​23 years ago today, famed Iraqi artist Layla al-Attar was killed by a US cruise missile strike that destroyed her home in Baghdad, killing her husband and caretaker and blinding her daughter for life. She was just shy of her 50th birthday.
Al-Attar was director of Iraq’s National Art Museum and had become famous across the Arab World for her work depicting nature and the inner lives of Iraqi women. 
Her home was nearly destroyed in a US cruise missile strike in 1991, during the Gulf War; the 1993 strike finished the job and took her life as well.
She was also a prominent peace activist, famous for commissioning a mural that read “Bush is A Criminal” in the Al-Rashid Hotel. In January 1993, a US missile hit the hotel.
The US bombing a few months later, meanwhile, was “retaliation” for an attempted assassination against former US President Bush in Kuwait a day earlier. As a result of the history of targeting, many have speculated her killing was no accident.
These are the lives taken away by decades of US warfare on Iraq. 
These are the lives of those who dreamed of a better country and a better world, dreams left to smolder beneath the rubble of a nation that has seen no peace in decades.
And these are the lives forgotten by Americans and the rest of the world who helped take them away, the crimes that have faded from our memories and helped us forget our own complicity in the devastation unfolding across the Middle East.
These are the lives silenced by our bombs.
Rest in Peace, Layla al-Attar.