CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE
by GEORGE PACKER

Will moderate Iraqis embrace democracy--or Islamist radicalism?

Issue of 2004-05-17
Posted 2004-05-10

On the March morning I visited the Baghdad morgue, which is in a decaying neighborhood near the Tigris River, a young forensic-medicine specialist named Dr. Bashir Shaker was on duty. It was the day after Ashura, one of the most important religious holidays on the Shiite calendar, which commemorates the murder of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, and the massacre of his followers at Karbala, in 680 A.D. Thirteen hundred and twenty-four years later, Baghdad was festooned with the symbols of Shiite piety and penitence: the red flags of Hussein's blood, the green flags of Islam, the black flags of grief bearing messages such as "Hussein Taught Us to Become Victims in Order to Gain Victory." For the first time in decades, Iraqi Shiites felt free to observe the day of martyrdom and the forty days of full-throated mourning that follow. The chants, the parades, the beating of chests, and the flaying of backs in ceremonies of atonement also became displays of collective power. 

The shrines of Baghdad and Karbala were therefore unusually crowded with black-clad Shiite pilgrims that day--and when suicide bombers in their midst detonated a series of explosions it was the worst civilian massacre since the start of the war. The death toll in the two cities was at least a hundred and eighty, and the Baghdad morgue became a charnel house filled with bodies, heads, limbs, and buckets of flesh. Outside the morgue, a man waited to enter and look for the corpse of an eleven-year-old boy, a neighbor, whose father lay wounded in the hospital. Others were leaving with rags still pressed to their faces, a response to the stench inside. The authorities were rushing to complete the process of identification. There would be no forensic autopsies of the victims, Shaker told me; these followers of Hussein were Shiite martyrs, and Islam forbade the violation of their bodies.

Before the American invasion of Iraq, Dr. Shaker said, only one murder victim arrived at the city morgue each month. This statistic underscores two conditions of Iraqi life under Saddam Hussein: the state had a near-monopoly on killing, and most of the victims of the state disappeared into unmarked mass graves. One unintended effect of Iraq's liberation from Baathist tyranny has been the widespread dispersal of violence. In occupied Iraq, between fifteen and twenty-five murder victims arrive at the Baghdad morgue daily, most of them with gunshot wounds. Shaker estimated that five cases a week involve Baathists executed in reprisal killings; their families typically retrieve the bodies without informing the police. With barely functioning courts, a weak, ill-trained, and often corrupt new police force, a foreign occupier that has failed to provide security, and a pervasive atmosphere of lawlessness, Iraqis don't expect the justice that was denied them during the reign of Saddam Hussein to materialize anytime soon.

The day I visited, Shaker said that he was reviewing "an interesting case," unrelated to the Ashura bombings. The body of a woman, forty-one years old and never married, had recently been discovered with six gunshot wounds in the chest. Shaker's initial examination had found that the woman appeared not to be a virgin, and the number of gunshots suggested that the murder was premeditated. These details cast suspicion on her family: Shaker said that such a crime was called "washing the shame." Honor killing is an old custom in Iraq, he said, though in this case there was a new element: before the war, the family would have burned or drowned the woman to disguise the murder. "Now you can kill and go," Shaker said. "No need to cover the crime." The standard sentence for "washing the shame" is six months.

The woman's case was referred to a committee of five doctors, including Iraq's leading hymen expert. To Shaker's surprise, the committee found that the woman's hymen was extremely thin but intact. Case closed: the family would not be investigated, and, without the means to find other clues, the police would seal the woman's file. 

Down the hall from the morgue, which is in a squat, two-story yellow building called the Medico-Legal Institute, is an examination room with a reclining chair and stirrups. This is where virginity exams on living subjects take place--most of them on suspected prostitutes, but also on runaways, kidnapping victims, and girls who have suffered an accident and whose parents, for the sake of marriageability, want a medical certificate establishing their purity. 

