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What goes through people's minds when their family are killed by bombs on the streets. What does daily life look like in the Iraqi capital Baghdad? What goes through people's minds when yet another bomb explodes, killing and maiming innocent people? Four Iraqis describe a day in the world's most dangerous city through their eyes.
Spiegel.de
The sun rises over Baghdad at 6:04 a.m. It immediately begins to blaze in a cloudless sky. There is no dawn. Baghdad, a dusty behemoth of a city, lies on a flat plain, a city of brownish streets along a greenish river, with the occasional pillar of smoke protruding into the sky.
It's Sunday, May 13 -- 1,496 days after the US military invaded the country. Another day begins for the 5 million residents of a city that was once the most advanced in the Arab world. Those days are long gone. Today Baghdad is a nightmare -- the world's most horrible city.
According to press reports, at least 35 people died in Baghdad on May 13, 2007, and dozens were injured. But no one will ever know exactly how many people have died since March 2003, when the war began. Baghdad is a city in which life lost its value long ago, a place where no one really knows how many murders, kidnappings and rapes the war has in fact brought to the city.
The information the world receives from Baghdad today has been reduced to simple numbers and images of horror. The Americans and British are looking for a way out of Iraq, and international conferences are underway at which Arab autocrats flesh out diplomatic solutions with representatives from the West and Iran. But how do ordinary people live in Baghdad? What keeps them from leaving this city?
Imad, the body collector, is awakened by the sun. He unrolls his small rug and says his morning prayers, and then he reads from the Koran. It is important to him to know that God is at his side because his work could cost him his life at any time. Imad, a former taxi driver, now makes living driving bodies. He finds them and recovers them when their families are unable to. It's a good business. He is 39, a thin, nervous-looking man with a black beard and coarse hands.
He lives in Iskan, a poor, crowded neighborhood near downtown Baghdad. Since Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi militia assumed control, only Shiites live in the district. Imad's house is tiny: four rooms on two floors. He sleeps in one of the upper rooms and his mother and two sisters sleep in the other one. Imad is single and says he is too busy to look for a wife.
7:00 a.m., THE GREEN ZONE
Two enormous, crossed steel swords stand at the entrance to the field where former dictator Saddam Hussein used to parade his troops and missiles. A red tent stands next to the martial archway.
The tent belongs to Salman Mohammed, the souvenir peddler. Mohammed, 40, a thin man with an angular jaw and graying hair, has just gotten up. His customers during the day include people from the US embassy, soldiers on short leave in the Green Zone, foreign construction workers and employees of security firms.
He sells souvenirs from Baghdad: small busts of Saddam, stamps and banknotes imprinted with images of Saddam, prayer rugs on which the customary inscriptions in Arabic are replaced by images of the Iraqi and American flags.
Ahmed, his 15-year-old, is tossing and turning in his bed at the back of the tent. The power was out overnight, even in the Green zone, and air in the tent is stifling without the two fans running. Sleeping was impossible, but this is the least of Ahmed's worries. What plagues him and millions of others in Baghdad who sleep outdoors to escape the heat are the mosquitoes. "We have two types of helicopters here," says the boy, "the American ones are big and loud, and they come and go. The Iraqi ones are small and sneaky. You can never get rid of them." Every few minutes he sprays himself with the contents of a bright yellow plastic bottle. The labeling on the bottle is only in English. Since he can't read it, he can't see that the pesticide is really meant to kill cockroaches.
Dr. Rafid is rudely awakened by the penetrating beep of a travel alarm clock. He hates the noise. He looks exhausted as he lies in his bed on the eighth and top floor of a building filled with medical offices, in a bare, windowless room he shares with three other doctors.
Dr. Rafid's morning shift is about to begin. He is 29, a short, slight man with a moustache, and he wears a white T-shirt, pale linen trousers and a little gel in his hair.
The power is out and the elevator is broken. As always, Rafid and his fellow doctors take the stairs. As they walk through a long corridor and small gardens to the hospital, they discuss the case of a patient who died after a kidney operation.
Rafid has only been living in the doctors' building for a short time. His family's house is in Yarmuk, a neighborhood west of the Green Zone now controlled by Sunnis. Rafid is a Shiite. A few weeks ago, members of a Sunni militia stopped him and his younger brother on the street in Yarmuk. They told him that he could choose whether he or his brother should be shot first. He said to them he ought to be the first -- but the two men were saved when an Iraqi army patrol appeared, forcing the militia members to flee.
