with, and then I asked him which one he had played with, and which one he and his friends had shot, and he admitted more and more. His cousins joined us and said they were scared to take me to the ammunition. I told them they were girls, and they said, “No, we are strong!” and puffed their chests. Then their uncle showed up and ruined our fun. He told me he was scared for the children, but it didn’t seem like he was making any attempt to control their behavior.
My driver’s children, about five and three years old, played with ammunition their uncle had found in a nearby arms depot that had been abandoned and looted. He showed me live anti-aircraft bullets and a bundle of detonation cords for explosives, which Iraqis were using to cook. Five-year-old Fahad lit one and watched the flame shoot through it while his three-year-old sister held one of the charges in her mouth. In a restaurant where I often had lunch, I took note of an increasingly common sight—a customer walked in with a pistol stuck in his belt behind him.
We assumed with egotistical condescension that Iraqis were “used to” the ubiquitous hardship that has been their unearned fate, as if they were different from us, suffered less than we did, and did not have the same hopes for a prosperous, peaceful life. Iraq has the second-largest oil reserves in the world, and Iraqis were in no way used to the nadir to which life had sunk. Since the Gulf War they had slowly watched their heavily developed, educated, and industrialized society deteriorate and regress to a preindustrial era. Power, water, and security were not just abstractions; they meant life or death.
Imagine bombs raining on your city, the ground shaking, the walls reverberating. Imagine your city losing its power, its water, its security, its communications, and its government. Law and order disappear, weapons abound, machine guns rattle, and bullets fly. Mountains of garbage grow higher on the streets as goats, donkeys, and children sift through them, dispersing the waste everywhere. Rivers of sewage cut through neighborhoods and roads, and people wade through them. The food supply dwindles, dead dogs litter the streets, their legs frozen in midair with rigor mortis, and a modern city becomes a jungle. Hundreds of thousands of foreign occupiers are ensconced in the bedrooms and barracks of the former dictator, their leviathan tanks dominating traffic, but the newcomers do not replace the system they destroyed. Armed gangs roam freely, and dogmatic religious organizations attempt to fill the power vacuum, though they too have no experience in governance and espouse an intolerant and regressive political ideology.
A UN representative explained to me that after the war Iraq had “gone back to the stone age.” It was a stone age lived in the midst of a modern state. Sheep were herded through traffic jams, unexploded bombs hid like snakes, diarrhea killed children minutes away from immense hospitals, and tantalizing glimpses of a different possibility beckoned on satellite television—it was not an impossible or unfamiliar dream but a return to the future Iraqis had taken for granted only a decade or two ago.
Baghdad in 2003 was a neglected city, broken like the spirit of its people, who seemed ashamed that they had not put up more of a fight against the occupiers, as was expected by the rest of the world. Um Qasr in the south took a week to fall, but the Republican Guard protecting the city barely put up a fight. They were perceived outside Iraq as the elite, as those who would fight to the death for their city, but this mythic status had more to do with their privilege than anything else. The American military was warned that the battle for Baghdad would be the most bitter and desperate. The Republican Guard felt no loyalty to Baghdad, though. They were terrified of the American juggernaut, and they could see what had already transpired in the rest of the country.
The media showed Iraq only during the day, when stores were open and Americans patrolled. At night, darkness and fear emerged. Most people had no electricity and resorted to oil lamps and fans made from straw to cope with the heat—which drove some to sleep on their roofs, under the moonlight.
There were rumors that Americans were paying three dollars for every cluster bomb returned. It did not matter if the rumors were false. If people believed them, they would touch a cluster bomb; and if a bomb was moved, it would explode. Children played with them, attracted to their shape. A child threw a stone at one and blew up a nearby house.
Iraq had thousands of locations serving as weapons depots that contained unexploded ordnances, abandoned missiles, armored vehicles, and tanks. Even if the Americans had known where to look, there were not enough soldiers to protect all of the sites from looters. Removing them required a delicate expertise, which meant that some locations might take several days to clear. Baghdadis would have to wait years for their city to be free from the dangerous detritus of war that the American and Iraqi militaries had left behind.
