"Reason
For Their Death Is Known"
By Dahr Jamail
09 May 2006
t
r u t h o u t
Death in Iraq. It is relentless
and incessant.
Know what it is like when
scores of your fellow citizens are being killed every single day while
the world proceeds unheedingly on? As a journalist I've had but a taste
of that poison during my eight months in Iraq. Try it out: be an Iraqi
for a day, into your fourth year of being occupied, humiliated, tortured
and killed, doing all you can just to survive.
All communication with my
Iraqi friends is punctuated by and smattered with their use of the words
"praying," "God," and "Insha'allah" (God
willing). Perhaps there is need to invoke something else altogether?
And all the dead air
is alive. With the smell of America's God.
- Harold Pinter, "War With Iraq"
On one of the days when
multiple car bombs drained the blood and souls of scores in Baghdad,
my closest friend wrote from there: "Dahr, This is a very sad letter
I'm writing you as a friend. My tears are coming down due to the humiliation,
suffering, frustration, thwarting defeat and discomfiture we the Iraqi
are living in. Please let people know some of the news of what is happening
to my country, my people and my religion."
Death lurks everywhere in
Iraq today. Keeping up with the numbers of dead is impossible. A doctor
working at one of the larger hospitals in Baghdad recently called it
a "camp" because the courtyard of the hospital is constantly
filled with members of the Shia Badr militia, who continue to carry
out their death squad activities of killing Sunnis and rival Shia. "The
Badr are all over the hospital, looking for people," said the doctor.
"The injured brought here sometimes die before even reaching the
ward, because the Badr are being obstacles for us. One of the men running
our morgue was killed by the Badr. My friends are warning me to be careful,
to keep my mouth shut."
The numbers are being hidden
… and the Badr, operating out of the Ministry of Interior, which
is funded by the US, are making sure the numbers remain shrouded.
Yet on Tuesday of this week,
a spokesman at that same hospital, speaking on condition of anonymity
of course, announced that in the last 48 hours alone Yarmouk Hospital
had received 65 bodies, most of them slaughtered by death squads in
execution-style murders. That day they had received 40 bodies, and Monday,
25.
Iraqis are at far greater
risk when they speak out about the true number of the dead than western
journalists. Those who speak out jeopardize their lives, like Faik Bakir,
the director of the Baghdad morgue. Bakir fled Iraq fearing for his
life in early March, after reporting that over 7,000 people had been
killed by death squads in recent months. In an article
in the Guardian on March 2nd, it was made clear by John
Pace, a UN official who worked in Iraq until February, that "The
vast majority of bodies showed signs of summary execution - many with
their hands tied behind their back. Some showed evidence of torture,
with arms and leg joints broken by electric drills." He said that
the killings had been ongoing long before the rampant bloodshed that
followed the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra. The article added,
"Mr. Pace, whose contract in Iraq ended last month, said many killings
were carried out by Shia militias linked to the interior ministry run
by Bayan Jabr, a leading figure in the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (Sciri)."
This past Saturday I received
information from the main morgue in Baghdad from a doctor there, name
withheld for security reasons. "Yesterday we received 36 bodies
from the police pickups. All of them are unknown, without IDs, and we
don't have refrigerators to put them in since all of ours are completely
full already. So we had to keep them on the ground. 12 of them were
handcuffed, most of them received between 2 and 10 bullets, some many
more than 10. We are not going to put them into biopsy. Reason for their
death is known. Most of them are between 20 to 30 years … This
is the number that was brought directly to us in one day, plus there
are the dead who are sent to the hospitals. They will be put in the
hospitals' morgues. We don't receive bodies from hospitals nowadays,
because we don't have a place to keep them. I can't tell the exact number
of killed people now, but it depends on the situation. But what I can
assure you of is that since the shrine explosion, deaths have almost
doubled. Daily, we receive between 70 to 80 bodies … you can see
within these 40 minutes that I've talked with you, we received 9 bodies.
Nearly every morning the count will be doubled twice this number, for
the police find them at night. Most are either found in the streets
or killed without sending them to hospitals. Four days ago we received
24 bodies in just 2 hours."
