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The devastation of
Iraq
By Dahr Jamail
The
devastation of Iraq? Where do I start? After
working seven of the past 12 months in Iraq, I'm
still overwhelmed by even the thought of trying to
describe this.
The illegal war and
occupation of Iraq was waged for three reasons,
according to the administration of US President
George W Bush. First for weapons of mass
destruction, which have yet to be found. Second,
because the regime of Saddam Hussein had links to
al-Qaeda, which Bush has personally admitted have
never been proved. The third reason - embedded in
the very name of the invasion, Operation Iraqi
Freedom - was to liberate the Iraqi people.
So Iraq is now a liberated country.
I've been in liberated Baghdad and
environs on and off for 12 months, including being
inside Fallujah during the April siege and having
warning shots fired over my head more than once by
soldiers. I've traveled in the south, in the
north, and extensively around central Iraq. What I
saw in the first months of 2004, however, when it
was easier for a foreign reporter to travel the
country, offered a powerful - even predictive -
taste of the horrors to come in the rest of the
year (and undoubtedly in 2005 as well). It's worth
returning to the now-forgotten first half of last
year and remembering just how terrible things were
for Iraqis even relatively early in our occupation
of their country.
Then, as now, for
Iraqis, the US invasion and occupation were a case
of liberation from - from human rights (think: the
atrocities committed in Abu Ghraib, which are
still occurring daily there and elsewhere);
liberation from functioning infrastructure (think:
the malfunctioning electric system, the
many-kilometer-long gasoline queues, the raw
sewage in the streets); liberation from an entire
city to live in (think: Fallujah, most of which
has by now been flattened by aerial bombardment
and other means).
Iraqis were then already
bitter, confused, and existing amid a desolation
that came from myriad Bush-administration broken
promises. Quite literally every liberated Iraqi
I've gotten to know from my earliest days in the
country has had a family member or a friend killed
either by US soldiers or from the effects of the
war/occupation. These include such everyday facts
of life as not having enough money for food or
fuel because of massive unemployment and soaring
energy prices, or any of the countless other
horrors caused by the aforementioned. The broken
promises, broken infrastructure, and broken cities
of Iraq were plainly visible in those early months
of 2004 - and the sad thing is that the
devastation I saw then has only grown worse since.
The life Iraqis were living a year ago, horrendous
as it was, was but a prelude to what was to come
under the US occupation. The warning signs were
clear from a shattered infrastructure, to all the
torturing, to a burgeoning, violent resistance.
Broken promises
It was quickly
apparent, even to a journalistic newcomer, even in
those first months of last year, that the real
nature of the liberation we Americans brought to
Iraq was no news to Iraqis. Long before the US
media decided it was time to report on the
horrendous actions occurring inside Abu Ghraib
prison, most Iraqis already knew that the
"liberators" of their country were torturing and
humiliating their countrymen.
In December
2003, for instance, a man in Baghdad, speaking of
the Abu Ghraib atrocities, said to me, "Why do
they use these actions? Even Saddam Hussein did
not do that. This is not good behavior. They are
not coming to liberate Iraq." And by then the
bleak jokes of the beleaguered had already begun
to circulate. In the dark humor that has become so
popular in Baghdad these days, one recently
released Abu Ghraib detainee I interviewed said,
"The Americans brought electricity to my ass
before they brought it to my house."
Sadiq
Zoman is fairly typical of what I've seen. Taken
from his home in Kirkuk in July 2003, he was held
in a military detention facility near Tikrit
before being dropped off comatose at the Salahadin
General Hospital by US forces one month later.
While the medical report accompanying him, signed
by Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Hodges, stated that
Zoman was comatose because of a heart attack
brought on by heat stroke, it failed to mention
that his head had been bludgeoned, or to note the
electrical burn marks that scorched his penis and
the bottoms of his feet, or the bruises and
whip-like marks up and down his body.
I
visited his wife Hashmiya and eight daughters in a
nearly empty home in Baghdad. Its belongings had
largely been sold on the black market to keep them
all afloat. A fan twirled slowly over the bed as
Zoman stared blankly at the ceiling. A small
backup generator hummed outside, as this
neighborhood, like most of Baghdad, averaged only
six hours of electricity per day.
