A Witness to 4 Iraqi Wars, but No More Mohammed Hussein is a former head of the newsroom in The New York Times's Baghdad bureau. He fled to Syria in 2007 at the height of the sectarian fighting, returned in 2008 when the situation improved, then moved to the United States with his family in 2010 under a program in which Iraqi interpreters working with Americans could receive special immigrant visas. His previous blog posts can be read here. One of my few memories from childhood is feeling horror at the sound of sirens. That was while my home country was at war with Iran - I was very young, and I did not really know what war was. We lived in Baghdad, and I remember my parents" painting the windows of our house a dark color to camouflage us against the nightly Iranian air raids. That war was followed by three more in Iraq, and I lived through all of them. No one ever really won. Looking back, I'm reminded mostly of all the young men who lost their lives; of all the destroyed buildings - private houses, power stations, schools; of the huge number of people disabled, of widows and orphans left behind. The war with Iran ended after eight years, in 1988. Our country's people and wealth had been consumed. But just two years later, another war - Iraq invaded Kuwait, leading to international sanctions and more devastation. Just a couple of days before the United States launched Operation Desert Storm, some distant relatives of ours moved to Baghdad after living in Kuwait for 20 years. The whole family was killed when a stray cruise missile struck their house in Baghdad. I understood then that war is blind, a monster crushing all around it, making no exception for civilians, children, old people. The first war I knew as an adult was when the coalition led by the United States and Britain toppled Saddam Hussein's government in 2003. During that war, my family didn't leave our house in southeast Baghdad. Most of our neighbors left theirs and went to other Iraqi provinces, believing that the big and final battle would be in Baghdad. I will never forget the morning in April 2003 when the American ground forces passed through the neighborhood that I lived in, making their way to the airport. The sky was so dark and smoky, and filled with the ugly growl of A10 warplanes as they struck at Iraqi ground forces. I had never thought it could come to this, and the images of burning bodies behind the steering wheels of cars will never leave my head. As the American forces moved quickly toward Baghdad, the feeling in the city was gloomy. But for me, and I believe for most Iraqis at that time, there was a thought that great things never come without great sacrifices. Despite all the miscalculations and tragedies of that war, the American forces so often played an important role as a neutral side, their presence a guarantor for all parties. All Iraqis remember how the American forces hunted down the Shiite militant groups that were supported by Iran, and when the American forces called upon Sunni insurgency groups to leave their arms and organized them into the so-called Awakening Councils. Another time we saw the American troops deploy their troops in the disputed oil-rich city of Kirkuk to avoid possible clashes between Kurdish fighters, the pesh merga, and the Iraqi Army units controlled by the central government in Baghdad. I am not saying that there were not any mistakes or negative consequences during and after the war, but I'm convinced that the Americans were making it easier to establish a democratic experience in Iraq. However, the Iraqi political leaders did not get it right. Instead, they turned everything upside down, exposing the country to regional divisions instead of living in coexistence. Then the fourth war, and the worst - a civil war. In February 2006, a radical Sunni group blew up Al Askari Shrine, a revered Shiite site in Samarra, and that was the spark. Sectarian war, all the Iraqi people involved in the most painful violence I've ever seen, turning the whole country into a hell. Every single day, there were bombings targeting civilians and mosques. Innocent people from this sect or that religion were kidnapped and tortured with electric drills and acid injections. Bodies of victims were thrown onto the streets. The country drowned in blood, and Iraqi society fractured. It may take decades to recover. I have many stories to tell about that dreadful period. One of my father's friends was kidnapped, and the kidnappers asked for a ransom. His family borrowed and collected money from here and there to secure the ransom. A couple of days after they paid it, they found their father dead. Another incident I remember involved one of our neighbors, a man nearly 70 years old. He, too, was kidnapped, then released a couple of days after and died right after his release. I went to give my condolences to his family, and talked to one of his sons. He said that his father told them that he had been injected with kerosene. Today, three years after most American soldiers withdrew from Iraq, we see that the whole country is on the brink of another round of sectarian war. Once again there are assassination campaigns by killers using silenced weapons, threats to force Sunni and Shiite families from their neighborhoods, and car bombs striking here and there all around the country. As the political quarrel among Iraqi leaders continues, I cannot help but think how similar it all is to the 2006-7 civil war. Each political group in Iraq has its own accusing tune. Sunnis are always complaining about what they called marginalization and exclusion from power, while on the other side we see the Shiite-led government calling everyone that opposes it a terrorist. As for Kurds, they are trying hard to establish a Kurdish nationality separate from the Arabs, without missing any opportunity that may lead to the establishment of their own state. Within those three major players, the other Iraqi minorities have been lost. Before the American withdrawal, the majority of Iraqi people and leaders blamed the American presence as the only reason behind all the instability in Iraq, but now I do not know who can be blamed for what is happening. I saw all these wars, lived through them and finally came to the realization that Iraq is not a decent place for my family. We left in 2010, moving to a place where we could bring up children in an environment away from sectarian violence and power struggles. I have no plans to return anytime soon.