LIVE FROM BAGHDAD
I remember a time in Baghdad when the pungent smell of decomposing bodies was pervasive. Dead bodies littered the streets for days, even weeks before Iraqis dared to bury them. “We couldn’t come out, but we had to,” says Ja’ffar, a 26 years old electronics whiz living in Al Yarmouk. “The Americans shot and killed two men in a car not far from our house. Their tanks established a checkpoint where our street intersects with Saddam Hussein International Airport road. They saw and smelled those dead men everyday. It took us a while to realize that it’s become our responsibility to bury the dead.”
When the American forces entered Baghdad in April of 2003, the Saddam Hussein International Airport was one of their primary targets. Now, it is a complex of U.S. military camps. Its name was changed to Baghdad International Airport, BIAP for short.
“The whole neighborhood smelled of death. The smell stayed for a long time after we buried the two men.” Nobody knew who they were.
The smell of death is gone from the streets, but dead bodies still turn up in Baghdad. They are collected everyday and deposited at the Baghdad morgue where the nauseous odor clings to the walls, the gurneys. Often, during power outages, entering the morgue becomes unbearable. But Iraqis are inured to the whiff of death and to its torturous form as bodies with drill and bullet holes, broken bones, and decapitated heads and limbs flood the morgue.
“2005 and 2006 were the worst,” says Abu Rana, a former veterinarian who now owns a cell phone shop in Al Dora. “Everyday, 40 to 50 bodies turn up dead. Some tortured, Some as young as 10.”
Everyday during those years, 40 to 50 people were kidnapped. The reasons varied from the political to the religious and the criminal.
In 2005 and 2006, the insufficient number of U.S. troops on the ground and the lack of a 
strong counter-insurgency strategy made for a fledgling security posture. Consequently, a significant security vacuum was generated exacerbating the ethnic and religious chasms and violently exposing feuds that had been bubbling vexingly underneath the surface.
The Shiite, under the banner of Jaysh Al Mehdi and its special groups, and the Sunnis, protected by Al Qaeda and its sympathizers, battled for ascendancy in Baghdad neighborhoods. Jaysh Al Mehdi, launching from its strong popular base in Sadr City and supported by a sympathetic Shiite government, swept through Sunni neighborhoods west of Baghdad. The Sunnis were kidnapped and killed; their families violently intimidated and forced to leave; their upscale homes quickly acquired new residents: the Shiite impoverished families from disaffected neighborhoods such as Sadr City. Jaysh Al Mehdi established offices in the newly misappropriated sections of the city and set up roadblock. It garnered a popular base by fomenting against the U.S. occupation. The Shiite militia infiltrated the police force, took control of the hospitals and the gas stations, and used force to impose a de facto control over Baghdad. It’s thus that Moqtada Al Sadr, who never figured in any U.S. intelligence threat assessment or even in the media before 2003, became a political force to reckon with in Iraq.
The situation sent the Sunnis scrambling for protection. The U.S. forces lacked the manpower and understanding to offset the Jaysh Al Mehdi’s plan to wipe out the Sunni population and take Baghdad over. Al Qaeda exploited a strategic military mistake by the U.S. and established itself in Baghdad as a protecting force for the Sunnis. The tit for tat led to the killing and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.
Taif just turned eighteen when he and two of his friends were hanging out in Bayaa, a middle class neighborhood southwest of the International Zone (IZ). He was born in that neighborhood and his family is well-respected there. A speeding BMW pulled next to them and a large masked man jumped out, snatched Taif, shoved him in the backseat, and jumped in after him. In a blink of an eye, the car was speeding away.
With a hurried and frightened voice he tells me his story. “The man who grabbed me was hammering my head and back with his pistol. I punched wildly and kicked. He was trying to get on top of me and pin me to the floor of the car, but I threw a good punch and got him in the groin. I sat up with my back against the door and started kicking. The man sitting in the passenger seat reached to grab me, but the door I was leaning on opened and I fell as one of them was yelling: “this is not your day.” I don’t know how I was able to get up and run. They still came after me shooting, but I was able to escape.”
Taif’s father sent him to Syria the very next day, where he remained for a year and half until his visa expired. Syria imposed new restrictions on Iraqi visa applicants making it harder for Taif, who was unemployed, to extend his stay. The day he returned to Baghdad, he was walking to his house when he was stopped by two strangers armed with AK 47s. They identified themselves as Jaysh Al Mehdi members and wanted to know who he was and what he was doing there. “I live here. This is my neighborhood,” he told them.
