A step on the road.

Yesterday, the Iraqis turned another page from the black pages of the past.
A page that the tyrant wrote with his own hand, and added his ugly portrait to it.
Yesterday, all the Iraqis made up their mind to get rid of Saddam’s currency and Saddam’s face forever. Some might say that this operation wasn’t the decision of the Iraqi people, and that it was forced by foreigners. So here I’m going to point to what happened in the last few months, from which you can see that there was a strong will and determination from the Iraqi people to change the currency.
The tyrant was obsessed with his own figure to the extent that he decided to force all Iraqis to look attentively at his picture every day and in all their deals, and when he stuck his portrait on the money, he forced us to carry his face with us every where and to look at it every time we needed to buy or sell anything. What kind of psychological problems our jailor had?!
The currency overlap operation shows clearly the Iraqis’ ability to change, and their great will to cooperate in everything that serves the country in this new age.
The mission was accomplished with minimal hardships, and with smoothness that makes it an example for the others.
The mercenary of the darkness tried to entangle the operation from the beginning through sending threats to the banks and those who deal with the new currency, and that urged the coalition forces and the IP to provide sufficient protection for the banks, and those threats couldn’t prohibit the Iraqis from queuing to replace the old currency. It was a magnificent scene for order and challenge, yes, we want the change and we will work hard for it.
The overlap had it’s positive influence on the economy, and brought back the people’s trust in the Iraqi dinar.
We have recovered something that we lost a long time ago. Yes we support every action serves our country and improves the life conditions of our people.
Yes, we may make wrong decisions sometimes and right decisions in other times, that’s the case with every new beginning, and it’s normal to find some confusion. Actually the overlap was a good indicator to a better future and we hope that the coming steps of the reconstruction process will witness the same good order and performance and carry the same challenge spirit.

Snap shots from the overlap process:
:: the banks kept working yesterday until 9 pm exceeding the official work hours to guarantee that those who have been late will have the opportunity to replace the old money.
:: we could see almost every day a person walking in the street getting out some small notes of the old money that he has forgotten in his pocket and then he starts to tear these notes as if this action was agreed upon by everyone.
:: there’s still a problem with the small notes, as small amounts of these were printed, however, some shop keepers found a way to overcome this problem by giving a piece of candy instead of the change.
And I saw a grocer once who found a problem with finding the 100 ID note to give the change to the customer after she gave him a 250 ID, so he returned the 250 ID back to her saying” doesn’t matter, as long as we got rid of the tyrant’s ugly face”.
:: there was obvious eagerness from the neighboring countries to buy the new Iraqi currency especially from Kuwait, Jordan, and Egypt aiming to get a fast benefit, because everybody believes that the exchange price for the new currency will improve in the coming weeks.
:: the old currency disappeared about a week ago, but yesterday was the day of the end and forever.
:: the overlap process deprived the terrorists from the having the opportunity to fund their operations, as the agents of the past regime were keeping billions of ID’s and those found great difficulty to replace the money, as this action would certainly uncover their identities and the uncover the huge sums the possessed and they would never take the risk to appear in public to declare that they have all that money and they can’t trust anyone to do the job for them.
:: the overlap process reinforced the unity of Iraqis, after they were dealing with two different versions (the so called SWISS in the north, that was printed in the 80’s and the so called PRINTING in the rest of Iraq, that was printed after 1991), now they’re using the same currency.
By: Mohammed.