As the Lancet releases shocking figures on the death toll in Iraq, Peter Beaumont describes the daily carnage across Baghdad

Thursday October 12, 2006


Baghdad resounds to the tales of the dead. Not the distant, dry accounting of news wires, but terrifying close-up accounts. Six beheaded corpses are dumped with their heads between their knees in Muhammad's street in Ghazaliya, a largely Sunni suburb of Baghdad. US soldiers ask him to search the bodies for IDs, fearful the corpses may be booby-trapped. He manages to frisk two before the effort becomes too awful.

This summer Muhammad witnessed a mass attack by Shia gunmen from a neighbouring area to his own, of running battles outside his house, the loudspeakers on the mosques coordinating the defence.

A few days after the appearance of the headless bodies, a translator for a British colleague announces he has lost a relative. He is distraught as the family searches the morgue for the body. The kidnappers get in touch. Your relative is still alive and eating his evening meal, they say, but start searching for his body in three days.

After a while the numbers no longer seem to matter - only the impact on a society of a steady and encroaching tide of killing. The aura of fear, cruelty and death is claustrophobic and all enveloping.

No report or estimate of the death toll, however disputed, gets near to conveying the corrosive nature of so much killing, so routinely carried out.

Law and order does not exist as the police themselves are involved in the killing. There are so many bodies that their disposal has become a problem of waste management. Most cities have to cope with fly-tipping of rubbish. Baghdad has to cope with the fly-tipping of corpses.

In some areas of Baghdad, such as Sadr City, US soldiers welded down sewer covers to prevent bodies being dumped.

But that was when the death squads cared about concealment. Today there is little time for such niceties. The bodies are dumped on rubbish heaps, in rivers, on areas of open ground.

Often victims are shot on the street in front of waiting traffic, as a reminder, if anyone needed it, that the next bullet could be for them.

Most victims have their hands bound, their feet tied and many show signs of torture. Two years ago, journalists were reluctant to accept that victims were tortured with drills, nails and caustic liquids. No one disputes it today.

Some Sunni families have stopped going to Baghdad's morgue, which is in an area controlled by Shia militias, who are responsible for the death squads. The families of two recently murdered Sunni soldiers in a largely Shia battalion of the Iraqi army, their colonel said, were followed to the morgue and attacked. Funerals have also been targeted. Death follows death. Hospitals have been used for holding and torturing the disappeared.

The sound of killing has become routine. No one pays attention to the morning explosions until the reports come in - the numbers of the dead and where. Baghdadis soon develop an ear for these attacks. They can distinguish between the sound of improvised explosive devices buried in the road, and the sound of mortars and car bombs. These are now commonplace. The conversation stoppers are the ingenious and brazen: the secondary and tertiary bombs left to kill the rescue workers; the abductions in broad daylight by men in police uniforms from shops and factories, while their colleagues try to hide from the lethal sweep.

Jihadis have recently taken to renting a shop at the bottom of a housing block on a short lease. They fill it with explosives with the aim of bringing down the building.

But what scares most are the impromptu checkpoints. They can be mounted by police, militias and jihadis, but they can all have the same result. Utter the wrong name, show the wrong number plate, or the wrong ID, and you can be quickly ushered away to face summary execution.

And there is no end in sight.

· Peter Beaumont returned from Baghdad at the weekend