“How come I have never seen you before?”
He explained that he was in Syria and he just returned. Two of his childhood friends who happened to be Shiite came up to the two men.
“He’s my cousin,” one of them said.
“Do you vouch for him?”
“I do!”
“Don’t ever let me see you here again,” one of the men said to Taif.
Taif’s father, through his connections, was able to find him a job in one of the U.S. military Forward Operating Bases. Taif, once a warm and radiant young man, shuns contact with the outside world until he renews his visa to Syria. His ordeal is not an exception. All the Iraqis I have talked to relate horrific stories of the killings, kidnappings, torture, and displacement of family and friends.
Teachers were assassinated before their students’ eyes by Al Qaeda terrorists who thought the curriculum was not Islamic enough; children were kidnapped for ransom and sometimes killed even if their poverty stricken parents paid; doctors are threatened by Shiite murderers with death and coerced to report on Sunni patients who are then killed in their hospital beds. The accounts are endless.
Both Al Qaeda and Jaysh Al Mehdi overplayed their hands. The sectarian/civil war, although unraveling friendly and familial relationships, did not break the Baghdadis’ resolve to rally against those they now consider an impediment to progress and peace. They grew exceedingly impatient with the austere version of Islamic law Al Qaeda imposed and the murderous bullying of Jaysh Al Mehdi. Internal divisions within the two groups precipitated their breakdown as the U.S. troop surge entered into effect. By August, 07, a relative calm befell the city.
“It’s true that the security situation is much better now than in the past two year, but it’s not as good as before 2003. Saddam was a dictator, but people had security, employment, basic services. Look outside! What do you see?” asked Abbas, a frail looking man with dark bags under his limpid eyes. Outside his foodstuff store, heaps of garbage line the street. Fetid sewage pooled over a large surface and the unpleasant stench of human waste was unrelenting. Even garbage collectors have been killed in the performance of their duties.
“It’s been five years now and we haven’t seen anything of what they promised us,” lamented Ammar, a dentist who lives in Palestine street. The country’s archaic power grids are badly damaged and produce less electricity than pre-war era. Baghdadis enjoy no more than two to three hours of electricity a day.
“I pay fifty thousand Dinars to a neighborhood cooperative for a few hours worth of power from their generator. I bought a small generator that can barely sustain the fridge and the television. The fuel is expensive and often unavailable,” Ammar said.
As the hot season approaches, power outages become a nagging challenge. Children and the elderly suffer the brunt of the scorching heat as air conditioners that have surpassed their shelf life conk out and the water trickles.
“The water is undrinkable,” said Ammar. “It’s murky and I have even found worms in it sometimes,” he added his voice dripping with disgust. “But we drink it anyway.”
The panoply of persistent problems the Iraqis face is staggering. Some of these problems they feel are insurmountable. But there is hope. The majority of the Iraqis I encountered, regular citizens eking out a living by whatever honest means possible, recognize that progress fundamentally depends on security and strongly believe that if the U.S. forces leave, the situation will rapidly deteriorate, civil war will ensue and thousands more will die. A precipitous American withdrawal will create a political and security void that Jaysh Al Mehdi, Al Qaeda and their ilk are willing to fill to the detriment of the Iraqi moderates.
Both Sunni and Shiite unanimously agree that the Al Maliki government is an Iranian puppet and that the U.S. needs to solve the social, economic, and political problems it created. How can a country as rich as Iraq be mired in poverty?
In the past five years, the U.S. has spent in excess of $600 billion; Over four thousand U.S. troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have perished. The Iraqis today feel that the current stability is unsustainable; their government’s credibility is bankrupt; their economy is weak.
“But the Arab street wants the Americans to leave Iraq. Don’t you agree with them?” I asked Aamar, the dentist.
“Not one single Arab demonstrated when the Sunnis and Shiites were killing each other and everyone else around them,” he inveighed.
So what’s next?
“Rinse, spin, and repeat!”
Ahmed T. B. Copyright © 2008
“Voice is unique personal significance—significance that is revealed as we face our greatest challenges and that makes us equal to them.”
Thx ahmed well said god be with you (f)
Comment by mehdi — March 26, 2008 @ 4:10 am