[Headnote from Slate's Today's Papers: The LAT's Patrick J. McDonnell reported from Iraq for two years and then left for one. He returns to find that the chaos and violence he left a year ago looks like paradise compared to the hellish city he finds today.]
October 23, 2006
Los Angeles Times
COLUMN ONE
Into the abyss of Baghdad
By Patrick J. McDonnell
Staff Writer
BAGHDAD -- I keep seeing his face. He appears to be in his mid-20s,
bespectacled, slightly bearded, and somehow his smile conveys a
sense of prosperity to come. Perhaps he is set to marry, or enroll
in graduate school, or launch a business -- all of these flights of
ambition seem possible.
In the next few images he is encased in plastic: His face is frozen
in a ghoulish grimace. Blackened lesions blemish his neck.
"Drill holes," says Col. Khaled Rasheed, an Iraqi commander who is
showing me the set of photographs.
He preserves the snapshots in a drawer, the image of the young man
brimming with expectations always on top. There is no name, no
identification, just a series of photos that documents the
transformation of some mother's son into a slab of meat on a bloody
table in a morgue.
"Please, please, I must show these photographs to President Bush,"
Rasheed pleads in desperation, as we sit in a bombed-out palace
along the Tigris, once the elegant domain of Saddam Hussein's wife,
now the command center for an Iraqi army battalion. "President Bush
must know what is happening in Baghdad!"
I covered Iraq for two years, beginning a few months after the
March 2003 U.S.-led invasion. For the last year, I have been gone.
I wondered how the country had changed.
I found that this ancient byway of Islamic learning and foreign
invaders has gone over to the dark side. A year ago, car bombs,
ambushes, daily gun battles and chronic lack of electricity and
gasoline were sapping the city. But not this: the wanton execution
of individuals because of sect -- a phenomenon so commonplace it
has earned a military shorthand: EJK, for extrajudicial killing.
Every day the corpses pile up in the capital like discarded
furniture -- at curbside, in lots, in waterways and sewer lines;
every day the executioners return. A city in which it was long
taboo to ask, "Are you Sunni or Shiite?" has abruptly become
defined by these very characteristics.
Once-harmonious neighborhoods with mixed populations have become
communal killing grounds. Residents of one sect or the other must
clear out or face the whim of fanatics with power drills.
Gunmen showed up one day on an avenue where fishmongers have long
hawked barbecued fillets. They mowed the vendors down. Maybe it was
because of the merchants' beliefs -- the fish salesmen were Shiites
in a mostly Sunni district, Dawoodi. Maybe it was revenge. No one
knows with certainty. No one asks. All that remains are the
remnants of charcoal fires.
"It's like a ghost city," laments Fatima Omar, a resident of the
Amariya district, which once abounded with street life. She is 22,
a recent graduate of Baghdad University, an English major -- and,
like many of her generation, unsure of what future she can expect.
"So many of our men are either dead or have gone away," she says.
"We may be doomed to spinsterhood."
People are here one day, gone the next. Those who do go out often
venture no farther than familiar streets. In the sinister evenings,
when death squads roam, people block off their lanes with barbed
wire, logs, bricks to ward off the killers.
Many residents remain in their homes -- paralyzed, going slowly
crazy.
"My children are imprisoned at home," says a cook, Daniel, a
Christian whom I knew from better times, now planning to join the
exodus from Iraq. "They are nervous and sad all the time. Baghdad
is a big prison, and their home is a small one. I forced my son to
leave school. It's more important that he be alive than educated."
But homes offer only an illusion of safety. Recently, insurgents
rented apartments in mostly Shiite east Baghdad, filled the flats
with explosives and blew them up after Friday prayers. Dozens
perished.
Even gathering the bodies of loved ones is an exercise fraught with
hazards. A Shiite Muslim religious party controls the main morgue
near downtown; its militiamen guard the entrance, keen to snatch
kin of the dead, many of them Sunni Muslim Arabs. Unclaimed Sunni
corpses pile up.
