Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Chicago Tribune
March 16, 2008 A Personal Accounting Of Iraqi Dead
By Liz Sly
BAGHDAD--I asked a close Iraqi colleague, Nadeem Majeed, to write down a list of the people he knows who have died in the five years since the Iraq war began. It took a long time. And as Nadeem tapped away on the computer, unknown to us, another name was being added to the list.
A friend, Nassir Jassem Akkam, 38, was among the 68 people killed in the recent suicide bombing of a busy shopping street nearby, one of the bloodiest attacks in Baghdad in a while. Akkam had slipped back to Baghdad for a quick visit after fleeing to Syria with his wife and 1-year-old son. When he died, he had in his pocket a ticket to travel the following day.
Akkam became No. 44 on Nadeem's list.
For me, one of the most striking indicators of the suffering Baghdad has endured is to be found in our own office, in the number of people known just to the Iraqis working in the Chicago Tribune's bureau who have been killed.
For security reasons, I'd rather not disclose how many people we employ; suffice it to say that our news operation is small compared with most. But if we were to open a Facebook account for our little bureau's social network of relatives and friends, it would be littered with the faces of the dead.
I'm not talking about people we sought out to interview because of their stories, or public figures and sources whose circumstances may have predisposed them to death in a war zone. Plenty of those have died too.
I'm talking about people already known to the Iraqis who work for us, ordinary people who led ordinary lives until war came and turned their country upside down.
There are no reliable figures for the number of Iraqi civilian casualties of the war. A 2006 Johns Hopkins survey cited as many as 600,000 violent deaths, a count much in dispute.
A recent World Health Organization report, based on Iraqi Health Ministry figures, came up with an estimate of 151,000 violent deaths through the end of 2006. That excludes the thousands who died in the violence that raged during the first half of last year, before the surge strategy helped bring down the number of attacks.
The Web site iraqbodycount.org, which monitors civilian casualties on the basis of news reports, puts the number at 82,000 to 89,000 to date, a figure that almost certainly is too low because many incidents go unreported.
Among the unreported killings was that of Media Majeed, the sister of Nadeem and his brother Arfan, who also works for us. A random bullet fired in an exchange between police and insurgents ripped through her brain on April 13, 2006, as she sat in the passenger seat of the family car. She was on her way to Nadeem's wedding party.
Instead, the brothers drove her to the hospital, blood spouting from her forehead onto the wedding flowers piled in her lap. She died four days later, at age 27, an unremarkable and unnoted death in a much larger war, except that it changed irrevocably the lives of one still grief-stricken Iraqi family.
Another death that hasn't been logged is that of Ayad Saleh, 35, one of Nadeem's closest friends. He had been a regular visitor to our office, for coffee and chats about the situation. On Oct. 26, 2006, men wearing police uniforms called at his home and said they were taking Ayad away for questioning.
Days later came the ransom demand, for $100,000, which the family was told to leave at the gate of a nearby farm known to be occupied by insurgents from Al Qaeda in Iraq. The family didn't have that kind of money. They negotiated the figure down to $25,000, and paid as instructed.
Ayad hasn't been seen since. It's all but unthinkable that he's still alive.
Nadeem's list includes victims of all the different ways to die in Iraq. He lived in the notoriously violent neighborhood of Dora, which was overrun by Al Qaeda in 2005. The vast majority of his dead friends, Sunni and Shiite alike, were gunned down by Al Qaeda, most of them in a two-block area around his home.
But there also are those who fell prey to Shiite death squads, those who died in bombings and those killed by American gunfire. A 7-year-old next-door neighbor, Rowayed Fa'ez Hanna, was shot dead with his baby brother when U.S. soldiers opened fire on his family's car in 2005. Two uncles and two cousins from the violent northern town of Tal Afar also are on the list.
