Violence Of Night Yields
Grim Crop Of BodiesBy James Hider
Times Online
25 July , 2003
Even before the blue metal gate of Baghdad’s 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 Baghdad’s murder rate. Lawlessness and anarchy remain the norm. The working day of the mortuary’s 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 world’s 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 man’s uncle moaned. Many blame the Americans and their manifest inability to curtail the carnage. “Is this freedom? It’s freedom to die!” one man spat. Another added, in English: “It’s 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 Baghdad’s 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 groom’s family took offence at a request from the bride’s 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 can’t 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.