A U.S. group called Voices in the Wilderness began a three-day fast and vigil to commemorate victims of the 1945 A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to call for an end to economic sanctions on Iraq.
The group has been living with families in Iraq's southernmost province of Basra since July 12. Its four members intend to stay there until September.
Group member Lisa Gizzi said they are staying with families in a poor neighborhood of Basra "so that we experience the exact sufferings of the sanctions-stricken poor Iraqis living under the merciless hot summer of Basra."
"On Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, the Japanese towns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were attacked with nuclear bombs by the United States; and on Aug. 6, 1990, the sanctions were imposed on Iraq. Both events are genocide and a crime of an international scope," Gizzi said. "And both were carried out by the United States."