars of her teachers, taxi drivers of her doctors; and they made off with her treasures and artifacts. Um Buraq had arrived in Jordan in that thick human stream of refugees in the spring of 2003. “Americans are the devil,” she said.