A year ago, many still extolled "Shiite restraint," the majority
sect's seeming disavowal of tit-for-tat reprisals for massacres of
Shiite pilgrims, policemen, clergy and lawmakers, among others. But
you don't hear much anymore about Shiite restraint. Its principal
proponent, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, now seems a septuagenarian
afterthought, his increasingly exasperated words from the southern
shrine city of Najaf reduced to near irrelevancy.
U.S. FORCES find themselves in a strangely ambiguous role. Troops
still battle mostly Sunni insurgents, especially in the western
province of Al Anbar. In Baghdad's Sunni districts, however, where
residents once danced alongside burning Humvees, American troops
are now tolerated as a bulwark against Shiite militias. But even
that acceptance has its limits.
"Some boys came up here and shook our hands the other day," a
sergeant recalls to me at a frontline base called Apache in the
Adamiya district, the last major Sunni bastion on the east side of
the Tigris. He is on his fourth tour: three deployments to Iraq,
one to Afghanistan, and has seen little of his own children. "But
later I saw that their fathers slapped the boys," the sergeant
continues. "I guess they told the kids never to greet us again."
On a recent patrol in Adamiya, one of the capital's oldest
sections, U.S. soldiers went door to door speaking with merchants
and residents, trying to earn their confidence. Everyone seemed
cordial as people spoke of their terror of Shiite militiamen. Then
a shot rang out and a soldier fell 10 yards from where I stood with
the platoon captain; a sniper, probably Sunni, had taken aim at
this 21-year-old private from Florida ostensibly there to protect
Sunnis against Shiite depredations. The GI survived.
Coursing through the deserted cityscape in an Army Humvee after
curfew empties the streets is an experience laced with foreboding.
U.S. vehicles, among the few on the road, offer an inviting target
for an unseen enemy. Piles of long-uncollected trash may conceal
laser-guided explosives. Russian roulette is the oft-repeated
analogy.
"Everyone's thinking the same thing," a tense sergeant tells me.
"IEDs," he adds, using the shorthand for roadside bombs, or
improvised explosive devices.
ONE evening, I accompanied a three-Humvee convoy of MPs through
largely Shiite east Baghdad. Before leaving the base, the commander
performed an unsettling ritual: He anointed the Humvees with clear
oil, performing something akin to last rites.
The objective that evening was to patrol with Iraqi police, but the
Iraqi lawmen are hesitant to be seen with Americans, whom they
regard as IED magnets. The joint patrol never worked out. Still,
good fortune was with us: no attacks.
The next night, an armor-piercing bomb hit the same squad, Gator
1-2. A sergeant with whom I had ridden the previous evening lost a
leg; the gunner and driver suffered severe shrapnel wounds. "Timing
is everything, especially in Iraq," the captain and unit commander
wrote in an e-mail informing me of the incident.
The U.S. mission here is now defined largely as training Iraqi
police and soldiers. But Sunnis don't trust the mostly Shiite
security forces, often with good reason. The question lingers: Are
U.S. troops equipping Iraq's sectarian avengers?
At this point, anything seems possible here, a descent of any depth
into the abyss. Militiamen and residents are already sealing off
neighborhoods by sect. Some have suggested district-to-district ID
cards. Word broke recently of a plan to build barriers around this
metropolis of 6 million and block the city's entrances with
checkpoints. The "terror trench," as some immediately dubbed it,
seemed to have a fundamental flaw: The killers already are in
Baghdad.
An Iraqi colleague ventured recently to the funeral of two Sunni
brothers snatched from their homes near southern Baghdad's Dora
district and later found slaughtered. They had disregarded threats
to get out. Absent from the ceremony at a relative's home were the
traditional mourning tent, the loudspeakers blaring Koranic verses,
the elaborate banners honoring the departed.
With grief such a cheap commodity, most folks seem hesitant to call
attention to their sorrows. The funeral was behind walls, a hushed
affair. Few showed up. The family apologized for the muted ritual.
You shouldn't have bothered, the relatives told the few guests, it
is too dangerous these days. Visitors sipped sweetened tea,
fingered beads, smoked a cigarette or two and moved on.
patrick.mcdonnell at latimes.com
Times staff writers Salar Jaff and Zainab Hussein in Baghdad
contributed to this report.
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times