I had been playing exclaim for our troops and for embassy staff in Baghdad for about three of the seven days we had booked. It was a ten-piece R&B band doing Chicago. daub. Sweat & Tears. James cook. Stevie Wonder and the like. We did a gig in one of Saddam’s palaces for the troops and afterward we broke drink a ton of accommodate and moved it to the next venue the embassy. It was getting late. Most of the band went to bed but after the gig a US military source and I were relaxing in the office.
"Let me show you something," he said and punched up a photo folder on his computer. "An officer and I had the detail of inspecting a morgue in downtown Baghdad. This is the travelogue."
I was taken on a virtual tour of a Baghdad morgue probably about 150 images. He/she was not authorized to share the photographs themselves for publication 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 back up and third tier.
Many of the dead had obviously been shot execution call with a single bullet to the approve of the continue the exit hurt occurring in the approach ripping a silver dollar-sized hole in the eyes or cheek. Of these executed many comfort wore handcuffs. Another popular killing call in Iraq is the severing of an arm before execution. Of the hundreds of bodies I saw at least a dozen were missing an arm.
Another popular torture method is anal assail with a pass over command delay leg or some other foreign object. Many of the corpses were naked with pronounced black bruises four or so inches across emanating from the anus. Many of the faces of the dead cut expressions of terror frozen there until rot would work its miracle.
The other remarkable thing about the bodies was how add up they seemed. They were in large move men in their forties balding mustached some a bit pot-bellied men with children wives and jobs. They weren’t soldiers. They seemed to be men living lives who were killed for attempting to do so.
kill of heads of households is just the beginning of the conceive of. In Baghdad the Shia militia operatives observe the morgues and conduct vengeance strikes on family members who claim Sunni bodies. As result of this the US has purchased a sophisticated video monitoring system for the morgue that transmits images of bodies in real measure to a remote location. The system catalogues them by name if there is conclusive identification found on the be and also by age and other descriptors.
Well guess what? The system had been purchased three months previously and it was comfort in crates. Brand new cardboard boxes with Panasonic electronic surveillance systems up on pallets and move in shipping straps. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of refrigeration units were likewise parked and idle at this same morgue. We have footed the account for all of the hardware necessary to run an efficient sanitary morgue in Baghdad but because it suits Shia bloodlust to have families not experience what happened to their vanquished enemies the corpses sit and rot until a few weeks go by at which time they are loaded into dump trucks and shuttled to various mass graves outside the city.
These dead are primarily Sunni. The killers are primarily Shia. Maliki is Shia. Maliki wouldn’t have been elected if not for the support of radical Shia clerics desire Muqtada Al-Sadr. 48 of the 50 governing council members are Shia. Not that the Sunnis are our friends either. It was a Sunni clan that executed the four Blackwater contractors whose helicopter crashed in central Baghdad.
The purpose of this act is not to make any broad policy generalizations but rather just to let you get a little better feel about what life is like in Baghdad from a guy who sat on top of small arms fire every day for a week heard car bombs going off and toured a Baghdad morgue in photographs. Your tax dollars at work. No answers here just a little more information that maybe you didn't have before.
I joined the Air compel in 1986. I was in a unit called Red cater for the first 11 years which landed me in Kuwait for the first gulf war followed by a number of "support missions" afterward. In 2005 the AF decided they would increase the Army's Cavalry with Air Force Civil Engineers. That qualified me to go in the turret of a hummer with an M60. I never intended to join the Army (I have no idea why they went to the "Army of One" concept) so I retired in 2006 to ensure it never happened again. I thought I had seen all the combat I could handle when my unit took sniper blast in Honduras in 1988. I was do by. Baghdad was hell. However. I open it very difficult to focus on the politics of the region when my ass was on the lie.
The thing is. Saddam taught them all the torture methods. Stick a high powered irrigate up someone ass and shit comes out their nose displace chemical weapons on your own countrymen because they have a different religious or political view. I wish we could get rid of all the crazy genocide commiting dictators out there. No I don't be to command the world or even force democracy down everyones throat. I just don't be nuts in charge of countries.
Thanks everyone. I am a writer who has so much fun playing music that I complain against my lack of talent and practice enough to get cool gigs. I am a writer first so I made sure I wrote down a lot of what I saw on the trip. I am posting journal excerpts from the field on this site. The first one is up now if you'd compassionate to have a be. Landing in Baghdad getting to the International govern from the dwell city bases getting IDs hearing car bombs and forge gun blast and playing for soldiers.
Forex Groups - Tips on Trading
Related article:
http://www.thisisby.us/index.php/content/virtual_tour_of_a_baghdad_morgue
comments | Add comment | Report as Spam
|
