Baghdad's Packed
Morgue Marks
A City's Descent Into Lawlessness
By Jeffrey Fleishman
Los Angeles Times
17 September,
2003
A sourness stings
the morning air as men with wooden coffins tied on taxis come to collect
the murdered: a boy shot in the face during a carjacking, a ruffian
stabbed in a neighborhood fight, a sheik ambushed by his rivals, a son
with a bullet through the heart.
U.S.-led coalition
forces insist that stability is returning to Iraq. The ledger in the
Baghdad morgue tells a different tale.
The number of reported
gun-related killings in Baghdad has increased 25-fold since President
Bush declared an end to major combat May 1. Before the war began, the
morgue investigated an average of 20 deaths a month caused by firearms.
In June, that number rose to 389 and in August it reached 518. Moreover,
the overall number of suspicious deaths jumped from about 250 a month
last year to 872 in August.
The Baghdad morgue
is beyond full. Refrigeration boxes that usually hold six bodies are
crammed with 18. An unidentified corpse is dragged across the floor
beneath the blue glow of an insect-repelling light. Five others
two pocked with gunshot wounds lie on steel tables. With quiet
determination, pathologists lift their scalpels, chart their findings
and fill the waiting coffins.
Most of the dead
here are not casualties of military actions or terrorist attacks, such
as last month's bombing of the United Nations headquarters, which killed
at least 20 people. Nor are they American soldiers.
Instead, they are
everyday civilians, victims of the violence that has become a fact of
life in a city that wakes and sleeps to the cadence of gunfire and unrelenting
crime. The coalition forces and the new Iraqi police have been unable
to stop the torrent of mayhem springing from robberies, carjackings
and just plain anger.
Many killings, according
to police and pathologists, are rooted in revenge. Saddam Hussein's
ousted regime murdered tens of thousands in its ongoing terror campaign,
but its omnipresent security force limited animosities among tribes
and clans.
With that shackle
broken, the slights and anger that accumulated over the years are being
settled with a sort of frontier justice, especially against Baath Party
loyalists and other remnants of Hussein's regime.
The equation is
further complicated by the thousands of criminals Hussein released from
prison in the months before the March invasion by U.S.-led coalition
forces. And by the tens of thousands of Kalashnikov rifles and pistols
that make every neighborhood an arsenal. Coalition troops confiscated
heavy weapons in July but allowed Iraqis to keep some light arms for
self-defense. These guns often lead to murder.
The rash of bloodshed
provides a stark indication that Iraqi society is careening out of control
and that Hussein's aftermath carries its own incomprehensible brutality.
Bodies are fished
out of the muddy-green Tigris. They are pulled from alleys, gathered
from rooftops and lifted from garbage piles. Some are left on the roadside,
like that of Bashar Khammas Mohammed, a 26-year-old taxi driver who
was strangled with his own headdress. They are then brought to the morgue,
where a meticulous man wearing rubber gloves ties strings around their
wrists and assigns each of them a number.
"We are a people
not yet suitable for democracy," said Sattar Mohammed, who waited
the other day with an open coffin to pick up his slain neighbor. "We
need to be strictly handled. We need a tight fist over us. We lived
like that for 30 years under Saddam Hussein, but now people are free,
and they're acting on their will. It is dangerous."
That grim assessment
is echoed often.
"I've been
working in this morgue for 29 years," said pathologist Abdul Razzaq
Ubaidi. Each of his pale blue folders holds a sheet of paper describing
a body. "It used to be accidents and natural deaths. Now there
are too many weapons in society. We used to dissect six or seven bodies
a day, but now we do 25 to 35 a day, and 80% of them are bullet injuries.
We have more freedom, but with the absence of security there is more
freedom for murder."
A state of lawlessness
has resulted as Iraqi society veers between the end of tyranny and unfulfilled
promises of stability from an embryonic U.S.-backed government struggling
to bring a new form of administration to the country. The police force
is understaffed at 38,000 officers nationwide, although it is expected
to grow to 65,000. Baghdad has more than 5,000 officers, down from 17,000
before the war.
The death of Sheik
Abdul Jabar Farhan Salman, according to authorities, appears to have
been caused by a mix of revenge and opportunism. A member of the powerful
Bu-Issa tribe in the city of Fallouja, the sheik controlled much of
the region's cigarette market. Rich enough to escape the turmoil of
postwar Iraq, Salman moved his family to Amman, Jordan. He visited Iraq
frequently to check on his business.