An entire subspecialty of forensic medicine in Iraq deals with virginity, Shaker said. In any criminal case involving a woman, it's the most important piece of information. "It rules our life," he added. The surprising thing about these details of his profession is their ordinariness. In the West, Iraqis developed a reputation for cosmopolitan modernity that is now decades out of date. In order to win the support of Iraq's clerics, Saddam obliged people to adopt a harsh form of traditional Islam. In private matters of religion, family, and the treatment of women, the vast majority of Iraqis are far more conservative than most outsiders understand. 

In March, 2003, a week before the start of the war, a sixteen-year-old girl whom the Baathist police had found wandering disoriented through the streets was brought to the Medico-Legal Institute. Upon examining her, Shaker found that her virginity had been recently and violently taken. The girl, named Raghda, was beautiful, with pale skin and large, dark eyes, and she was so miserable she could hardly speak. Raghda seemed nothing like the teen-age prostitutes Shaker examined, and he gently persuaded her to tell him what had happened. 

Raghda had gone to audition as a television announcer at the studio owned by Uday Hussein, Saddam's psychopathic older son. Along with the six other finalists, she was taken to a room where Uday--crippled from a 1996 assassination attempt--was seated in a chair, holding a pistol in his lap. He ordered the girls to undress and walk in a circle around his chair. When one girl begged to be excused, Uday shot her dead. After that, the other girls, including Raghda, did as they were told. In the following days, Uday (who was committing some of his last crimes in power, while an invasion force gathered along Iraq's southern border) raped the girls, then threw them out on the street, drugged, with a wad of cash, which was how Raghda was found by the police. When she told them her story, they gave her a beating and then took her to the Medico-Legal Institute.

"If you want to help me," Raghda told the doctor, "go tell my parents their daughter was found dead."

On March 18th, two days before the war started, Shaker completed Raghda's paperwork. "Notice that there is the appearance of complete hymen rupture from the top to the base," he wrote. "In conclusion, the hymen membrane was ruptured longer than two weeks ago; I cannot say how long. End of report." Raghda was returned to the police; Shaker never learned her fate.

Shaker served in the Iraqi Army and, a decade ago, took part in the occupation of Kuwait. Now he handles Baghdad's nightly traffic of violent death. One Friday brought thirty-two bodies, including two foreign engineers--one German, one Dutch--who had been gunned down by insurgents on a road south of Baghdad, and two Iraqi journalists shot to death by American soldiers as they drove away from a checkpoint. For Shaker, such cases are purely intellectual matters. He told me without emotion that his testimony in trials has sent homosexuals to execution. The effect of this dispassion shows in the cold, handsome gaze of his blue eyes; in his direct, uninflected manner of speaking; and in the way his smile turns almost automatically into a sneer. But he hadn't got over Raghda.

When I met him, Shaker said he was looking for a change in his life: "Any change, better or worse." He had a restless mind and hated boredom, and, since the Americans represented something new, he welcomed spending time with me. I assumed that this forward-thinking man of science--with a flat-top haircut and clean-shaven jaw--wanted a relatively secular, liberal Iraq. I kept waiting for him to catch my eye in the middle of one of his clinical descriptions and shake his head over the backwardness of a society obsessed with virginity and prostitution. It never happened. 

Shaker was born in 1968, the year the Baath Party came to power. "For thirty-five years, I feel I was dead," he said. "Only these last weeks I'm beginning to live." The fall of Saddam and the arrival of foreign occupiers--who happened to be the makers of his favorite old movies--had, at last, brought the chance for a new life. Eager to obtain travel documents and venture outside Iraq, he sold his private dermatology practice and a piece of land he'd received as a former soldier. His first foreign trip was to Amman, Jordan, where he had arranged to meet an Iraqi girl who was living in exile in Amsterdam. They married after two days. "Like a movie," he said. His wife is still in Amsterdam, but the plan is for her to move to Baghdad, once the city returns to calm.

Though Shaker was initially grateful to the foreign occupiers, the disorder on Baghdad's streets disillusioned him. The morgue reflected that chaos--it had the improvised, filthy atmosphere of a front-line hospital. There were pools of blood on the floor, and empty stretchers attracted flies. In the hall, bodies lay uncovered on tables: a man with a broad mustache and a slashed throat, found naked under a pile of garbage in a middle-class district; a man with a gunshot wound in his head, his blue eyes open and filmy; the small, blackened corpse of a badly burned woman. Amid the gloomy chill of the refrigerated room, six other naked bodies lay sprawled on the floor, two women and four men. One of the women, believed to be a prostitute, had been shot through the nipple--by a relative, Shaker assumed. 