Her
daughter Rheem, who is in college, voiced the
sentiments of the entire family when she said, "I
hate the Americans for doing this. When they took
my father they took my life. I pray for revenge on
the Americans for destroying my father, my
country, and my life."
In May 2004, when I
went to their house, a court-martial of one of the
soldiers complicit in the widespread torturing of
Iraqis in Abu Ghraib had recently taken place. He
had been sentenced to some modest prison time, but
Iraqis were unimpressed. They had been convinced
yet again - not that they needed it - that
Bush-administration promises to clean up its act
regarding the treatment of detained Iraqis were no
less empty than those being offered for assistance
in building a safe and prosperous Iraq.
Last year, the empty promises to bring
justice to those involved in such heinous acts,
along with promises to make the prison at Abu
Ghraib more transparent and accessible, fell on
distraught family members who waited near the
gates of the prison to see their loved ones
inside. Under a scorching May sun I went to the
dusty, dismal, heavily guarded,
razor-wire-enclosed "waiting area" outside Abu
Ghraib. There I heard one horror story after
another from melancholy family members doggedly
gathered on this patch of barren earth, still
hoping against hope to be granted a visit with
someone inside the awful compound.
Sitting
alone on the hard-packed dirt in his white
dishdasha, his headscarf languidly flapping
in the dry, hot wind, Lilu Hammed stared
unwaveringly at the high walls of the nearby
prison as if he were attempting to see his
32-year-old son Abbas through the concrete walls.
When my interpreter Abu Talat asked if he would
speak with us, several seconds passed before Lilu
slowly turned his head and said simply, "I am
sitting here on the ground waiting for God's
help."
His son, never charged with an
offense, had by then been in Abu Ghraib for six
months after a raid on his home that produced no
weapons. Lilu held a crumpled
visitation-permission slip that he had just
obtained, promising a reunion with his son ...
three months away, on August 18.
Along
with every other person I interviewed there, Lilu
had found consolation neither in the recent
court-martial nor in the release of a few hundred
prisoners. "This court-martial is nonsense. They
said that Iraqis could come to the trial, but they
could not. It was a false trial."
At that
moment, a convoy of Humvees full of soldiers, guns
pointing out the small windows, rumbled through
the front gate of the penal complex, kicking up a
huge dust cloud that quickly engulfed everyone.
The parent of another prisoner, Mrs Samir, waving
away the clouds of dust, said, "We hope the whole
world can see the position we are in now," and
then added plaintively, "Why are they doing this
to us?"
Last summer I interviewed a kind
55-year-old woman who used to work as an English
teacher. She had been detained for four months in
as many prisons ... in Samarra, Tikrit, Baghdad
and, of course, Abu Ghraib. She was never, she
told me, allowed to sleep through a night. She was
interrogated many times each day, not given enough
food or water, or access to a lawyer or to her
family. She was verbally and psychologically
abused.
But that, she assured me, wasn't
the worst part. Not by far. Her 70-year-old
husband was also detained and he was beaten. After
seven months of beatings and interrogations, he
died in US military custody in prison.
She
was crying as she spoke of him. "I miss my
husband," she sobbed and stood up, speaking not to
us but to the room, "I miss him so much." She
shook her hands as if to fling water off them ...
then she held her chest and cried some more.
"Why are they doing this to us?" she
asked. She simply couldn't understand, she said,
what was happening because two of her sons were
also detained, and her family had been completely
shattered. "We didn't do anything wrong," she
whimpered.
With the interview over, we
were walking towards our car to leave when all of
us realized that it was 10pm, already too late at
night to be out in dangerous Baghdad. So she asked
us instead if we wouldn't please stay for dinner,
all the while thanking me for listening to her
horrendous story, for my time, for writing about
it. I found myself speechless.
"No, thank
you, we must get home now," said Abu Talat. By
this time, we were all crying.
In the car,
as we drove quickly along a Baghdad highway
directly into a full moon, Abu Talat and I were
silent. Finally, he asked, "Can you say any words?
