FOR Iraqis, 9/11 led us to our current life of death and destruction.

A sad moment for Americans was the reason for a sad life for us. With 3,000 civilians killed every four weeks, my country suffers its own 9/11 on a monthly basis.

A few months before 9/11 my sister bought some American medical books because she was planning to study in the States.

I called her after I saw the towers burning on TV and said: "Forget it - you are not going to make it there any more."

How would it affect our life? Or how my people would come to suffer for Saudis attacking American buildings? I didn’t bother finding answers for all these questions that day. The only thing I said to my sister before ending the conversation: "We will be in big trouble soon."

Last week thugs tortured and killed my friend Mahmoud, a 51 year old father of three children, just for being an unlucky Shia who by accident drove by a Sunni neighborhood.

To me those thugs are no different from the American soldiers who killed the family of a 10-year-old girl named Iman in Haditha last November.

I think about Iman watching her parents die. Then I remember seeing the body of my friend Mahmoud last week at the morgue, with burns and bruises covering every part of his body.

Terror is terror, no matter how it is dressed up, or who performs the act.

Terrorists don’t need to wear balaclavas or grow beards. They sometimes come in proper uniforms, and call themselves Marines, like the 10-year old- girl’s family killers.

Whether it was the collapse of the Twin Towers or the missile from an F-16 plane hitting a wedding party in Anbar in the west of Iraq more than a year ago, innocent people have lost their lives.

The other night, I was watching a documentary on the Al-Jazeera satellite news channel about the September 11 attack. Listening to the stories told by the survivors was terrifying for me. The scene of that airplane hitting the tower was as horrible as the scene of the wreckage of a red old Passat car that I saw after it was run over by an American tank in west Baghdad in 2004, crushing the mother, father and their young child.

Those people who died under the rubble of the Twin Towers looked similar to those Iraqis who died under the American barrage. We all lost loved ones - but here we continue to lose them.

Who knows why President Bush, Saddam Hussein and even Bin Laden did what they did? But Americans need to understand that 9/11 is not only theirs anymore, after they chose to make the suffering sharable.

At least in their case they still have the chance every year to hold a memorial for the sad event and to pray for the victims. For us the event is still going on - and it’s not clear yet who should be praying for whom, as any of us is a victim waiting for his 9/11 to come.

Life in Iraq wasn’t great under Saddam but there was only one way to suffer, decided by the dictator. With the American freedom that was offered to my nation, people got the choice of how to suffer, but to suffer is a must.

Freedom can not be offered to a dead nation. Unfortuanately, what America was looking for has never been in my country.

Now I sit in Baghdad and listen to American commentators debating about whether their nation is now safer. It probably is, but they have messed up our lives, as if they exported their troubles to us.

Times Recommends

• Mandela’s tribe threatens President Zuma
• The French empire strikes back
• Wife of cheating governor exacts a political revenge