Rafid, who has always been a pensive man, has become even quieter since the incident. He wants to leave Iraq, but he doesn't have enough money. Fleeing the country costs tons of thousands of dollars.
**** 8:30 a.m. Two Iraqis are shot, execution style, 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of Baghdad. Armed men have driven them into the city, dragged them down from the bed of their truck and shot them. "This is the fate of traitors," they tell their victims. It's meant as a warning to other Iraqis not to cooperate with the US forces. ****
9:00 a.m., THE GREEN ZONE
Mithal al-Alussi, one of the most influential and widely known politicians in postwar Iraq, sits on a sofa in his villa in the Green Zone. He is 52, sports a thick moustache and keeps his gray hair neatly parted on the side.
Alussi drinks a strong cup of coffee for breakfast and then smokes a cigarette. He's preoccupied with a report he found on the Internet last night. The vice-president's son was murdered, just like Alussi's own two sons, Jamal and Ayman, 22 and 30, who died in an attack two years ago.
He has around-the-clock security. His villa in Baghdad's Green Zone has a small front garden and is surrounded by a meters-high wall topped with a privacy screen. A guardhouse stands next to the gate into his compound. Alussi is a liberal member of parliament, a secular Sunni, and his name has been repeatedly dropped as a possible candidate to become defense or interior minister.
Alussi is scheduled to report on his recent trip to Washington at today's meeting of the Iraqi parliament's foreign affairs committee. But he has received news this morning, through back channels, that interests him far more than foreign policy.
He has been searching for his sons' murderers for the past two years. Several men have been arrested, and one was found guilty and executed, but the men responsible for masterminding the attack have remained a mystery.
Alussi learned this morning that one of the detained men claimed that a man who is now a cabinet minister had ordered the attack. He is unwilling to identify the man by name, preferring to wait until a judge has issued a warrant for his arrest. He is agitated at the prospect of finally bringing the man to justice.
The power is always on in Alussi's villa, keeping the air-conditioning and refrigerator humming. He has four mobile phones, one for each of the three Iraqi networks, which seem to take turns breaking down, and one for the US telephone company MCI. All four networks are working this morning, and Alussi's four mobile phones are ringing constantly.
He finally finds the time to call the vice-president to extend his condolences. But the news was a false alarm. The vice-president's son is alive.
Imad, the body collector, sends his sisters to their room when an old man and two women come to the house to request his services. It is unseemly for women to show themselves to male guests. Imad doesn't want to upset God.
The visitors' faces are grief-stricken. The old man, wearing a blue suit, tells Imad the story of his son's death. Sunni hoodlums kidnapped him a few days ago and demanded a $10,000 ransom. The old man didn't have the money and asked the men to give him a month to raise the necessary funds.
The kidnappers called a few days later to tell him that his son was dead. They never returned the body.
The women weep quietly. The man says: "Imad, this is not the first time we have asked you to collect a body for us. You wanted $200 last year. How much do you want this time?"
Imad asks the family to return the next day with a picture of their missing son. He tells them that he needs to know what the man was last wearing and where he was last seen.
Once he has gathered all the information he needs, Imad activates his network. He calls it the "network of body merchants," so named because bodies are the focus of their work. He cooperates with Sunnis and Shiites, who can help him when a corpse he is looking for is in an area where he would feel unsafe.
When Imad puts the word out, the members of his informal network begin searching for the body among the many dead they find decomposing on the street every day. To make sure that the districts they are searching are safe, they first walk up and down the street to determine whether they are being watched and if militias are active in the area.
Imad's work is like Russian roulette. Many bodies are wired to explosives and blow up the minute they are touched. "I become suspicious when I see a corpse lying face-down," he says.
Suddenly there are gunshots in front of the house. Imad's mother is frightened. He comforts her. "It's only an American patrol," says Imad, "They drive by, and a few people shoot at them. It'll be over in a minute."
**** 10:30 a.m. An al-Qaida group operating in Iraq posts a video on the Internet that depicts the execution of three Iraqi soldiers. The group had demanded the release of prisoners, but the government refused to cooperate. The video shows a man wearing a black mask as he shoots the bound prisoners on a country road. ****
10:30 a.m., THE GREEN ZONE
Mithal al-Alussi, the Member of Parliament, leaves his villa. He had planned to visit his party's headquarters in the Masbah district, only about five kilometers from his Green Zone villa, before the parliamentary session begins. But there is bad news from the Red Zone. His security team calls to report fighting near the headquarters of Shiite leader Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim. "Iranian activities," says Alussi.
