Truthout's Darh Jamail's Iraq Dispatches

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** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
** Visit the Dahr Jamail Iraq website http://dahrjamailiraq.com **
** Website by http://jeffpflueger.com **

By Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Wednesday 03 May 2006

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
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1721366,00.html> 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
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060427/wl_nm/iraq_killing_dc;_ylt=A9G_RwN46FBERUUByQlm.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA-->
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
<http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/0e9b19596e7ec143feaa10e2d4d2e996.htm>
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" 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 <http://www.alternet.org/story/31508/> 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/

_______________________________________________
(c)2004, 2005 Dahr Jamail.
All images, photos, photography and text are protected by United States and international copyright law. If you would like to reprint Dahr's Dispatches on the web, you need to include this copyright notice and a prominent link to the http://DahrJamailIraq.com website. Website by photographer Jeff Pflueger's Photography Media http://jeffpflueger.com . Any other use of images, photography, photos and text including, but not limited to, reproduction, use on another website, copying and printing requires the permission of Dahr Jamail. Of course, feel free to forward Dahr's dispatches via email.

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[Oversea Visitor]

1. Sad

Cant do anything ....x(

Leader look at 10,000 nukes then turn back on problems x(

What now?

Guess all wait....

Meanwhile Iran going to go ...... who knows

For what? so many deads for what
Lies more lies more and more lies
and people dies more and more and more and more
How much more 1 million 2 million 3 million
How much evil can a soul hold and yet be call a soul
What colour is the American soul
Is it pure white
maybe it was long ago, so how long more before it is totally pure evil?