You don't bounce back from losing people like this. Nadeem and Arfan visibly shrank after their sister was killed. I saw it in other people too—the two front-desk managers of the hotel where we keep our bureau each lost only sons in 2005. They haven't looked the same since.
The Majeed family moved to Syria after Media's death, joining the exodus of 2.4 million Iraqis who have fled the country. Nadeem and Arfan live with us in our bureau; their neighborhood is still considered dangerous.
"I sometimes wonder what would be worse," Nadeem remarked to me recently. "To never be able to go home again, or to go home and have to live with all these ghosts."
For me, this has been the hardest part of covering Iraq—not the dangers or the hardships, but the experience of watching people die, and of watching the lives of those they leave behind fall apart. You feel the collective weight of accumulated grief hanging over the streets of this worn-down, crumbling city.
Of course, there are parts of Iraq that have been relatively unaffected by the violence and where people's experiences have been very different. Baghdad has been at the epicenter of the killings, both of the sectarian strife and the terrorist bombings, and my anecdotal insights on the war's toll are based on the lives of those living here.
There was a time, starting in 2005 and running into 2007, when the stories of death were coming thick and fast, when almost every day it seemed someone was coming to work with a new tale of the neighbor shot dead on the street outside his home, the mangled body of a college friend found in the morgue. Death became the stuff of water-cooler gossip.
That has changed. The surge strategy, the Shiite militia cease-fire and the Sunni revolt against Al Qaeda have sharply reduced the number of attacks. Baghdad residents are enjoying a relative reprieve from the horrors of the recent past.
But the violence hasn't stopped, and the stories still trickle in. A February suicide bombing nearby killed the woman who ran the little store from which we always bought our stationery. The son of one of Nadeem's friends who visited us for tea a few years back was blown up along with six American troops in a house bombing in January.
We didn't know them, so their names don't belong on the list.
For me, these small connections to the daily death toll bring a pang of sorrow for the grief of others. And yes, there's also that guilty sense of relief that the victim wasn't one of our own.
For the Iraqis who live this war, there are no degrees of separation from the dead.
March 16, 2008 A Personal Accounting Of Iraqi Dead
By Liz Sly
BAGHDAD--I asked a close Iraqi colleague, Nadeem Majeed, to write down a list of the people he knows who have died in the five years since the Iraq war began. It took a long time. And as Nadeem tapped away on the computer, unknown to us, another name was being added to the list.
A friend, Nassir Jassem Akkam, 38, was among the 68 people killed in the recent suicide bombing of a busy shopping street nearby, one of the bloodiest attacks in Baghdad in a while. Akkam had slipped back to Baghdad for a quick visit after fleeing to Syria with his wife and 1-year-old son. When he died, he had in his pocket a ticket to travel the following day.
Akkam became No. 44 on Nadeem's list.
For me, one of the most striking indicators of the suffering Baghdad has endured is to be found in our own office, in the number of people known just to the Iraqis working in the Chicago Tribune's bureau who have been killed.
For security reasons, I'd rather not disclose how many people we employ; suffice it to say that our news operation is small compared with most. But if we were to open a Facebook account for our little bureau's social network of relatives and friends, it would be littered with the faces of the dead.
I'm not talking about people we sought out to interview because of their stories, or public figures and sources whose circumstances may have predisposed them to death in a war zone. Plenty of those have died too.
I'm talking about people already known to the Iraqis who work for us, ordinary people who led ordinary lives until war came and turned their country upside down.
There are no reliable figures for the number of Iraqi civilian casualties of the war. A 2006 Johns Hopkins survey cited as many as 600,000 violent deaths, a count much in dispute.
A recent World Health Organization report, based on Iraqi Health Ministry figures, came up with an estimate of 151,000 violent deaths through the end of 2006. That excludes the thousands who died in the violence that raged during the first half of last year, before the surge strategy helped bring down the number of attacks.
The Web site iraqbodycount.org, which monitors civilian casualties on the basis of news reports, puts the number at 82,000 to 89,000 to date, a figure that almost certainly is too low because many incidents go unreported.