At this same morgue back
in June 2004, I interviewed the aforementioned director, Dr. Faiq Bakir,
who had to flee for his life. He said that their maximum holding capacity
with the freezers was 90 bodies, and since January 2004 an average of
well over 600 bodies each month had been brought there. The cause of
death for at least half of these were gunshots or explosions. He also
pointed out that those numbers did not include the heavy fighting areas
of Fallujah and Najaf.
In addition, he told me,
"We deal only with suspicious deaths, not deaths from natural causes.
And so many bodies are buried that never go to a morgue anywhere."
According to Dr. Bakir,
the rate of bodies brought to the Baghdad Morgue even back then was
3-4 times greater than it ever was during the regime of Saddam Hussein.
"I am sure that not all of the bodies that should come here do,"
he continued before very diplomatically adding, "Because our legal
system has some problems right now."
Before the invasion, there
was a coordinated system between Baghdad and the other governorates,
which allowed his morgue to track deaths throughout the country, but
this too had been smashed along with the rest of the infrastructure
of his country.
More recently, a doctor
at another hospital shared information which puts this in clearer perspective.
This past Sunday, a doctor
from al-Numan hospital in the al-Adhamiya district of Baghdad reported
to my source in Baghdad: "Every major hospital has either one or
two refrigerators, depending on the population of the area. As for Adhamiya
we have one refrigerator that holds a maximum of 10 bodies. Meanwhile
there are two refrigerators in the Shula hospital. We have not less
than 18 major hospitals inside Baghdad, in addition to the main morgue,
which has 6 refrigerators that contain 20 bodies each. In the emergencies
we use refrigeration trucks to put bodies inside - this is very familiar
to the main morgue. I went there a week ago. I have seen three refrigeration
trucks inside the yard. They were filled with bodies. They keep the
bodies in the main morgue for not more than 15 days, and if no one asks
for them, they send the bodies to the cemetery administration to deal
with them. This administration hands the bodies to some individuals
who will bury them, mostly in Najaf or in the cemeteries around Baghdad."
Reuters
recently ran a story titled, "In Baghdad, some killings
get noticed, some don't." The story read, "When gunmen killed
a sister of an Iraqi vice president on Thursday, it grabbed world headlines.
A few streets away, however, another slaying, typical of hundreds in
Baghdad in recent weeks, went all but unnoticed. Indeed it might never
have been recorded had 73-year-old Khatab al-Ani not been shot outside
the home of a journalist." The only part of this I would amend
is "in recent weeks," because I know for a fact that random
unreported killings have been the norm in the capital city of Iraq for
over two years now.
Another Iraqi source of
mine works for an Iraqi relief NGO in Fallujah. He told me that from
the April and November 2004 US assaults on Fallujah there were a minimum
of 4,500 dead or missing (most of them dead), and "killings in
Fallujah and Ramadi are a daily reality for us." According to this
source, "Doctors in Fallujah estimate that an average of 3.5 people
are being killed in Fallujah every day during 2006, while doctors we
know in Baghdad estimate that the number there is between 150 and 200
per day."
He went on to say, "The
Lancet reported over 100,000 killed over a year ago. This was even before
many of the crimes committed by US troops, the Iraqi so-called Army
and the Government militias, who are all first class killers, came to
light. This brings the number to over 200,000 at the least. On the other
hand, those people (Bush and those claiming less than 100,000 dead)
not reporting the correct number of civilian casualties - that is a
major crime in itself. It looks like they don't give a damn how many
Iraqi people get killed."
Even the UN Integrated Regional
Information Networks (IRIN) humanitarian news agency reported
on April 26 that "More than 90 women become widows each day due
to continuing violence countrywide, according to government officials
and non-governmental organizations devoted to women's issues."
Another extremely telling
point in the IRIN report is that "Although few reliable statistics
are available on the total number of widows in Iraq, the Ministry of
Women's Affairs says that there are at least 300,000 in Baghdad alone,
with another eight million throughout the country." The report
said that at least 15 police officers' wives are widowed every day,
and that local NGOs in Iraq said the situation had become much worse
since the 2003 US-led invasion of the country, which has brought horrific
violence on a level not seen before.
