By Hadi Yahmid, IOL Paris Correspondent

PARIS, April 15 (IslamOnline.net) - Shocked and distressed by the Anglo-American occupation of their motherland, Iraqi immigrants in France have a strong feeling that the Iraqi people will stand up to the occupation.

“It is nothing but a defeat for all Arabs that resembles the defeat of the Palestinians and Arabs in 1948. All people failed us; the Arabs, the Kurds and the Turks…but Allah Almighty will never do,” Shaker Al-Saaidi, head of the Iraqi immigrants’ society in France, told IslamOnline.net Tuesday, April 15.

“How can Baghdad, the diamond of Islamic caliphate, collapse? On this ill-fated day, I switched my cellular off and went to a Paris café all by myself…I did not want to talk to anybody; silence was most telling,” he recalled.

Ahmad, an Iraqi who has been residing in France for some 18 years, feels disappointed at the current situation in Iraq.

“Iraq has went through many crises, such as the 1980-1988 war with Iran and the 1991 second Gulf War, but we have never felt homeless or that the Iraqi identity was targeted as we do nowadays,” he asserted.

“My nine-year-old daughter always asks me whether or not we will visit our relatives in Basra,” Ahmad said.

Reborn Resistance

But Soa’d, Ahmad’s wife, looks more optimistic with an unshakable belief that the Iraqi resistance “will be born anew and Iraq will remain unified.”

“The Iraqis will never tolerate the U.S. and U.K. shoes desecrating Baghdad, An-Najaf and Karbala.

“He who knows the Iraqis well can rest assured that the occupation will never bring them to their kneels,” she averred.