The citizens of Baghdad know that there is often a connection between traffic jams in their city and politics.
Alussi drives himself, as he always does, in his armor-plated BMW to the parliament building a few hundred meters away. Official’s tightened security at the entrance to the former convention center after a bomb detonated in the cafeteria in parliament. Alussi had just left the canteen when the bomb went off.
The Foreign Affairs Committee's meeting is short today. Alussi campaigns once again for his pet idea, which essentially involves reestablishing the old anti-Iranian alliance Washington maintained with Saddam's Iraq in the 1980s. After the meeting, he says that there was no opposition to his proposal, only an exchange of ideas. And perhaps there was no reason to voice any opposition, because few in Iraq share Alussi's views on the United States.
Alussi is a former expatriate, and bringing down Saddam was once his purpose in life. He lived in Germany for more than 20 years. Half a year before the war broke out, he and several like-minded dissidents attacked the Iraqi embassy in Berlin. A German court sentenced him to three and a half years in prison, but he moved to Iraq before his jail term could be imposed.
Imad, the body collector, has taken a taxi to Mansur, a section of town about four kilometers south of his home. Ruwad Square in Mansur is one of the few places where people can feel relatively safe in Baghdad. The shops are open and packed with people. Groups of young women walk from one store to the next; shopping with the little money they have left.
Suddenly three police officers run through the crowd, yelling and shooting into the air. Three police cars and two Iraqi army vehicles block the street and a 10-minute gun battle ensues. Someone says: "They're looking for a gunman."
A man explains the incident to Imad: "This morning four young men shot a 12-year-old boy who was cleaning the street with other children." The police and military were now searching for the killers. A young man in his mid-20s runs across the square. A bullet hits him in the leg and he falls down. The police seize him and drag him away. "God damn you!" Imad shouts after the young man.
Imad decides to go home as quickly as possible. Whenever fighters are arrested, their friends usually show up a short time later at the nearest checkpoint to take revenge on the police. It's a familiar sequence of events for Imad. He waves down a taxi.
1:00 p.m., THE GREEN ZONE
Salman Mohammed, the souvenir seller, has returned from the Red Zone across the Tigris River, where he went to purchase more merchandise at a local market. Markets are dangerous places because large crowds are favorite targets for suicide bombers in Baghdad.
Now he is back in his red tent in the Green Zone. He crossed the Tigris in a Kia, the local term for a minibus, the city's safest form of transportation. It's too big and filled with too many people for attackers to simply shoot the passengers and steal the vehicle, but too small to be a worthwhile target for a suicide bomber. Guards at the checkpoint searched his two bags of prayer rugs. He paid the guards a bribe of 15,000 dinars (about
Parliamentarian Mithal al-Alussi from the Iraqi National Party is sitting in the Grill Room at the Hotel Rashid, an 18-story building in the Green Zone. Many members of parliament live in the hotel because living anyplace else in Baghdad would be too dangerous for them. But the militias occasionally even fire at the Rashid from the distance.
Alussi discusses the current hot-button issues in Iraqi politics: the oil law that is meant to ensure equitable distribution of the country's oil revenues that the political parties can't seem to agree on; the question of whether former members of Saddam's Baath Party should continue to be excluded from public service, which the Shiites favor and the Sunnis oppose and, finally, the question of parliamentary vacation, which ...
Alussi is interrupted in mid-sentence as the lights suddenly go out. There is deafening roar in the distance and the room has fallen silent.
**** 2:45 p.m. A car bomb explodes on the busy Wathba Square in central Baghdad. Seventeen people die and 46 are wounded. Television reports show a crater in the ground filled with rubble, splintered wood, bits of metal and a tire. Iraqi and US soldiers secure the area. A similar attack nearby on April 18 claimed 127 lives. ****
3:05 p.m., MEDICAL CITY
Dr. Rafid, the young surgeon who works at the hospital in Medical City, is called to the emergency room. Wathba Square, the site of the bombing, is only two kilometers away.
The wounded -- 21 civilians, three police officers and two traffic policemen -- are brought to the hospital in ambulances, private cars and police vehicles. There are no extremely serious injuries among the people arriving at the hospital and though terrible, the attack could have been a lot worse. They were not standing directly adjacent to the explosion. Nevertheless, the emergency room erupts in chaos. The victims are brought in bleeding and screaming, and some, who must believe they are dying, start to scream even louder.
