Iraq's Self-Inflicted Wounds

By Bobby Ghosh

To understand just how brutal the war in Iraq has become, spend a day at work with Sheik Jamal al-Sudani. A Baghdad mortician, he travels to the holy city of Najaf every Friday to bury the capital's unclaimed and unknown dead--the scores of bodies that turn up every day, bearing no identifying characteristics save the method by which they were murdered. On a typical trip to the Wadi al-Salaam cemetery last month, Sheik Jamal and a small band of volunteers unload the grim cargo they have brought 100 miles from the Iraqi capital in an old flatbed truck. Sheathed in powder-blue body bags are the remains of 72 men, many of them bearing signs of terrible torture--holes in the skull made by power drills, mutilated genitals, burns. They are the signature of the shadowy Shi'ite groups that have been kidnapping and murdering hundreds of men and boys, most of them Sunnis, in a campaign that has terrorized Baghdad's neighborhoods.

On any given Friday, Sheik Jamal inters Iraqis killed by roadside bombs ("I can tell how close they were to the blast from the extent of burning and depth of the shrapnel wounds"), execution ("Their hands are usually tied behind their back, and they've been shot in the head"), garroting and beheading. He buries victims of U.S. air strikes, some of whose bodies have been fused together by the heat of the explosion "so you can't tell which limb belongs to which head." Every now and again, he will get a body bag with charred-black body parts, dismembered by massive explosions. Those are the remains of suicide bombers. "When you explode a bomb strapped to your chest," he says, "it tears up your body in a particular way."

Death comes to Iraq now in many new and terrible forms. Though there is outrage among many Iraqis about the alleged massacre in Haditha last November, the violence on Iraq's streets is so unrelentingly horrific that even the worst atrocities have lost their power to shock. Few Iraqis even know how many people have died by the bullets and bombs. Definitive statistics are impossible to find in a country where the most violent provinces are out of bounds for journalists and human-rights workers, and where the state infrastructure--hospitals, morgues, police stations--is not up to the task of caring for the living, never mind counting the dead. According to the Iraq Body Count project, the most frequently cited source, at least 38,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since May 1, 2003, when President George W. Bush announced that "major combat operations" had ended. More controversially, a study in the British medical journal Lancet in November 2004 put the toll at more than 100,000 since the invasion. Both studies say more than 4 in 10 of those deaths are attributable to U.S. forces.

Certainly in recent months, most of the violence has been Iraqi-on-Iraqi, with civilians being killed by Shi'ite death squads or Sunni insurgents and jihadis. U.S. forces often find themselves trying to prevent Iraqis from killing one another. On the same day that Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced that the government would launch an investigation into the 24 Haditha killings and called U.S. attacks against Iraqi civilians "a regular occurrence," at least 18 Iraqis died at the hands of their countrymen. The rate of sectarian killings has escalated sharply since the Feb. 22 bombing of a major Shi'ite shrine in Samarra. In Baghdad alone, morgue officials say they have received at least 3,500 bodies since the bombing. Some of those officials have told TIME they routinely understated the toll because of political pressure from the interim Iraqi government to deny that the capital was in the throes of a civil war.

How do Iraqis make sense of the carnage? For many, the only way to cope is to block out the daily reports of civilian deaths--such as the story of U.S. troops' opening fire last week on a car carrying two women, or of Islamic extremists gunning down a tennis coach and two of his players last month for wearing shorts. Iraqis honed their imperviousness to atrocity under Saddam Hussein, when the regime killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens. But the sheer numbers of victims from this war has deepened the desensitization. That may explain why the debates about the overall death toll don't seem to resonate with many Iraqis. "What is the use of numbers?" asks Mithal Alussi, a secular, independent member of the Iraqi Parliament. "When you reach a point when every Iraqi can say that a member of his family or a close friend was killed, then statistics don't matter anymore. You don't need numbers to tell you it's a national catastrophe."

The Iraqi media had little interest in the Haditha story until last week, when it emerged that the Marines involved were likely to be punished. When TIME's first Haditha story ran in March, it was picked up by most of the Arab TV stations beaming into Iraq, but the local channels and newspapers repeated it with no comment or further reporting of their own. A senior Western diplomat who monitors the Iraqi media was surprised: "They treated it as just another atrocity, nothing special." There is one other explanation: Iraqis take it for granted that the military--any military--will mistreat and murder civilians. After all, that's how their own soldiers behaved for decades. They expected no different from the Americans, so there was a built-in propensity to believe that many, or most, Iraqis killed by U.S. forces were innocent victims of oppression. That is especially true in the Sunni triangle, but many Shi'ites believe it too, especially those who follow the radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The Abu Ghraib scandal merely confirmed what they had suspected all along, that George Bush's soldiers were no different from Saddam's. Haditha was simply more of the same. But the possibility that Americans may be punished for killing Iraqis--that, at least, is new. Saddam's soldiers were rarely brought to justice for their crimes.

And yet it is a sign of Iraqis' utter mistrust of the leaders who have replaced Saddam that anger over Haditha has been directed as much toward the Iraqi government as toward U.S. troops. Like many Iraqis across the country, the survivors accuse their elected leaders of cocooning themselves in a highly fortified Baghdad enclave, with little thought for the plight of their countrymen. "The concrete walls of the Green Zone are too high, so they can't see what's happening to us," says Khaled Raseef, the spokesman for the Haditha victims' kin. Whatever they think of the Marines, Raseef says he was impressed with the thoroughness with which the U.S. military has investigated the killings. As of last week, he says, nobody from the Iraqi government had contacted him for an account of what happened.

Sheik Jamal's views on the Americans are not hard to divine--in his spare time he's a volunteer in al-Sadr's office in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood. But his take on the Haditha killings is purely practical: the local morgue dealt with those bodies, and they were all claimed by family members, so they aren't his problem. He has more pressing concerns. The escalation of killings in Baghdad puts him under tremendous financial strain: he makes his living as a professional mortician but receives no payment for burying unclaimed bodies, which he sees as a religious duty. He estimates that each body he buries costs him $20, including the price of the body bag, the coarse white cotton shroud, gravediggers' fees, transportation costs and the grave itself. Recently, he's taken to burying two bodies in each grave.

Money is only one of his problems. The Friday trips to Najaf are fraught with danger. The road from Baghdad runs through some of the most lawless parts of Iraq, where criminals routinely kill commuters to take their cars and terrorists have been known to attack funeral corteges. Sheik Jamal says his weekly convoy--one truck and several carloads of volunteers--has never been attacked, a fact he attributes to divine intervention. "It's God's work, and he finds a way for us to do it," he says.

It's late in the morning at the Wadi al-Salaam cemetery by the time Sheik Jamal and his volunteers have completed their grim mission. The 72 bodies have been sprayed with disinfectant, wrapped in shrouds and buried. Sheik Jamal thanks the gravediggers, shaking their hands. "I will be in touch," he says. "I'll call and let you know how many [graves] we need next week." Stretching out into the desert, the graveyard is unlikely to run out of space. And since the killings of Iraqis show no sign of slowing, Sheik Jamal will not run out of bodies either.

With reporting by Yasser al-Ali/Najaf, Assad Azawi/Baghdad