WASHINGTON, December 2 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - With anti-war campaigns going on in different spots around the world, a growing peace movement, called Mothers Against War has been gaining momentum and raises the possibility of much more dissent if U.S. bombs begin falling on Baghdad.

The idea was hatched on a bright day in August, when Daphne Reed was celebrating her daughter's and granddaughter's birthdays, and the talk around the living room sofa turned to war, reported Washington Post on Monday, December 2.

Reed began worrying that her 25-year-old grandson, who spent four years in the Coast Guard, might be called to serve if the United States were to invade Iraq. Her family also wondered why the United States was threatening to invade Iraq even before the United Nations weapons inspections began.

Reed told the daily that “she fretted over the particular suffering that would befall Iraqi women; their sons and husbands would be killed and that the women would be left in the rubble to fend off contaminated water and starvation.”

"I said that all mothers should automatically be against war," Reed said. "It was against their nature to be violent instead of nurturing." Maybe, she said, it was time to start a movement -- Mothers Against War.

The retired Hampshire College drama teacher e-mailed about 15 parents in her address book. Before long, Mothers Against War had 50 core members, and thousands of supporters around the country and the world, the Post said.

Most members of Mothers Against War are grandmothers in their seventies whose lives are already full. Yet they spend hours a day on the Internet, reading and spreading information on Iraq and the United States and planning for marches, e-mail campaigns and teach-ins, the paper said.

Having lived through the Vietnam antiwar movement, which took years to build, the Mothers Against War find themselves part of a fast-growing movement of people from every walk of life, from every political stripe.

The paper said that those who still remember the horrors of the Vietnam War, like the members of Mothers Against War, find themselves connected to this new antiwar movement on a personal as well as ideological level.

The other day, as half a dozen core members sat in Daphne Reed's living room, they remembered friends who had fled to Canada to shield their sons from the military draft, friends who died in the war, and lives forever changed by the war.

Reed, recalling the four wars she has seen this country involved in during her lifetime, said she is often motivated by a single memory decades old.

She was visiting the nation's capital, she said, when she saw a man without a face.

"Yes," she said, "without a face. He had nothing but a plastic mask with two holes for eyes and one for mouth. It still swims before my inner vision, provoking an agony of grief that no one had been able to stop the war that took away that man's face."

The extraordinary array of groups questioning the Bush administration's rationale for an invasion of Iraq includes longtime radical groups such as the Workers World Party, but also groups not known for taking stands against the government, it added.

There is a labor movement against war, led by organizers of the largest unions in the country; a religious movement against the war, which includes leaders of virtually every mainstream denomination; a veterans movement against the war, led by those who fought Iraq in the Persian Gulf a decade ago; business leaders against the war, led by corporate leaders; an antiwar movement led by relatives of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; and immigrant groups against the war.

There are also black and Latino organizations, hundreds of campus antiwar groups and scores of groups of ordinary citizens meeting in community centers and church basements from Baltimore to Seattle, the paper said.

After large rallies in Washington and San Francisco on Oct. 26, the next big day to test the antiwar movement's might is Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day. Hundreds of groups plan events, rallies and civil disobedience to capture the nation's attention, including demonstrations in Lafayette Park across from the White House and at a military recruitment center in downtown Washington, the paper said.

Otherwise, antiwar groups, which tend to rely on the Internet to receive and spread information, operate largely without the attention of the media or Capitol Hill. Yet many of those speaking out against an attack on Iraq represent large numbers of Americans.

Among themselves, the groups are quietly organizing their ranks. The National Council of Churches, which includes Lutherans, Episcopalians and President Bush's denomination, Methodists, is facilitating antiwar events for traditionally liberal institutions and conservative churches, said the Rev. Robert Edgar, its general secretary.

On that day, religious groups across the country plan to stage mass acts of civil disobedience.

"I've never engaged in civil disobedience before," he said. "But if some country was going to do this to us -- have a little preemptive war with the U.S., bomb our people, kill or maim people because they thought that at some time we might bomb them, we'd say that's a war crime. I feel that getting arrested is the biggest statement that I could make to say that what the Bush administration is doing is wrong."