About WeOweItToThem.com

This site exists to change the current policy of the British Government as soon as possible, to ensure the future safety of Iraqi translators and other Iraqi nationals. These are people who now face persecution because of their good-faith work with US and UK Coalition Forces since March 2003.

Wherever your politics, the current situation is morally disgraceful. I am ashamed at our Government's inaction and delay in addressing this matter - quite simply, that delay is costing lives.

Those Iraqis, who were employed by the UK and US since March 2003 onward, are being intimidated, tortured and murdered. Every week of delay by our Government causes further needless loss and suffering to those who helped in the aftermath of the US-led invasion in March 2003.

Now that the British Army has no presence in Basra City, these threats have predictably increased. Read this article aloud, if you can.

Get out or die, security force chief tells interpreters for British Army

If you too are ashamed that your Government is delaying rather than intervening, please: join us, and do something about it, now.

Contact your elected representative, and tell them how you feel, and demand that they take action on your behalf.

As somebody who employed interpreters in 2003, and repeatedly trusted my life on their competence and commitment, I am now ashamed that my Government appears to be ignoring them, and hoping that "the problem will go away".

It will not; and by not acting promptly to meet their moral obligations, our leaders are complicit in the ongoing daily intimidation on the streets of Iraq, Syria and Jordan of ordinary Iraqis who volunteered to assist in the aftermath of war, and to whom many of us now owe our lives.

Read their desperate individual testimonies here, and put aside for a moment your previous feelings concerning the rights and wrongs of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and "Operation Telic", and the subsequent effect on the country of Iraq.

Instead, ask yourself: how is it right that the very people that have provided, and continue to provide, an essential interface between our military forces and the Iraqi populace—often exposed to great daily danger through their sheer proximity to our forces—should now be offered no form of sanctuary in the US or UK after they come under direct and sustained personal threat—except for the lengthy, expensive and uncertain process of applying endlessly to indifferent or incompetent bloodless bureaucrats, in a nightmarish Kafka-esque search for asylum?

Prior to March 2003, my interpreters were students, engineers, oil workers, scholars and housewives.

All had one thing in common; they all volunteered to assist in helping Iraq to recover, following the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime.

None of them merely "did it for the money", nor did they do it to ingratiate themselves with a long-term occupation force—we told them we would head smartly for the exits when we'd done the job.

Instead, they stepped forward to help as a reflex of basic humanity, probably in the same way that you or I would do so after finding ourselves on the scene of a multiple car crash.

Since then, executions, torture and intimidation have become commonplace; and many of them, forced to flee for their lives, are now living as refugees in other Middle East countries.

Both the Polish and Danish governments have evacuated Iraqis who were put at risk by employment by their own Coalition Forces. I welcome these actions, and call upon US and UK leaders to follow the example of Poland and Denmark, and to address this issue as a matter of grave urgency.

If, having read their stories, you do recognize as clearly as I that this matter cannot, should not and must not be neglected, because we do indeed "owe it to them", then I will count on you to help me take action now.