These days, the morgue overflows, but the examination room down the hall is usually empty. Before the war, it was the other way around; Shaker used to perform five or six virginity exams a day. Shaker is a Shiite Muslim, and he was appalled by this inversion of the normal order. In his view, a fragile moral relationship existed between the two sections of the Medico-Legal Institute--as if the social control of virginity offered a defense against the anarchy that led to murder. He noted that in Iran, an Islamist theocracy, prostitutes were publicly whipped. He thought the same practice should be instituted in Iraq--where the sex trade, he claimed, had reached epidemic proportions in the lawlessness of the occupation. "It's strict, it's horrible, but it has good results," he said of Islamic law. "Prostitution now is normal here." He blamed the Americans for the moral laxity in Baghdad, and especially L. Paul Bremer, the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, for threatening, in February, to veto any interim constitution that declared Islam to be the principal basis of federal law. "When they give everybody their rights, it's causing bad things in society--it's corrupting us," Shaker said. "If Islam is the main source of law, none of these things would happen."

The doctor said that he belonged to "the middle level of mind" in Iraqi society, somewhere between the strictly religious masses and the secular élite. "There are many Iraqis like me," he said. In Iraq, there is nothing unusual about a doctor who loves Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant, desires the public whipping of prostitutes, and believes that executed homosexuals got what they deserved. Yet Shaker's mix of traditional and modern views causes him considerable inner conflict. "I hate Iraq," he said. "And I love it." He longs to live abroad, but fears the moral climate outside the country. He is wary of the Western images that appear on his television screen, though he installed a satellite dish on his roof when it was illegal, and dangerous, to own one. He adores his new wife, an independent-minded woman who wears low-cut shirts, but he wants her to start covering her hair and acting like a traditional Muslim woman when she moves to Baghdad. His work fascinates him, but he is concerned that his daily immersion in death will make him less spiritual. "The doctor of forensic medicine deals only with bodies," he said. "So maybe in the end I will become like you--an existentialist."

Dr. Shaker lives with his mother and his brothers and sisters on a tidy side street in Al Thawra, the heavily Shiite slum district in northeastern Baghdad. Last year, the neighborhood was renamed Sadr City, in honor of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, a revered Shiite leader known for his subversive sermons against Baathist tyranny; he was assassinated in 1999, almost certainly on Saddam's orders. His son, Moqtada al-Sadr, declared himself his successor. With the overthrow of Saddam, Moqtada began stridently fomenting dissent against the American occupation. Throughout Sadr City, young men in black uniforms guided traffic: these were members of the Mahdi Army, Moqtada's militia. 

A round sticker was affixed to the wooden front door of Shaker's house; it bore an image of Ayatollah Sadr, along with a quotation, from one of his sermons, insisting that women be veiled. In the Shakers' living room hung a picture of Imam Hussein crossing a river on horseback by moonlight, like one of the Christian saints. Compact disks containing forty-five sermons by Ayatollah Sadr were stacked inside the family's TV cabinet, alongside a pile of back issues of Al Hawza, the fiercely anti-American newspaper published by Moqtada al-Sadr. Shaker told me that he got his television news from Al Jazeera and Iranian broadcasts--he never watched Iraq's American-run network. His main source of information from the non-Islamic world, I realized, was old Hollywood movies. That wouldn't offer him much help in parsing the truth of a story I noticed in Al Hawza. The newspaper had reprinted photographs of President Bush and President Clinton holding up their index and pinkie fingers; the accompanying article offered the images as evidence of a Zionist-Masonic conspiracy. 

Shaker's younger brothers, Ali and Samir, joined us in the living room. Ali was a secondary-school math teacher, Samir an unemployed telecom repairman. Unlike their dirty-blond, fair-skinned older brother, they were dark and bearded--respectful, serious, slightly wary.

