Dr Salih Ibrahim: Oppressed by Saddam, my family will now bear the brunt of this onslaught

I fear I may have spoken to my sisters for the last time. At the weekend I tried to telephone Widad and Dhikra, who live in Baghdad, but I couldn't get through. And now America and Britain are preparing to bomb the city and the line will soon go dead for a long time.

What a bitter taste it leaves, knowing that my sisters are being made to endure this fresh atrocity. This assault on Iraq is unjustified and cruel and I oppose it totally. Martin Luther King said: "Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows" and I feel this war will be no different.

I left Iraq in 1981, when I was 28, to study in Britain. My family were from Basra, where my older brother Ibrahim, his family, my friends and relatives still live. Although I live and work in Britain, I've always wanted to return. When I visited my homeland a few months ago I remember wishing things had been different. I looked at the pathology department in Basra where I trained and thought: "I should be teaching there." But they were still using the antiquated microscopes I used 31 years ago. In schools there was no glass in the windows and the lavatories were flooding.

Iraq deserves better than Saddam Hussein. Four of my cousins died in the Iran-Iraq war. Most Iraqis are mentally scarred. But this is not the right way to get rid of him. It is up to the people of a country to decide their rulers, not an outside power to impose its will.

The Americans talk of brilliant weapons such as "the mother of all bombs" (MOAB); people casually refer to "deaths in the thousands". Perhaps these deaths seem abstract to people when they watch the news, perhaps they can't imagine those terrible bombs actually landing on people. But when I hear of what the invasion force has planned I think of my young nephews and nieces: Safa, Marwa, Muna, Aya, Nawf, Hana, Noor and Reem and all Iraqi children. They are the ones who will bear the brunt of this war.

Many in the West seem to have difficulty accepting that Iraqis are real people, people who will grieve for the children. They are not expendable, they are not vermin. Why don't ordinary Iraqis leave Baghdad to get out of range of the bombs? But why should they leave? Four million people have already left Iraq, many because of sanctions, many because of President Saddam.

Military analysts talk about how his army will soon collapse, how soon it will be defeated by the hi-tech sophistication of America's forces, but they don't seem to appreciate that it is largely a conscript army. What do people expect these poor men to do? They feel they have to protect their homeland and it is likely they will die doing so.

What reason have the Iraqis to trust the Western powers who now come to "liberate" them? Western-imposed sanctions have killed thousands of Iraqis. America has sponsored dictators around the world. This invasion is just the latest in a long line of betrayals of the Iraqi people.

Dr Ibrahim is a consultant pathologist at St Peter's Hospital in Chertsey, Surrey.