SEPTEMBER 2006

Jeff Severns Guntzel, Electronic Iraq, 25 August 2006

Three stories today, one from AP, one from the L.A. Times, and one from the Independent, lay bare war's terrible promises fullfilled.

AP correspondent Rawya Rageh, in her article Iraqis used to cleaning up after carnage, looks at Baghdad's post-suicide bombing cleanup ritual.

"They're scenes all too familiar in Iraq," Rageh begins, "shattered buildings, mangled cars, pools of blood. The carnage takes its toll on the landscape — and those responsible for cleaning up the mess.

"There aren't any trained hazmat specialists here. It's the same minimum wage guys who sweep trash off the streets for a daily wage of less than $5."

"Iraqis," Rageh writes, "have the post-blast drill down pat":

First on the scene are civil defense workers who extinguish fires, provide first aid to survivors and carry off the dead. They then spray the site with jets of water to wash away most of the blood.

Then, come the street cleaners, who get no training on how to deal with bombing sites.

"Usually at that point, most of the blood is gone," said Ammar Adnan, who supervises a cleanup crew. "If not, well, we have to deal with it. We go in, do it quick and leave — you don't want that depressing scene lurking around for long."

Adnan, who works part-time to pay for his engineering education at Baghdad University and help his parents with expenses, says there is another reason to work fast: Insurgents sometimes plant a second bomb to kill and maim police and cleaners who rush to the scene.

...

Lt. Col. Qassim Majid, spokesman for the civil defense unit in eastern Baghdad, said four of his employees have been killed and three injured over the past two months in follow-on explosions ... His unit has about 800 workers and is responsible for nearly three-fourths of Baghdad. Even a medium-size explosion requires at least 30 civil defense workers, he said.

Scattered body parts are collected by rescue teams and packed in a bag that is carried by ambulance to a hospital.

Hospital officials say the parts are kept in refrigerators until enough are collected for a burial — but not cremation, in line with Muslim tradition. However, workers at some medical facilities and the Baghdad morgue have complained that bits of flesh sometime clog drain pipes.

Rageh writes that it is "the low paid, untrained street-sweepers who seem to suffer the most" with no training or counseling.

Ali, the city government spokesman, confirmed they don't get training or psychological counseling for coping with the horror, but he said all Iraqis have had to come to grips with carnage.

"The psyche of all Iraqis now is disturbed — whether you work for the health ministry, defense ministry or wherever," Ali, the city government spokesman told Rageh. "Even if you don't have to deal with it because it's your job, you see it on the street everyday."

Adnan, the engineering student, agreed and added: "It just crushes your soul."

"We curse the devils for all this death."

LA Times Staff Writers Jeffrey Fleishman and Suhail Ahmad profile Najim Abid, who prepares victims of Iraq's violence for burial in his Baghdad "washing room":

They arrive in borrowed wooden coffins. He lifts them to his marble slab, cuts away their clothes, stuffs their wounds with cotton. He lathers and then rinses them with a hose that runs like a tiny river, carrying away blood and shrapnel and grit. He sprinkles them with rosewater, wraps them in white linen. He sends them to the grave.

Najim Abid works in solitude, in a place where the deeds of men intersect with the grace of God. Islamic custom requires the dead be cleansed before burial. Abid's hands are white and raw; he has washed too many bodies, yet the coffins don't stop. They never seem to stop.

"I've washed clergy, doctors, policemen, soldiers, laborers and painters," says Abid, 44, a slight man with the whisper of a mustache. "I've washed Sunni and Shiite. This sectarian violence touches everyone. Once came a child of 12 killed in a mortar attack. They are all dear to me. They are all Iraqis."

"To visit Abid's washing room," Fleishman and Ahmad write, "is to see how brutal and battered Iraq has become. "We curse the devils for all this death," Abid tells them.

Like the civil servants clening up amidst the blood and mangled metal, Abid, who receives as many as six coffins a day, has a ritual, described by Fleishman and Ahmad with dizzying and reverant detail:

Cleansing the dead, like washing one's hands before prayer, is symbolic. It brings purity before God. It is an intimate act, carried out by a stranger, a man who will burn the bloody clothes, offer spiritual comfort to a widow, a brother, a cousin. There is modesty too. Abid washes only men, and when he does, he covers their genitals with a cloth.

Then he takes a loofah and greenish-brown soap. He begins: moving along the right side from leg to arm and over the shoulders and head and then coming down the left side before turning the body over and washing again.

"The bloodstains don't always come off with the first foam," he says. While he washes, he chants: "God is the greatest, there is no god but God. Our thanks are all to God." Relatives are permitted in the washing room. Many don't come. "It's hard to see a wound or a piece of head broken away," Abid says.