Do you have any words?"
I had none. None
at all.
Broken
infrastructure
Everything in Iraq is set
against the backdrop of shattered infrastructure
and a nearly complete lack of reconstruction. What
the Americans turn out to be best at is, once
again, promises - and propaganda. During the
period when the Coalition Provisional Authority
ruled Iraq from Baghdad's Green Zone, their
handouts often read like this one released on May
21, 2004: "The Coalition Provisional Authority has
recently given out hundreds of soccer balls to
Iraqi children in Ramadi, Kerbala and Hilla. Iraqi
women from Hilla sewed the soccer balls, which are
emblazoned with the phrase 'All of Us Participate
in a New Iraq'."
And yet when it came to
the basics of that New Iraq, unemployment was at
50% and increasing, better areas of Baghdad
averaged six hours of electricity per day, and
security was nowhere to be found. Even as far back
as January 2004, before the security situation had
brought most reconstruction projects to the nearly
complete standstill of the present moment, and
nine months after the war in Iraq had officially
ended, the situation already verged on the
catastrophic. For instance, lack of potable water
was the norm throughout most of central and
southern Iraq.
I was then working on a
report that attempted to document exactly what
reconstruction had occurred in the water sector -
a sector for which Bechtel was largely
responsible. That giant corporation had been
awarded a no-bid contract of US$680 million behind
closed doors on April 17, 2003, which in September
was raised to $1.03 billion; then Bechtel won an
additional contract worth $1.8 billion to extend
its program through December 2005.
At the
time, when travel for Western reporters was a lot
easier than it is now, I stopped in several
villages en route south from Baghdad through what
the Americans now call "the triangle of death" to
Hilla, Najaf and Diwaniyah to check on people's
drinking-water situation. Near Hilla, an old man
with a weathered face showed me his water pump,
sitting lifeless with an empty container nearby -
as there was no electricity. What water his
village did have was loaded with salt, which was
leaching into the water supply, because Bechtel
had not honored its contractual obligations to
rehabilitate a nearby water-treatment center.
Another nearby village didn't have the salt
problem, but nausea, diarrhea, kidney stones,
cramps and even cases of cholera were on the rise.
This too would be a steady trend for the villages
I visited.
The rest of that trip involved
a frenetic tour of villages, each without
drinkable water, near or inside the city limits of
Hilla, Najaf and Diwaniyah. Hilla, close to
ancient Babylon, has a water-treatment plant and
distribution center managed by chief engineer
Salmam Hassan Kadel. Kadel informed me that most
of the villages in his jurisdiction had no potable
water, nor did he have the piping needed to repair
their broken-down water systems, nor had he had
any contact with Bechtel or its subcontractors.
He spoke of large numbers of people coming
down with the usual list of diseases. "Bechtel,"
he told me, "is spending all of their money
without any studies. Bechtel is painting
buildings, but this doesn't give clean water to
the people who have died from drinking
contaminated water. We ask of them that instead of
painting buildings, they give us one water pump
and we'll use it to give water service to more
people. We have had no change since the Americans
came here. We know Bechtel is wasting money, but
we can't prove it."
At another small
village between Hilla and Najaf, 1,500 people were
drinking water from a dirty stream that trickled
slowly by their homes. Everyone had dysentery;
many had kidney stones; a startling number,
cholera. One villager, holding a sick child, told
me, "It was much better before the invasion. We
had 24 hours of running water then. Now we are
drinking this garbage because it is all we have."
The next morning found me at a village on
the outskirts of Najaf, which fell under the
responsibility of Najaf's water center. A large
hole had been dug in the ground where the
villagers tapped into already existing pipes to
siphon off water. The dirty hole filled in the
night, when water was collected. That morning,
children were standing idly around the hole as
women collected the residue of dirty water which
sat at its bottom. Everyone, it seemed, was
suffering from some water-born illness and several
children, the villagers informed me, had been
killed attempting to cross a busy highway to a
nearby factory where clean water was actually
available.
