By Catherine Philp Nine years ago in the bright Kabul spring, I met a young woman called Marla Ruzicka. She was hard to miss, with her wild blonde hair and animal pyjamas peeking out from the hem of her long kameez. She was harder still to miss the morning she marched to the gates of…
Posted By Shelly Mention “war” or “armed conflict,” and many people scroll through mental images of soldiers engaged in combat or of pock-marked villages halfway across the world. But these images are just a fraction of that element. War’s impact doesn’t end when the bullets and bombs stop. Its effects stretch beyond the fighting and…
CIVIC’s associate director Marla Bertagnolli talks briefly from Jordan about the stories of Iraqi war victims who have fled to the country as refugees.
The Iraqis I met a few weeks ago are still fleeing car bombs and sniper fire, but they’re not running for their lives. Instead, they are running for a living, earning money by playing distraught civilians in a fake Iraqi province called Ghanzi. Created by the U.S. military in California’s Mojave Desert, Ghanzi is part…
A year ago tomorrow, in Baghdad, a young woman from California was killed by a suicide bomb. Marla Ruzicka was working to get aid to Iraqi civilians harmed by U.S. military operations when her car and that of her colleague Faiz Ali Salim was destroyed on the now-infamous airport road. Marla’s legacy lives on in…