Then the same thing happens that always happens. The policemen who traveled to the hospital with their fellow injured officers compel the doctors to treat them first.
Rafid treats leg and back injuries, stops bleeding, and fends off the relatives who push him around, shout at him and beg him to help. Some of the doctors are forced to perform emergency surgery on the spot. All of the operating rooms are taken.
When larger attacks occur, circumstances in the hospital can get particularly grim. On some days, there aren't enough neurosurgeons on hand and doctors are forced to saw off limbs. Rafid has seen many things that he is unable to forget. Comparatively speaking, this day isn't all that bad.
The problem is that there is a shortage of everything in this hospital. There are no defibrillators, important drugs are missing and, of course, there is never enough blood to make up for the many liters of blood being shed every day.
The doctors are poorly paid, and those who can go abroad do. Most of Dr. Rafid's friends have already gone -- to Syria, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates -- but life there is more difficult than they had imagined, and most haven't found jobs.
**** The Iranian foreign minister announces those representatives of Iran and the United States plan to meet in Baghdad to increase security in Iraq. "We hope that this will help reduce the pain of the Iraqi people," says the minister. ****
Mithal al-Alussi leaves the parliament building through the rear entrance, where he encounters three women wearing long, black abajas in the afternoon heat. They want to talk to him. Their families were driven from their homes in Husseiniya in northeast Baghdad by Sunni gangs.
One of them is holding a baby on her arm. When Alussi walks through the gate, she blocks his way and begins weeping loudly. She tells him that her son is ill, and that the doctors don't know what's wrong.
Alussi stops to listen to the woman and asks for details. He begins to sweat. Other Iraqis, women and men, also force their way into Alussi's path. One of the men has a piece of paper to show Alussi and tries to push the woman aside.
Alussi, perspiring heavily by now, hands the woman with the baby two business cards and a $100 bill. But she is illiterate and doesn't know what to do with the business cards. He explains it to her, even writing one of his four mobile phone numbers on the card, and then he kisses her -- exactly the way Iraqi sheikhs used to kiss women in public spaces: by pulling her head against his chest and then kissing her on the head.
Alussi drives home, where he plans to address the fate of the man responsible for the deaths of his sons. He has completed his day's work.
3:30 p.m., ISKAN
Imad the body collector reads the Koran at home. He is a god-fearing man. He admits that he does his job for the money, but he also finds it satisfying that his work also has religious significance. Imad brings families their dead so that they can give them a proper burial.
He charges $200-2,000 a body, depending on the level of difficulty involved. When potential customers come to him, he shows them photos of bodies he has recovered, and tells them that the photos are the only evidence that he is good at his profession.
There is yet another power failure in the neighborhood. Imad switches on his gas generator so that he can watch TV.
He will stay at home for the rest of the day. It's too dangerous to venture out into the streets after 5 p.m. He will sit here, watch TV with his mother, and perhaps the neighbors will drop by for tea. He plans to go to bed early and search for the body tomorrow.
**** Four thousand US troops are searching for three of their fellow soldiers who were abducted yesterday during an attack on a patrol south of Baghdad. Four soldiers and an Iraqi translator were killed in the attack. ****
The day has drawn to a close in Baghdad. Life has disappeared from the streets. Anyone who dares to go outside now is gambling with his life. Only the heat remains. The temperature outside is still 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit).
Dr. Rafid is back in his room on the ninth floor of the doctors' building. He has just met his girlfriend in the hospital's Internet room. The young woman is beautiful and, like Rafid, a doctor too. But the couple can only get together rarely, and then only in public places. They stay together in the computer room for more than two hours, but now Rafid feels melancholic.
Rafid would like to ask her to marry him, but the war makes things more difficult for young couples. He needs her father's permission, which would require a trip to the house of her parents, who live outside the city. Getting there would be dangerous. Worse yet is the fact that Rafid has no money and doesn't even own his home. In today's Baghdad, a man who lacks money, a house or at least a way to take his bride out of the country, stands virtually no chance of her family approving his marriage request.
He doesn't understand this war. He has little interest in religion, but he loves Iraq and he loves Baghdad. He remembers a Jordanian student who used to cross the Tigris on foot because he found it so beautiful, and who always kept a notebook with him to write down his experiences with this river. That was how beautiful the city once was, he says.
He prays. "Thank you, God, for this day. But please let tomorrow be a better day than today."
