The Baghdad morgue is a fearful place of heat and stench and mourning, the cries of relatives echoing down the narrow, foetid laneway behind the pale-yellow brick medical centre where the authorities keep their computerized records. So many corpses are being brought to the mortuary that human remains are stacked on top of each other. Unidentified bodies must be buried within days for lack of space – but the municipality is so overwhelmed by the number of killings that it can no longer provide the vehicles and personnel to take the remains to cemeteries.
July was the bloodiest month in Baghdad’s modern history – in all, 1,100 bodies were brought to the city’s mortuary; executed for the most part, eviscerated, stabbed, bludgeoned, tortured to death. The figure is secret.
We are not supposed to know that the Iraqi capital’s death toll last month was only 700 short of the total American fatalities in Iraq since April of 2003. Of the dead, 963 were men – many with their hands bound, their eyes taped and bullets in their heads – and 137 women. The statistics are as shameful as they are horrifying. For these are the men and women we supposedly came to “liberate” – and about whose fate we do not care.
I keep hearing the Right bitching about how the "positive" stories from Iraq are being ignored. I am sure that there are successes that are happening that we do not hear about, but I am equally convinced that there is even more "negative" news that is being kept from us.
While Saddam’s regime visited death by official execution upon its opponents, the scale of anarchy now existing in Baghdad, Mosul, Basra and other cities is unprecedented. “The July figures are the largest ever recorded in the history of the Baghdad Medical Institute,” a senior member of the management told The Independent.
It is clear that death squads are roaming the streets of a city which is supposed to be under the control of the US military and the American-supported, elected government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Never in recent history has such anarchy been let loose on the civilians of this city – yet the Western and Iraqi authorities show no interest in disclosing the details. The writing of the new constitution – or the failure to complete it – now occupies the time of Western diplomats and journalists. The dead, it seems, do not count.
As long as this is happening under our watch we will continue to be blamed for it. It is just like Colin Powell said "If you break it, you own it." Well we sure as hell broke it.
