The Mothers Who Stay and the Children Who Are Worth Nothing

By Zein Ahmed

On three decades of conflict, and who pays the price every single time.

There is a question that haunts me, and I cannot shake it.

When the bombs fell on Baghdad in 2003, when the missiles hit hospitals in Sana'a, when entire neighborhoods in Gaza were reduced to dust — where were the bankers who financed the weapons contracts? Where were the defense executives whose stock prices surged with every news bulletin? Where were the politicians who stood at podiums and spoke of liberation and democracy?

They were home. Safe. Comfortable. Getting richer. And the women of Iraq were burying their children.

Wars are always sold to us as necessary. They are never paid for by those who sell them.

For thirty years — from the Gulf War in 1991 to the ongoing devastation in Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon and Iran — we have watched a pattern repeat itself with sickening precision. A Muslim-majority country is identified as a threat, a target, a problem to be solved. The machinery of the most powerful military and financial systems on earth is mobilized. Bombs are dropped. Sanctions are imposed. Governments are toppled.
And then the cameras leave.

But the mothers stay. They stay in the rubble of what was once a kitchen, a school, a hospital. They stay with children who have lost limbs, eyesight, fathers, futures. They stay because they have nowhere to go — or because the borders are closed to them, or because the boats across the sea are not safe, or because the countries that bombed them do not want to receive them.

In Iraq, it is estimated that over 500,000 children died as a direct result of the sanctions regime imposed throughout the 1990s — before a single soldier from the 2003 invasion had even boarded a plane. When a senior American official was asked on television whether those children's deaths were "worth it," she said yes. Five hundred thousand children. Worth it.

In Afghanistan, two decades of war produced the highest maternal mortality rate on earth. Girls' schools were bombed and burned. An entire generation of young women was denied education — not only by the Taliban, but by the conditions of endless conflict that made any stable society impossible. When the last troops withdrew in 2021, they left behind the women who had believed the promises. They left fast.

In Syria, fourteen million people were displaced. Fourteen million. The largest refugee crisis since the Second World War. Seventy-five percent of those refugees were women and children. They crossed deserts, survived detention camps, crossed seas in boats never designed to carry human beings. Many did not make it. The men who decided to fund and arm various factions in that conflict, who turned a civil uprising into a proxy war between competing geopolitical interests — they held press conferences about it.

In Yemen, one child dies every ten minutes. That is not a metaphor. That is a statistic from Save the Children. The war is sustained by weapons sold by some of the world's wealthiest nations to a coalition whose conduct has been repeatedly flagged for war crimes. The arms deals are worth billions. The children are worth nothing.

In Gaza, the numbers have become too large to hold. Over seventy percent of casualties are women and children. Hospitals have been struck. Schools sheltering displaced families have been hit. Aid convoys have been blocked. The word "genocide" — which carries a precise legal meaning — is being used by international courts, human rights organizations, and UN bodies. The business of war, meanwhile, continues. Share prices in the defense sector have risen.

This is not accidental. This is structural.

The corporate and banking systems that sustain these wars are not soulless by mistake. They were built without souls deliberately, because a soul would get in the way of the profit margin. Defence contractors do not profit from peace. Arms dealers do not benefit from stability. The financial instruments that fund these conflicts are held by institutions and individuals who will never hear a bomb, never lose a child, never sleep in a tent, never drink contaminated water, never watch their daughter stop going to school because it is no longer safe.

The top one percent of the global wealth distribution — the class that owns the banks, the weapons manufacturers, the media empires that shape how these wars are reported — they are insulated from every consequence of the violence they enable. The losses are socialized. Entire societies bear them. The gains are privatized. They flow upward, always upward, to people whose names most of us will never know.

And to justify it all — to keep the rest of us from asking too many questions — a story must be told. A story about who the enemy is. About which people are civilized and which are not. About which religions represent peace and which represent terror. About which children are innocent and which are, somehow, acceptable losses.

For thirty years, that story has had a consistent cast of villains. They look a certain way. They pray a certain way. They come from certain countries. Their names are difficult for Western newsreaders to pronounce, and this seems, somehow, to be held against them.
I want to be clear about what this is. It is not a clash of civilizations. It is not a war on terror. It is a war on particular people, dressed up in the language of universal values, funded by specific financial interests, and justified through the deliberate misrepresentation of a faith — Islam — that at its heart teaches exactly what its name means: peace. Submission not to power, but to something greater than power. Justice. Compassion. The protection of the widow, the orphan, the stranger.

The women of Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria and Yemen and Palestine are not the victims of their religion. They are the victims of a system that needed an enemy and chose them.

No one wins these wars. No one.

The soldiers who return home carry wounds that never fully heal. The countries that launch the wars accrue debts — financial, moral, generational — that burden their own working people for decades. The "stability" that was promised never arrives. The democracy that was advertised is never delivered. The region is left more fractured, more dangerous, more desperate than it was before.

And the women and children who were never consulted, never warned, never given a choice — they live with it forever. Or they do not live at all.

I think about this when I sit with artisans in communities that the world might call underdeveloped. Women who create extraordinary things with their hands. Women who have built networks of trust and mutual support that no institution funded them to build. Women whose knowledge, craft, and dignity have survived despite everything the modern world has thrown at them.

They are not waiting to be saved. They were never the problem.

The problem is a system that measures human life in strategic value and quarterly returns. The problem is a global order in which the decision to destroy a city can be made in a boardroom, ratified in a parliament, and executed with a technology so precise and so remote that the person pressing the button never has to see a face.

What do we do with this?

We name it. We refuse the comfortable story that these wars were necessary, that the suffering was regrettable but inevitable, that the people who built and sold and launched these conflicts acted in good faith.

We listen to the women who survived them — not as victims to be pitied, but as witnesses whose testimony we are obligated to carry.

We invest in what actually builds resilience: communities, relationships, craft, solidarity, the slow and unglamorous work of trust.

And we stop pretending that the people who profit from war share our values, or our world, or our humanity.

Because they do not.

The wars of the last thirty years did not happen to abstract populations. They happened to mothers. To daughters. To girls who wanted to go to school. To women who wanted to work, to create, to build something of their own.

Their stories are not footnotes. They are the main text.

Everything else — the strategy, the geopolitics, the press conferences — is the footnote.

Header image: a painting by Sliman Mansour.