BAGHDAD - Rubaei Street in
Baghdad's Zayuna district is one of the city's
lesser-known oasis of normality. Far away from the more
famous Kindi Street of Harthiya or 14 Ramadan Street of
Mansour in the center of the city. On either side of the
wide and brightly lit boulevard good restaurants are
open well into the night, the sidewalks are crowded with
families, and even young couples. Expensive cars slowly
cruise the street, and people gaze at the crowds of
girls in tight clothes.
I was sitting outside
last night (staring at them too) with my Iraqi friend
Rana in a fresh fruit juice and ice cream restaurant
called Sandra. Owned by a Christian family, this
restaurant is a secret I hesitate to reveal to the rest
of the world. Sitting outside at dusk, I was sipping my
strawberry smoothie while Rana ate imported ice cream,
explaining that she did not eat the local ice cream for
fear of nuclear contamination in the milk. She noted
that the scene before us reminded her of the days before
the war, when she would go out at night with her
sisters, unafraid of the dangers that keep women
sequestered in their homes today.
As she was
waxing nostalgically about the good old days under
Saddam Hussein, a refrain I am by now accustomed to
hear, even from many Shi'ites, and I was trying not to
roll my eyes, two sharp gun shots cut her words short
and returned her to reality. Though by now, like for all
Iraqis, the sound of gun shots rarely distracts me, this
time it was too close, and too incongruent with the
bustling nightlife. I saw two men walking hurriedly
across the street in between the traffic, arms raised
and pistols in the air. "They killed a man!" someone
shouted. I got up and saw a man in a suit collapsed on
the curb, blood spreading from beneath his head. Not
knowing what else to do, I began taking pictures of him.
The crowd grew and cars slowed down as their
drivers gazed at the corpse. Soon about 50 men stood
around silently looking around them for help, looking at
the body then looking away guiltily. Someone tried
calling the police, but the call did not go through. Two
men ran a few hundred meters away to the nearest police
checkpoint, but were told by the policemen there that it
was somebody else's
jurisdiction. Two armed security guards from a building
across the street returned panting, having failed to
find the killers. They said they provided security for
"an official" nearby. People told me the official was a
judge. Someone from a nearby shop covered the body with
a rug, but it failed to conceal the growing pool of
blood that had already started to coagulate. Finally,
half an hour after the shooting, Iraqi police began
arriving, just as several men in the crowd had turned
over the body and were looking through his pockets for
identification or a phone.
Blue and white pickup
trucks pulled up and a dozen police officers emerged
with guns drawn, pushing the crowd back and asking
witnesses what had happened. Witnesses described the men
and said they had walked away laughing. The police
recognized the dead man as a colonel from their local
station. Realizing he was one of theirs, and that his
gun was missing, they became very tense, raising their
guns and pushing back the crowd. The police told me to
stop photographing. Rana showed them a permission slip
from the ministry of interior allowing a different
friend of hers to work with the police. She was told
this did not apply to cases of murdered police officers.
I showed several officers some of the pictures I had
taken of the first moments of his death on my digital
camera. A tall officer with light hair and gray eyes
grabbed my camera, telling me I was not allowed to have
pictures of dead police on it, and I would have to wait
for his commander to come before he returned it to me. I
grabbed the camera back and we both held it, arguing
over who would keep it. He waved his gun and held it to
my chest, and I let go of the camera as we shouted back
and forth at each other. He growled that if I did not
let it go he would break it, and pushed the barrel of
his gun at my chest again, I recall being impressed with
how clean and new it looked. I relented, but followed
him around, fearing for my camera.
The Zayuna
station commander arrived wearing civilian clothes and a
worried look. He told me I could not take pictures of
dead policemen, and ordered me to erase the ones I had
taken. The tall angry officer demanded I give him the
film. I explained to him that it was digital and he
shouted that I should erase all the pictures. I pressed
various buttons and scowled in mock concentration,
pretending to delete the pictures. One of the slain
colonel's men arrived, and smacked himself on the head
when he saw his superior officer's body, falling to his
knees and sobbing. "Sir! Oh sir!" he cried. "Why did you
go out alone?" He rolled in agony, screaming, "It was
his first time out alone!"
A family walking by
recognized the commander and called to him. He smiled at
the mother and her children, asked them how they were.
"Alhamdulillah," praise god, he said warmly, when
they inquired how he was doing. They kissed hello and
hugged. The family left and he returned grimly to the
body of Colonel Basel Abdel Aziz, who looked to be about
50 years old, raising it with the help of two of his men
onto the bed of a pickup truck. An officer found two
empty nine millimeter shell casings and gave them to the
commander. A man from a shop nearby splashed a
bucket-full of water onto the pool of blood, spreading
it across the road, and the air was thick with its
pungent smell.
Rana convinced the commander to
take us with him and the body back to the police
station. On the way he told us that this was the sixth
officer from his station who had been assassinated, and
another one had died in an explosion. A different
officer commented that the killers were "very organized
and systematic. They want to prevent stability." The
vehicles weaved through concrete barriers arranged to
slow down potential suicide bombers as a son of Colonel
Basel, who looked to be in his 20s, ran out and began
moaning and beating a car. Other officers told him to
say "ya Allah", oh God, and urged him to be strong, but
he fell down and lay still, and they carried him inside.
A second, younger son of about 15 years, could be heard
crying as he ran past the barriers and pushed the other
policemen away.
"Every day we lose another one
of out brothers," one policeman said, "Every day I leave
my house and kiss my wife and children goodbye not
knowing if I will return." Another officer complained
that "his family will get nothing. Even in the worst of
times under Saddam, the family of a dead police officer
received a salary, or a car or a house even. Now they
get nothing. If the situation for the police does not
improve we all soon all quit." I asked a police officer
about the problems they faced. "Three problems a day,"
he said, "breakfast, lunch and dinner." He and his men
asked me to tell the Iraqi Governing Council about their
difficulties.
Two American military Humvees
rumbled into the base and several soldiers from the 1st
Infantry Division emerged to look around. A towering
officer leaned over the pickup truck and gazed with
indifference at the body, shining his flashlight and
asking his translator to tell him what had happened. The
officer admitted he had no clue who was behind these
attacks, but expressed confidence that "we'll find them
eventually". On the way home past Fardos Circle I saw an
immense sign above a building. A few Iraqi men and women
in uniform smiling proudly and in Arabic was written
"Iraqi Security Forces, The New Future." When I returned
to my hotel, I told Karim, a photographer, about what I
had seen. He asked me if I had heard about the explosion
in Fallujah. I asked him if he had heard about the
deputy chief of police in Mosul getting assassinated. He
said: "It's all small news, so you never hear of it.
It's all small news, but it's all bad news."
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somebody else's
jurisdiction. Two armed security guards from a building
across the street returned panting, having failed to
find the killers. They said they provided security for
"an official" nearby. People told me the official was a
judge. Someone from a nearby shop covered the body with
a rug, but it failed to conceal the growing pool of
blood that had already started to coagulate. Finally,
half an hour after the shooting, Iraqi police began
arriving, just as several men in the crowd had turned
over the body and were looking through his pockets for
identification or a phone. 