"Saddam Hussein was
responsible for killing thousands of men during his 25 years of brutal
rule," said Ibtissam Kamal in the IRIN report. Kamal, a member
of a local organization that works on the issue but prefers anonymity
of the organization for security reasons, added, "But more people
have died during the past three years, most of them men …"
The vast majority of deaths
in Iraq are not being counted. Anyone who has spent any time there knows
this. It was and remains common knowledge amongst my colleagues who
worked on the streets, rather than those "embedding" or conducting
"hotel journalism."
Several of my colleagues
who have reported from Iraq feel the number of Iraqis killed during
the occupation far exceeds 100,000.
"If one counts excess
mortality from collapsed healthcare, polluted water, poverty and the
like - at least 100,000 Iraqis have died since the US invaded Iraq,"
Christian Parenti, author of the book The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations
in Occupied Iraq wrote me this week. Parenti, who has reported for over
5 months from Iraq and is a regularly contributor to The Nation magazine,
added, "How many people have been killed by US troops? How many
in sectarian violence? It's impossible to say, but the point is this:
Iraq has been destroyed by the US invasion and the process of its disintegration
will go on for years. It is a horror no matter what the numbers are."
David Enders, an American
freelance journalist who has spent 18 months reporting from Iraq and
author of the book Baghdad Bulletin, told me yesterday, "I visited
the Baghdad morgue, and they were receiving between 30-40 bodies every
day. That didn't include car bombs and people who'd died for obvious
reasons. That was more than a year ago, and that was just for Baghdad.
I think it's probably safe to say that well over 100,000 Iraqis have
died during the occupation."
Veteran Middle East correspondent
Robert Fisk writes for the Independent in the UK and has reported from
the region for over 30 years. He had this to say in a piece written
on March 20th titled, "The Iraq War: Three Years On - The march
of folly that has led to a bloodbath":
"The Iraqis? Well,
they are lesser beings whose casualties cannot be revealed to us by
the Iraqi ministry of health, on orders from the Americans and British;
creatures whose suffering, far greater than our own, must be submerged
in the democracy and freedom in which we are drowning them; whose casualties
"more or less" [mocking the infamous quote from George W.
Bush] are probably nearer to 150,000. After all, if 1,000 Iraqis could
die by violence last July - in Baghdad alone; and if they are being
killed at 60 or 70 a day, then we have a near genocidal bloodbath on
our hands. Iraqis, however, are now our Untermenschen for whom, frankly,
we do not greatly care."
By far and away the survey
that comes closest to the true number of dead in Iraq to date was the
one conducted for the Lancet. Yet even Les Roberts, the lead author
of that report and one of the world's top epidemiologists with the Center
for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies at Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health, said this February that there might
be as many as 300,000 Iraqi civilian deaths generated by the US invasion
and occupation. So as not to skew the results, it is important to note
that the survey did not include areas where major combat had occurred
such as Fallujah, Najaf, and Sadr City - home to roughly three million
Iraqis.
Any news agency, government,
or other organization reporting anything less are actively attempting
to hide the level of slaughter and mayhem and thus aiding and abetting
the ongoing war crimes in Iraq.
My aforementioned friend
in Fallujah is both frustrated and angry that most news agencies choose
not to report the number of dead in Iraq more accurately. "I know
there are some organizations who claim that they have an accurate count,
which is less than 40,000 dead Iraqis," he wrote me recently. He
went on to reference Bush Junior, "And as if that number itself
isn't shameful enough for the US and the whole world to see. Anyone
claiming that low number who calls himself a humanitarian is a shameful
guy."
we leave civilian dead
as litter in the streets
ignored by us their numbers
unmarked as are their names
- Labi Siffre
Anyone who's been in a war
zone knows what it feels like to lie in bed at night listening to the
cracking of gunfire, or the sound of thudding bombs. Knowing that each
report means death or maiming. It is true that the dead do not talk,
but each shot fired or bomb detonated means someone is dead, and the
killers know and must live with that knowledge forever - that they have
killed a human being.
And we cannot escape that
knowledge either.
Not hearing the sounds of
death, but knowing that somewhere this instant in Iraq is a family that
will have to suffer a loss in perpetuity.
Your silence will not protect
you …
- Audre Lorde
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent
over 8 months reporting from occupied Iraq. He presented evidence of
US war crimes in Iraq at the International Commission of Inquiry on
Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New
York City in January 2006. dahrjamailiraq.com