PressEthic

Western media in general and American media in particular have done their best to cover most of the events and consequences of the US led war on Iraq in 2003. Many changes, developments, acts of violence were conveyed for the western public. They have more or less introduced the public to the events in Iraq.

Since I have been following the western media to watch the war and its consequences form a western media eye, I have noticed a big gap in their coverage. There are two important new phenomena that were missed or at least have not been written about excessively, are spread of Aids and Drugs in Iraqi society, especially in the Shiite dominant south.

In the middle of 1990s, after Saddam’s regime announced an Islamic rule –which was all for the sake of taking hearts and minds of the Islamic world after the 1991 gulf war- most of the Iraqi prostitutes fled Iraq to countries like Syria and Jordan.

After the fall of Saddam in 2003, most of the prostitutes returned to Iraq Although some others still flee the current hardship in unstable Iraq. And because of lack of sexual education among the prostitution community, some of them had already carried HIV/Aids. Imagine what would happen when many hungry young Iraqis became their regular customers.

The other new phenomenon that was spread in Iraq was drug trafficking. Drug traffickers from Iran, as one of the biggest exporters of drugs in the region, had smuggled a lot of drugs into Iraq’s southern cities.

I don’t want to talk about the impacts of these two phenomena in the Iraqi society, but my point is that they are not covered by the American media, which consider Iraq situation as one the priorities in their coverage.

Is the western public aware if this? If not, who should we blame?