In June, six months later, I
visited Chuwader Hospital, which then treated an
average of 3,000 patients a day in Sadr City, the
enormous Baghdad slum. Dr Qasim al-Nuwesri, the
head manager there, promptly began describing the
struggles his hospital was facing under the
occupation. "We are short of every medicine," he
said and pointed out how rarely this had occurred
before the invasion. "It is forbidden, but
sometimes we have to reuse IVs [intravenous
devices], even the needles. We have no choice."
And then, of course, he - like the other
doctors I spoke with - brought up their horrendous
water problem, the unavailability of unpolluted
water anywhere in the area. "Of course, we have
typhoid, cholera, kidney stones," he said
matter-of-factly, "but we now even have the very
rare hepatitis type E ... and it has become common
in our area."
Driving out of the
sewage-filled, garbage-strewn streets of Sadr City
we passed a wall with "Vietnam Street" spray
painted on it. Just underneath was the sentence -
obviously aimed at the American liberators - "We
will make your graves in this place."
Today, in terms of collapsing
infrastructure, other areas of Baghdad are
beginning to suffer the way Sadr City did then,
and still largely does. While reconstruction
projects slated for Sadr City have received
increased funding, most of the time there is
little sign of any work being done, as is the case
in most of Baghdad.
While an ongoing fuel
crisis finds people waiting up to two days to fill
their tanks at gasoline stations, all of the city
is running on generators the majority of the time,
and many less favored areas such as Sadr City have
only four hours of electricity a day.
Broken cities
The heavy-handed
tactics of the occupation forces have become a
commonplace of Iraqi life. I've interviewed people
who regularly sleep in their clothes because home
raids are the norm. Many times when military
patrols are attacked by resistance fighters in the
cities of Iraq, soldiers simply open fire randomly
on anything that moves. More commonly, heavy
civilian casualties occur from air raids by
occupation forces. These horrible circumstances
have led to more than 100,000 Iraqi civilian
casualties in the less-than-two-year-old
occupation.
Then there is Fallujah, a city
three-quarters of which has by now been bombed or
shelled into rubble, a city in whose ruins
fighting continues even while most of its
residents have yet to be allowed to return to
their homes (many of which no longer exist). The
atrocities committed there in the past month or so
are, in many ways, similar to those observed
during the failed US Marine Corps siege of the
city last April, though on a far grander scale.
This time, in addition, reports from families
inside the city, along with photographic evidence,
point toward the US military's use of chemical and
phosphorous weapons as well as cluster bombs
there. The few residents allowed to return in the
final week of 2004 were handed military-produced
leaflets instructing them not to eat any food from
inside the city, nor to drink the water.
Last May, at the General Hospital of
Fallujah, doctors spoke to me of the sorts of
atrocities that occurred during the first
month-long siege of the city. Dr Abdul Jabbar, an
orthopedic surgeon, said it was difficult to keep
track of the number of people they treated, as
well as the number of dead, because of the lack of
documentation. This was due primarily to the fact
that the main hospital, located on the opposite
side of the Euphrates River from the city, was
sealed off by the Marines for the majority of
April, just as it would again be in November.
He estimated that at least 700 people were
killed in Fallujah during that April. "I worked at
five of the centers [community health clinics]
myself, and if we collect the numbers from these
places, then this is the number," he said. "And
you must keep in mind that many people were buried
before reaching our centers."
When the
wind blew in from the nearby Julan quarter of the
city, the putrid stench of decaying bodies (a
smell evidently once again typical of the city)
only confirmed his statement. Even then, Dr Jabbar
was insisting that US planes had dropped cluster
bombs on the city. "Many people were injured and
killed by cluster bombs. Of course they used
cluster bombs. We heard them as well as treated
people who had been hit by them."
Dr
Rashid, another orthopedic surgeon, said, "Not
less than 60% of the dead were women and children.
You can go see the graves for yourself." I had
already visited the Martyr Cemetery and had indeed
observed the numerous tiny graves that had clearly
been dug for children. He agreed with Dr Jabbar
about the use of cluster bombs, and added, "I saw
the cluster bombs with my own eyes. We don't need
any evidence. Most of these bombs fell on those we
then treated."
