Food, medicine and other goods were prevented from going into Iraq, and the country’s economy and its people suffered from being unable to engage in full trade with the rest of the world. Because water-treatment plants had been damaged during the First Gulf War, half the Iraqi population did not have access to clean drinking water. Inflation skyrocketed, the education system collapsed and, as Hadani Ditmars wrote in Dancing in the No-Fly Zone: A Woman’s Journey Through Iraq, “almost overnight, the lives of most Iraqi citizens went from comfortable to desperate.” The sanctions continued until 2003, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, according to UNICEF. Sara is old enough to remember those years under sanctions. She lives in the Hashimi district of Amman, near the older downtown. There is a shiny new shopping mall nearby. Behind the wide, bright streets of the commercial area are houses full of small apartments that house many Iraqis, including Sara, her two sisters, her mother and a cousin.