Among the unreported killings was that of Media Majeed, the sister of Nadeem and his brother Arfan, who also works for us. A random bullet fired in an exchange between police and insurgents ripped through her brain on April 13, 2006, as she sat in the passenger seat of the family car. She was on her way to Nadeem's wedding party.
Instead, the brothers drove her to the hospital, blood spouting from her forehead onto the wedding flowers piled in her lap. She died four days later, at age 27, an unremarkable and unnoted death in a much larger war, except that it changed irrevocably the lives of one still grief-stricken Iraqi family.
Another death that hasn't been logged is that of Ayad Saleh, 35, one of Nadeem's closest friends. He had been a regular visitor to our office, for coffee and chats about the situation. On Oct. 26, 2006, men wearing police uniforms called at his home and said they were taking Ayad away for questioning.
Days later came the ransom demand, for $100,000, which the family was told to leave at the gate of a nearby farm known to be occupied by insurgents from Al Qaeda in Iraq. The family didn't have that kind of money. They negotiated the figure down to $25,000, and paid as instructed.
Ayad hasn't been seen since. It's all but unthinkable that he's still alive.
Nadeem's list includes victims of all the different ways to die in Iraq. He lived in the notoriously violent neighborhood of Dora, which was overrun by Al Qaeda in 2005. The vast majority of his dead friends, Sunni and Shiite alike, were gunned down by Al Qaeda, most of them in a two-block area around his home.
But there also are those who fell prey to Shiite death squads, those who died in bombings and those killed by American gunfire. A 7-year-old next-door neighbor, Rowayed Fa'ez Hanna, was shot dead with his baby brother when U.S. soldiers opened fire on his family's car in 2005. Two uncles and two cousins from the violent northern town of Tal Afar also are on the list.
You don't bounce back from losing people like this. Nadeem and Arfan visibly shrank after their sister was killed. I saw it in other people too—the two front-desk managers of the hotel where we keep our bureau each lost only sons in 2005. They haven't looked the same since.
The Majeed family moved to Syria after Media's death, joining the exodus of 2.4 million Iraqis who have fled the country. Nadeem and Arfan live with us in our bureau; their neighborhood is still considered dangerous.
"I sometimes wonder what would be worse," Nadeem remarked to me recently. "To never be able to go home again, or to go home and have to live with all these ghosts."
For me, this has been the hardest part of covering Iraq—not the dangers or the hardships, but the experience of watching people die, and of watching the lives of those they leave behind fall apart. You feel the collective weight of accumulated grief hanging over the streets of this worn-down, crumbling city.
Of course, there are parts of Iraq that have been relatively unaffected by the violence and where people's experiences have been very different. Baghdad has been at the epicenter of the killings, both of the sectarian strife and the terrorist bombings, and my anecdotal insights on the war's toll are based on the lives of those living here.
There was a time, starting in 2005 and running into 2007, when the stories of death were coming thick and fast, when almost every day it seemed someone was coming to work with a new tale of the neighbor shot dead on the street outside his home, the mangled body of a college friend found in the morgue. Death became the stuff of water-cooler gossip.
That has changed. The surge strategy, the Shiite militia cease-fire and the Sunni revolt against Al Qaeda have sharply reduced the number of attacks. Baghdad residents are enjoying a relative reprieve from the horrors of the recent past.
But the violence hasn't stopped, and the stories still trickle in. A February suicide bombing nearby killed the woman who ran the little store from which we always bought our stationery. The son of one of Nadeem's friends who visited us for tea a few years back was blown up along with six American troops in a house bombing in January.
We didn't know them, so their names don't belong on the list.
For me, these small connections to the daily death toll bring a pang of sorrow for the grief of others. And yes, there's also that guilty sense of relief that the victim wasn't one of our own.
For the Iraqis who live this war, there are no degrees of separation from the dead.