![]() ![]() I was beaten by Iraqi and Saudi secret police. ![]() The supreme sacrifice made for flies and maggots. Cries of the dying, sometimes for their mothers. ![]() Heads imploded into a bloody, pulpy mass. Death cuts through the linguistic barriers. I have heard the wails of those convulsed by grief as they clutch the bodies of friends and family, including children. I have felt the helplessness and the paralyzing fear, which, years later, descend on me like a freight train in the middle of the night, leaving me wrapped in coils of terror, my heart racing, my body dripping with sweat. You desperately, and not always successfully, struggle to figure out where the firing is coming from in the hopes you can avoid being hit. In a firefight you are only aware of what is happening a few feet around you. I know the chaos and disorientation of war, the constant uncertainty and confusion. RELATED: The Ukraine catastrophe and how we got here: Chronicle of a war foretold I carry within me the ghosts of dozens of those swallowed up in the violence, including my close friend, Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork, who was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone with another friend, Miguel Gil Moreno. I spent two decades as a war correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans, where I covered the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. The invasion of Ukraine, under post-Nuremberg laws, is a criminal war of aggression. Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed and angry. The invasion of Ukraine would, I expect, never have happened if these promises had been kept. It does not matter if the war is launched on the basis of lies and fabrications, as was the case in Iraq, or because of the breaking of a series of agreements with Russia, including the promise by Washington not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, not to deploy thousands of NATO troops in Eastern Europe and not to meddle in the internal affairs of nations on the Russia's border, as well as the refusal to implement the Minsk II peace agreement. Preemptive war, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, is a war crime. This article originally appeared at ScheerPost. ![]()
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