On Sept. 1 at 10:20
p.m., the sheik was driving his white Nissan near a Baghdad crossroads
when two cars appeared beside him and gunmen firing 9-millimeter automatic
pistols shot him in the heart and shoulder.
He died not much
more than a quarter-mile from the Khadra district police station, where
U.S. military police stand lookout from sandbag bunkers.
"It seems to
be a case of revenge," said Lt. Col. Sabah Majeed Latif, an Iraqi
police commander. "Those who killed him stole nothing. Only a few
members of his tribe knew he was back in town.... There was hostility
toward him, and it looks as if his cigarette rivals wanted to get rid
of him."
Silver-rimmed glasses
riding low on his nose, Dr. Faik Amin Bakr, director of the Baghdad
Forensics Institute, sat at his desk staring at the statistics. They
were daunting. In July 2002, he said, suspicious deaths in Baghdad were
already high at 237 a figure not taking into account those who
disappeared at the hands of Hussein's security forces. A year later,
with U.S. troops on the ground, the figure had more than tripled to
751.
"When you see
people killed every day, you imagine the insecure situation in the country,"
Bakr said. "It is difficult to blame somebody," he added later.
"Something should be done by the coalition forces.... It is their
job and duty."
The morgue itself
was a victim of crime during the war. Looters stole steel gurneys and
electric autopsy saws. Some of the doctors today who earn $180
a month must now cut by hand. Like the rest of Baghdad, the morgue
faces sporadic shortages of electricity, water and gas. There is also
a lack of needles, sutures and other supplies. Bodies appear constantly,
as if from a tide. They are photographed, and some including
21 last Friday go to the grave in anonymity. "Something
should be done," Bakr said.
The scent of death
outside the autopsy room intensified in the desert heat of a recent
afternoon. With wooden coffins borrowed from neighborhood mosques across
the vast city, families arrived in the alley to collect their dead.
Some coffins were communal and stained with the blood of earlier victims.
Wrapped in carpets
and lowered from the roofs of taxis and minibuses, the coffins were
placed by the morgue door until names were called and bodies carried
into the sunlight and loaded for the 110-mile journey to the holy city
of Najaf for burial.
Men spoke of revenge
while they were waiting. Some fidgeted with the pistols hidden beneath
their shirts. The men were mostly quiet, but the women, dressed in black
robes that billowed through the alley, beat their chests and wailed.
"My tragedy
is greater than yours!" yelled one woman. "They killed my
boy!"
A pickup truck pulled
up. A man got out. His son, who had refused to give his car to a thief,
lay in the back with a bullet through his face. Another boy crouched
and cried. The morgue door opened and the father bowed his head. Two
more coffins arrived, and by midmorning the alley was full.
Fadhil Abbas Jasim
had his brother's blood on his shirt. Khudhayr, 23, had been stabbed,
then shot after a marketplace quarrel with a drug addict named Adil.
"My brother
had a skirmish with him," said Fadhil, who sat at the morgue with
a coffin. "Adil stabbed him in the wrist. My brother wrestled the
knife from him and came home. I was going to the marketplace to see
what happened. I told Khudhayr to stay at home. But he ran out to buy
a pack of cigarettes and when he stepped outside, Adil shot him with
a Kalashnikov. He shot 12 bullets and hit my brother six times.
"I dragged
my brother into the house. He was dying.... Adil shot him because he
had lost face in the marketplace after my brother took the knife from
him. The neighbors fetched me a jeep and I drove Khudhayr to the hospital,
but the doctor said he had been dead for some minutes.... I brought
him here to get a death certificate so he can be buried. I paid $7 for
it. They gave my brother a number on his wrist. I'm waiting to pick
him up."
Dr. Ubaidi, seeing
patients at a nearby clinic, must hurry to the morgue.
The pathologist
says he collects bullets and traces the path of death. He takes X-rays,
draws diagrams. He seldom talks of justice. A murder's motive has little
meaning for him. Science, he says, is where he prefers to dwell.
On this day, he
was delayed, swarmed by his patients with their sick babies, stiff legs
and fevers.
One woman had an
eye injury. Ubaidi put down his pale blue folders and set about examining
her.
"I should be
in the autopsy room," he said, "but as you can see, the living
are interfering with my work on the dead."