Families bring new towels — a final, small gesture of love. Abid dries the body. He measures white linen, running scissors through it and wrapping the body from head to toe, tying it with four sashes. He sprinkles it with rosewater or maybe a man's favorite cologne. Many families bring vials of Zamzam water, drawn from a sacred well at Mecca, where every Muslim able to do so is required to make a pilgrimage at least once.

"Sometimes with a body I feel relaxed and almost calm when washing," he says. "You feel he is close to you. But other times, you just want to finish up quickly. Why I feel one way or the other is a mystery. It must be something related to the dead man himself. Maybe during his life he was good-hearted and had no bitterness in his soul. Maybe that comes through."

"When the dead one is carried away, I try to forget about him," Abid tells his visitors from the American newspaper. "Maybe it is a blessing from God that I don't remember them all. But the wailing families and the beating of chests, I don't forget these."

"I can't go out there and shoot at young children."

Then there are the soldiers. Cahal Milmo writes in today's Independent about a 19-year-old infantryman from the UK who was buried this week. He never made to Iraq with his regiment. He took an overdose of painkillers and slashed his wrists in a desperate attempt to avoid the violence he was dreading in Iraq - more specifically, to avoid having to kill.

Jason Chelsea, Milmo writes, had told his parents "that he had been warned by his commanders that he could be ordered to fire on child suicide bombers."

48 hours after confessing his concerns, he comitted suicide.

His parents said yesterday that their son's ordeal had convinced them of the need for an urgent review of the pre-deployment training given to British soldiers bound for Iraq.

Tony Chelsea, 58, a factory production supervisor, said: "My son was made very, very lonely by what was happening to him. He was very sad inside and he bottled up what was causing it. It was only after the overdose that he told us about his fears over what might happen in Iraq.

"In training, they were made to wrestle with dummies. Jason said they were also told they might have to fight kids and that they might have to shoot them because they were carrying suicide bombs. He said the policy [where there was a suspected suicide bomber] was to shoot first and ask questions later."

His mother added: "Jason said that during the training for Iraq he had been told that children as young as two carry bombs and the time may come when he would have to shoot one to save himself and his friends. I think they need to think again about the training they give to young soldiers before Iraq."

It is understood guidelines on training for British troops heading for Iraq offer no warning on child suicide bombers. But defence sources confirmed that the details of the advice given to soldiers are decided by each regiment. There have been no known cases of suicide attacks in Iraq committed by young children.

The death of Pte Chelsea, who had served in Germany and Cyprus, will renew concern about the psychological pressures faced by British troops as they deal with deployment to Iraq. Four days before the infantryman attempted to take his life, the MoD released figures showing that 1,541 soldiers who served in Iraq are suffering from psychiatric illness. Last year, 727 cases were recorded, amounting to nearly 10 per cent of the British deployment. Special units have now been set up in the country to help soldiers deal with combat stress. While services were also available in Britain to Pte Chelsea to discuss his concerns within the Army, it seems he felt unable to disclose them.

It is clear that Chelsea had serious mental health issues. He had attempted suicide once before. Many other soldiers received Chelsea's training without then taking their own lives. Still, the warning to a young soldier that he might have to kill a small child is just the kind of promise that war can keep.


Jeff Severns Guntzel, a journalist based in New York City, is co-founder and editor of Electronic Iraq. From 1998-2003, Guntzel made frequent visits to Iraq as co-coordinator of Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign to end the economic sanctions against Iraq. Guntzel returned to Iraq as a journalist immediately after the invasion. He was last in the Middle East in January 2006 to report on Iraqis fleeing the war and the demise of Ariel Sharon’s political career.

This page is part of Electronic Iraq/electronicIraq.net, a joint project from Voices in the Wilderness and The Electronic Intifada. http://electroniciraq.net/news/2463.shtml

Excerpt from The Standard:
The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, has found it impossible to rein in al-Sadr, whose movement holds 30 of the 275 seats in parliament and five Cabinet posts.

Al-Sadr's backing also helped al- Maliki win the top job during painstaking negotiations within the Shiite alliance that led to the ouster of Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister.

Al-Sadr mounted two major uprisings against the American-led coalition in 2004 when US authorities closed his newspaper and pushed an Iraqi judge into issuing an arrest warrant against him.

But American forces have also been wary of confronting the Mahdi Army because of al-Sadr's clout over the government and his large following among Shiites, who are in a majority in Iraq.

Some 10,000 Iraqis have been killed in the past four months alone in unrelenting attacks by Sunni and Shiite extremists on each other's communities, as well as bombings and shootings by Sunni Arab insurgents. www.thestandard.com.hk