On streets throughout Baghdad people tried to hawk their wares, hoping that buyers would be interested in the screws, pipes, sneakers, computers, soccer balls, AK-47s, and grenade launchers they had likely stolen. Every neighborhood had its own weapons bazaar, an unofficial collection of a few dozen men, who displayed heavy weaponry of every variety and eagerly demonstrated their use by firing them repeatedly into the air right next to you. A rocket-propelled grenade launcher could be found for fifty thousand dinars, or fifty dollars. When an American patrol drove by, the men hid their goods under boxes or in the trunks of their cars, and then took them out again as soon as the patrol moved on. The chatter of Kalashnikov shots and exchanges of fire punctured the empty silence of Baghdad nights. Iraqis evinced no perceptible reaction to these new sounds; they were normal, and no thought was given to the unknown circumstances and actors responsible for nearby violence or to its many victims.
The victims usually ended up in Baghdad’s Criminal Medicine Department, which squatted on a muddy congested road next to the Ministry of Health. On the morning I visited it in May 2003, a busload of sobbing women sat in the entrance. An old man vomited on a wall to the side, while several other men sat glumly on the floor. An empty coffin made of wooden planks lay abandoned by the entrance, a large blood stain in its center. The sour stench of death wafted out into the halls. Ninety percent of Baghdad’s violently killed passed through the Criminal Medicine Department before burial. Ever since Baghdad fell on April 9, Dr. Lazim had been seeing an average of fifteen to twenty-five corpses a day—all murdered, he said, pointing to a large stack of files on a shelf and opening a drawer to show another stack. Before the war he would see about five such cases a month. The state had a monopoly on violence, but victims of the regime were taken elsewhere. He said it was also possible to accommodate oneself to life under Saddam, and to live without arousing the state’s ire and incurring its wrath. The new violence was random, and Lazim attributed it to the lack of security.
“Weapons are easy to find, and Iraqis are full of anxiety from three wars and the economic circumstances after 1991,” Lazim said. Since it was so easy to obtain a weapon and there were no legal consequences, disputes were often settled violently and with impunity. “I am afraid to argue with any person on the street,” he said. “There is no regime, no order.” He added, “It is the duty of the international forces to create security.” Lazim recently had begun seeing female victims for the first time. One was a teenager found by American soldiers with her throat slit. Two others set a ghoulish precedent—they had both been raped and then murdered.
For those wounded in Baghdad’s gun battles, there was little hope of finding help. Yakub al-Jabari, a microbiologist at the National Blood Transfusion Center for Iraq, located in the complex of buildings known as Medical City, summarized the situation when asked if there was a shortage of blood. “There is a shortage of everything,” he said, “blood, equipment, staff.” He had not received his salary for three months. The labs looked like a dusty basement where a hospital might store its obsolete machines. The staff used food refrigerators to store blood, though frequent blackouts made Jabari’s efforts worthless, as everything became contaminated. “If you want to save people’s lives, bring us more of these machines—you will go to paradise,” he said, opening a dirty refrigerator and pointing inside. “We kill people here, we don’t save them.” He smiled bitterly. “Many people are dying because of our shortages. We lie when we give people hope, but we can’t be honest with them.” Iraqis in need of blood must bring their own, which meant bringing a friend or relative to donate. I heard shooting from outside the blood center as I hurriedly asked Jabari about HIV and other concerns the center faced without the ability to screen donors. He told me he knew of only two cases of HIV in the past decade. He believed Saddam had executed them.
Baghdad’s hospitals had collapsed at a time when improved health care was needed more than ever. Hospital directors and doctors complained that they had received no assistance from the coalition forces, only promises. They relied on generators, because they got only a few hours of electricity a day. Sometimes they were forced to operate by candlelight. Most hospitals and clinics received contaminated water or none at all. Contamination resulted in outbreaks of typhoid, gastroenteritis, and diarrhea. They had no air-conditioning, medicine, oxygen, or anesthesia. And there was no one to clean the floors, so they remained stained with blood.
Chaos reigned, as staff were overwhelmed. They had no computers and they recycled carbon paper. Ambulance crews had no gas or security escorts, and Americans stopped them at night for violating curfews when
