The horrors of Iraq

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The horrors of Iraq

Chris Elliott Archives

I had hoped to avoid coming off like the New Hampshire Seacoast’s Thomas Friedman subsequent to my weeklong stay in Baghdad, but a person’s experience drives his or her output, so I’ll persist a bit further in relaying some of the observations and assessments born of my short time in the Middle East.

First, the Maliki government is a sham. This was borne out best by a virtual tour of a Baghdad morgue that I was taken on by a US military source. He/she was not authorized to share the photographs, but a description of conditions there should suffice for all but the most ghoulish reader’s appetites.

The morgue photos I saw were of a facility that was equipped to handle perhaps 100 corpses per week, whereas their intake was typically more than five times that. Bodies are laid out on stone floors one next to another in seemingly endless rows. In some of the rooms the quantity of bodies was such that they had begun to be stacked in a second tier.

Many of the dead had obviously been shot execution style with a single bullet to the back of the head, the exit wound occurring in the face, ripping a silver dollar-sized hole in the eyes or cheek. Of these executed, many still wore handcuffs. Another popular killing style in Iraq is the severing of an arm before execution. Of the hundreds of bodies I saw, dozens were missing an arm.