Violence
Of Night Yields
Grim Crop Of Bodies
By
James Hider
Times Online
25 July , 2003
Even before the blue metal gate of Baghdads
mortuary opens at 8am, crowds of stony-faced men and keening black-robed
women have gathered in the street outside. Cheap wooden coffins are
strapped to taxis or loaded on vans. Night is the deadliest time in
Baghdad and there is always a morning crop of bodies.
The Times spent
a day inside this grim repository. By the time it closed at 8pm, it
had received 23 bodies; 18 were shooting victims. That, the staff said,
was a quiet day. On some days they receive 40 bodies, or more. With
just a few poorly equipped police to back them in a city teeming with
weapons, American forces have been unable to stem Baghdads murder
rate. Lawlessness and anarchy remain the norm. The working day of the
mortuarys six overburdened pathologists who hack and saw
in the crowded laboratory provides a catalogue of the grisly
ways that citizens meet their end in one of the worlds most dangerous
cities.
First through the
gates was the family of Muhammad Abed al-Hussein, a 17-year-old who
had died overnight in hospital. He had been hit in the head by a falling
bullet last week, when viewers mistook a defiant television broadcast
by Saddam Hussein to be news of his arrest and let off volleys of celebratory
fire. Next came Ahmed al-Najar, visibly in shock, who was collecting
the body of his younger brother, Omar, 21. The graduate spoke excellent
English and had wanted to help his country to recover from the war,
so had signed up as a $10-a-day translator for the US Army. But the
military failed to provide him with a flak jacket or helmet and Omar
was killed when assailants fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the Humvee
in which he was riding. By 9.30am there was a throng of relatives in
the concrete courtyard, jostling around coffins, some threatening the
tired morticians: many Iraqis dislike the idea of a post-mortem examination,
especially when the air is so thick with the odour of putrification
and formaldehyde that it is difficult to breathe. But this is the only
way to a death certificate and legal burial.
Grieving parents
of a ten-year-old boy killed in a hit-and-run on the chaotic streets
shuffled in quietly, followed by the body of a young man shot in the
street for no apparent reason, the killer unknown and still on the loose.
Iraqis are monsters. We are supposed to be Muslims. What happened
to us? the mans uncle moaned. Many blame the Americans and
their manifest inability to curtail the carnage. Is this freedom?
Its freedom to die! one man spat. Another added, in English:
Its the people who make the freedom. Why blame the Americans
always? But the American contribution to the body count soon became
apparent. An elderly hospital driver pulled a stiff body from his van,
saying that he had been shot dead by US troops the night before. F***
Bush, f*** America, he muttered as he slammed the door and pulled
away. Yet others pointed at the blanket-draped corpse and laughed. Ali
Baba, one man said.
A looter, in other
words, a breed universally detested by Baghdads residents and
the scourge of post-war Iraq. A silver Toyota pulled up, windscreen
half-covered in streaks of blood that had leaked from the coffin tied
to the roof. Angry men said that the body inside was that of Nasser
Salim Rahim, 19, killed by a single sniper bullet the night before as
he was riding in a car with four other men. It was the Americans,
an uncle snapped. The young men had been passing an American unit in
the city centre when the bullet struck, spraying the other passengers
with gore. The bodies rolled in as the morning turned to afternoon:
a young man shot dead in the street by thieves; a father of three who
was playing football for his local team when three men in the crowd
pulled out pistols and shot him. If his family knows who killed
him, there will be revenge killings, a friend waiting for the
body said.
Still the bodies
came: a taxi driver shot twice in the head by a thief, who took his
car and dumped his body; a mother and son, shot dead an hour before
in a tribal dispute dating back 35 years. They arrived together under
blankets, a yellow foot sticking out from under the covers. Next was
the body of a man killed at a wedding after the grooms family
took offence at a request from the brides side that no guns be
allowed in for celebratory fire. The guests pulled their guns, killing
three people; the wedding was cancelled. Then came an elderly woman,
blown up when someone threw a grenade into her house, another seemingly
random act that could happen only in a lawless metropolis emerging from
decades of war and repression, overlaid on centuries of tribal rifts.
A police officer brought in the body of a middle-aged man shot by his
brother in an inheritance dispute. We have 50 policemen in our
station, but only two cars and no guns. We cant keep control,
Sergeant Esam Numer said.
Finally, another
policeman pulled up at the wheel of a smart grey BMW, two bullet holes
in the bonnet. Slumped in the back seat was the owner, a bullet through
his right eye. He fell victim to a well-known criminal released with
thousands of others by Saddam in the last days of the war. At 8pm the
morgue closed. Tariq al-Ibrahim, the chief pathologist, swabbed down
the floors and locked up for another night. This was a quiet day,
for these times, he said with a smile. Out in the city, gunfire
crackled in the twilight.