[lbo-talk] LAT: Iraq one year later: the abyss

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Wed Oct 25 04:51:36 PDT 2006


[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.]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fg-baghdad23oct23,0,361375.story?coll=la-home-headlines

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



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