Iraq on Fire

"And the harsh truth is that once Iraq descends into widespread sectarian warfare, American military forces and diplomats will not be able to do much to stop the killing of civilians and ethnic cleansing that would likely ensue."
--editorial, The Boston Globe, February 23, 2003

As the Mahdi Army stormed Sunni mosques and threw out the imams, they didn't destroy all of them. Some of them they commandeered, claiming that the mosques were truly Shi'ite mosques anyway. In fact, some of the mosques had indeed been taken away from Shi'ites by Saddam Hussein and given to the Sunnis, and now the Shi'ites wanted them back. So they took them.

They set up checkpoints and could not be persuaded to leave by Iraqi policemen.

Meanwhile, official government sources put the death toll at first 170, and then 200. These figures were widely reported in the American media and the American military as fact.

However, on February 27, reporters working for the Washington Post paid a visit to the Baghdad morgue, and were horrified to discover hundreds of unclaimed dead, describing, "blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted, or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound--and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shi'ite militia of Moqtada al-Sadr."

The article said that the floor of the morgue was caked with dried blood, and that "Morgue officials said they had logged more than 1300 dead since Wednesday" (the day the Golden Mosque was bombed seven days previously), "photographing, numbering, and tagging bodies as they came in over the nights and days of retaliatory raids."

Meanwhile, the U.S. military and Iraqi officials were saying that the 200 dead reported by the news media were exaggerated, that not that many had been killed.

(So, either official authorities were lying, or the horrified reporters for the Post were lying. Who had the most to gain? Several days later, Iraqi government officials revised the death tolls to more than 400, but claimed that the "foreign newspaper" was "exaggerating." And Time and Newsweek, both of whom go to press days in advance of publication, published death tolls at around 200.)

But people weren't just dying. In a report in the February 28th Washington Post, widespread instances were documented of retaliation against Shi'ites by Sunnis, as Shi'ites from mixed neighborhoods being accosted in their homes by masked and heavily armed men who then demanded that they leave their homes or be killed.

Soon the roads were filled with wandering Shi'ite refugees, many of whom walked with their families for three days to get to safe mosques and neighborhoods, where many found food and blankets provided by the Mahdi Army.

Meanwhile, Sunnis were attacking Shi'ite mosques, and Shi'ites were being bombed and attacked at restaurants, marketplaces, and gas stations.

Sunnis were demanding that Sunni prisoners gathered up in the wave of violence by Shi'ite police, be released from jail, but the Shi'ites claimed the arrestees were insurgents.

In one town, boys playing soccer in a field were gunned down, killing two and wounding at least five.

Acts of bloodshed occurred all over the country.

The American military increased their patrols in Baghdad from an average of 60 a day to more than 300.

In one brief satellite phone call with my son, I asked how all the unrest had effected the Marines he was with, and he said that since they were in a predominantly Sunni area, things were not as violent as in mixed areas, adding, "the boys in Baghdad have it worse."

He added that it was becoming increasingly difficult to work with the Iraqi army and police because of the widespread corruption. He couldn’t say any more for security reasons and I didn't ask.

When I hung up the phone, I burst into tears, something I haven't done as much during this deployment. In my mind was a picture of Iraq on fire, and of American troops getting caught in the backdraft.