Speaking of the medical
crisis that his hospital had to deal with, he
pointed out that during the first 10 days of
fighting the US military did not allow any
evacuations from Fallujah to Baghdad at all. He
said, "Even transferring patients in the city was
impossible. You can see our ambulances outside.
Their snipers also shot into the main doors of one
of our centers." Several ambulances were indeed in
the hospital's parking lot, two of them with
bullet holes in their windshields.
Both
doctors said they had not been contacted by the US
military, nor had any aid been delivered to them
by the military. Dr Rashid summed the situation up
this way: "They send only bombs, not medicine."
As I walked to our car at one point amid
what was already the desolation of Fallujah, a man
tugged on my arm and yelled, "The Americans are
cowboys! This is their history! Look at what they
did to the Indians! Vietnam! Afghanistan! And now
Iraq! This does not surprise us."
And
that, of course, was before the total siege of the
city began in November. The April campaign in
Fallujah, which resulted in a rise in resistance,
proved - like so much else in those early months
of 2004 - to be but a harbinger of things to come
on a far larger scale. While the goal of the most
recent siege was to squelch the resistance and
bring greater security for elections scheduled for
January 30, the result as in April has been
anything but security.
In the wake of the
destruction of Fallujah, fighting has simply
spread elsewhere and intensified. Families are now
fleeing Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, because
of a warning of another upcoming air campaign
against resistance fighters. At least one car bomb
per day is now the norm in the capital city.
Clashes erupt with deadly regularity throughout
Baghdad as well as in such cities as Ramadi,
Samarra, Baquba and Balad.
The
intensification is two-sided. With each ratchet
upward in violence, the tactics by the US military
only grow more heavy-handed and, as they do, the
Iraqi resistance just continues to grow in size
and effectiveness. Any kind of "siege" of Mosul
will only add to this dynamic.
Despite a
media blackout in the aftermath of the recent
assault on Fallujah, stories of dogs eating bodies
in the streets of the city and of destroyed
mosques have spread across Iraq like wildfire; and
reports like these only underscore what most
people in Iraq now believe - that the liberators
have become no more than brutal imperialist
occupiers of their country. And so the resistance
grows yet stronger.
Yet among Iraqis the
growing resistance was predicted long ago. One
telling moment for me came last June amid daily
suicide car bombings in Baghdad. While footage of
cars with broken glass and bullet holes in their
frames flashed across a television screen, my
translator Hamid, an older man who had already
grown weary of the violence, said softly, "It has
begun. These are only the start, and they will not
stop. Even after June 30." That was the date of
the long-promised handover of "sovereignty" to a
new Iraqi government, after which, US officials
fervently predicted, violence in the country would
begin to subside. The same pattern of prediction
and of a contrarian reality can now be seen in
relation to the upcoming elections of January 30.
Three weeks ago, a friend of mine who is a
sheikh from Baquba, visited me in Baghdad and we
had lunch with Abdulla, an older professor who is
a friend of his. As we were eating, Abdulla
expressed a sentiment now widely heard. "The
mujahideen," he said, "are fighting for their
country against the Americans. This resistance is
acceptable to us."
The Bush administration
has recently increased its troops in Iraq from
138,000 to 150,000 - in order, officials said, to
provide greater security for the elections. Such
troop increases also occurred in Vietnam. Back
then it was called escalation.
What I
wonder is, will I be writing a piece next January
still called "The devastation of Iraq", in which
these last terrible months of 2004 (of which the
first half of the year was but a foreshadowing)
will prove in their turn but a predictive taste of
horrors to come? And what then of 2006 and 2007?
Dahr Jamail is an independent
journalist from Anchorage, Alaska. He has spent
seven of the past 12 months reporting from inside
occupied Iraq. His articles have been published by
the Sunday Herald, Inter Press Service, the
website of The Nation magazine, and the New
Standard Internet news site, for which he was the
Iraq correspondent. He is the special
correspondent in Iraq for Flashpoints radio and
also has appeared on the BBC, Democracy Now!, Free
Speech Radio News and Radio South Africa. This
article is reposted here by permission of
Tomdispatch.com. http://www.tomdispatch.com/
(Copyright 2005 Dahr Jamail.) |
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