"Samir is closer to God than me," Shaker said. "Ali is like me--flexible." Ali and Samir were devoted followers of Moqtada; they shared his hostility toward the occupation. From time to time, someone knocked on the door, and one of the brothers would get up to receive a tray of food or beverages from the hands of an unseen woman.

Ali brought up the Ashura bombings. "Ninety-five per cent of Iraqis knew the main purpose of this was to start a religious war between Shia and Sunnis," he said. He was skeptical of the Americans' assertion that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist with ties to Al Qaeda, was responsible for the attacks. "This Zarqawi--it's only a game that the Americans use," Ali declared. "Before the election of Bush, they'll show Zarqawi on TV. Just like Saddam--they captured him months before they showed him."

The brothers told me a joke about the occupation: An American soldier is about to kill a Shiite, who cries, "Please, no, in the name of Imam Hussein!" The American asks who Imam Hussein was, and then decides to spare the man's life. A few weeks later, this same soldier is sent to Falluja, where he is cornered by a Sunni insurgent. The soldier thinks fast and cries, "Please, no, in the name of Imam Hussein!" The insurgent says, "What? You're an American and a Shiite?," and blows him away.

There was a moment of laughter in the living room.

Ali sat cross-legged on a rug against the wall, and looked directly at me. "Before this war, I was waiting for the Americans to come--and now I feel sort of cheated. All this talk about rebuilding Iraq, and all we see is a couple of light coats of paint. And they say they renovated Iraq."

Samir, the unemployed younger brother, spoke in darker tones, with a faint smile. He had never had any illusions. "No enemy loves his enemy. We know very well that the Americans don't intend us any good."

The Americans had at least got rid of Saddam, I observed. "That's not enough," Ali said. "Now things are worse. We can't go outside at four in the morning, as before."

If within a year there were free elections in Iraq, I asked, would they be satisfied?

"Yes," Samir said.

Ali disagreed. "I don't think the people will be satisfied. So what if we have a President? The mobile phones we have here don't work. Why can't it be like the Gulf countries? Maybe in generations after generations. But we won't be here then. It pisses me off."

Shaker also spoke of the urgent need for improved services. Then he asked to borrow my satellite phone and disappeared up on the roof, to call his new wife in Amsterdam.

One Friday not long after the Ashura bombings, I went with Shaker to hear prayers in Kadhimiya, an old Shiite neighborhood in the northwestern part of Baghdad that is famous for its gold shops. One of the bombs killed nearly sixty people at the local shrine, which holds the remains of two imams who came after the martyred Hussein. Along a broad pedestrian market street that ends in the square in front of the sixteenth-century mosque, cordons of grim-looking young Mahdi Army militiamen, carrying Kalashnikovs, searched the throngs of pilgrims for weapons.

There were no Iraqi policemen or American soldiers on the streets. One Mahdi soldier, who was eighteen years old, said that the Americans had prevented Moqtada's militia from carrying their weapons on Ashura. This was a foolish decision, he said: if the militia had been armed, it would have been able to hold back the surges of worshippers and catch the suicide bombers mingling in the crowd.

While Shaker went into a shop to wash himself before prayers, a local cleric named Sheikh Muhammad Kinani told me that the bombers were Wahhabi members of Al Qaeda, working in concert with an American soldier employed by the John Kerry campaign. "I believe John Kerry is behind this so Bush will lose his Presidency and look bad in front of the world," he said. "But it's the Iraqis who pay for it."

Such rumors proliferate on the streets of Iraq's cities these days. In fact, the traffic in conspiracy theories is so heavy that an American intelligence unit began putting out "The Baghdad Mosquito," a daily compendium of rumors currently in circulation. According to several Shiites I spoke with in Kadhimiya, Wahhabi men all have light-colored beards and are the enemies of true Muslims. A merchant on the pedestrian market street said, "We caught a Wahhabi from Ramadi an hour ago." The captive, he said, was wearing a short dishdasha, in the Wahhabi style; although his feet were dirty, his body was suspiciously clean. A search of the Wahhabi man turned up blank paper and a map. Local people took him to the police station, where he would be tortured until he confessed.

continue to part two

continue to part three