- BAGHDAD -- Rubaei Street
in Baghdad's Zayuna district is one of the city's lesser-known oasis of
normality. Far away from the more famous Kindi Street of Harthiya or 14
Ramadan Street of Mansour in the center of the city. On either side of
the wide and brightly lit boulevard good restaurants are open well into
the night, the sidewalks are crowded with families, and even young couples.
Expensive cars slowly cruise the street, and people gaze at the crowds
of girls in tight clothes.
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- I was sitting outside last night (staring at them too)
with my Iraqi friend Rana in a fresh fruit juice and ice cream restaurant
called Sandra. Owned by a Christian family, this restaurant is a secret
I hesitate to reveal to the rest of the world. Sitting outside at dusk,
I was sipping my strawberry smoothie while Rana ate imported ice cream,
explaining that she did not eat the local ice cream for fear of nuclear
contamination in the milk. She noted that the scene before us reminded
her of the days before the war, when she would go out at night with her
sisters, unafraid of the dangers that keep women sequestered in their homes
today.
-
- As she was waxing nostalgically about the good old days
under Saddam Hussein, a refrain I am by now accustomed to hear, even from
many Shi'ites, and I was trying not to roll my eyes, two sharp gun shots
cut her words short and returned her to reality. Though by now, like for
all Iraqis, the sound of gun shots rarely distracts me, this time it was
too close, and too incongruent with the bustling nightlife. I saw two men
walking hurriedly across the street in between the traffic, arms raised
and pistols in the air. "They killed a man!" someone shouted.
I got up and saw a man in a suit collapsed on the curb, blood spreading
from beneath his head. Not knowing what else to do, I began taking pictures
of him.
-
- The crowd grew and cars slowed down as their drivers
gazed at the corpse. Soon about 50 men stood around silently looking around
them for help, looking at the body then looking away guiltily. Someone
tried calling the police, but the call did not go through. Two men ran
a few hundred meters away to the nearest police checkpoint, but were told
by the policemen there that it was somebody else's jurisdiction. Two armed
security guards from a building across the street returned panting, having
failed to find the killers. They said they provided security for "an
official" nearby. People told me the official was a judge. Someone
from a nearby shop covered the body with a rug, but it failed to conceal
the growing pool of blood that had already started to coagulate. Finally,
half an hour after the shooting, Iraqi police began arriving, just as several
men in the crowd had turned over the body and were looking through his
pockets for identification or a phone.
-
- Blue and white pickup trucks pulled up and a dozen police
officers emerged with guns drawn, pushing the crowd back and asking witnesses
what had happened. Witnesses described the men and said they had walked
away laughing. The police recognized the dead man as a colonel from their
local station. Realizing he was one of theirs, and that his gun was missing,
they became very tense, raising their guns and pushing back the crowd.
The police told me to stop photographing. Rana showed them a permission
slip from the ministry of interior allowing a different friend of hers
to work with the police. She was told this did not apply to cases of murdered
police officers. I showed several officers some of the pictures I had taken
of the first moments of his death on my digital camera. A tall officer
with light hair and gray eyes grabbed my camera, telling me I was not allowed
to have pictures of dead police on it, and I would have to wait for his
commander to come before he returned it to me. I grabbed the camera back
and we both held it, arguing over who would keep it. He waved his gun and
held it to my chest, and I let go of the camera as we shouted back and
forth at each other. He growled that if I did not let it go he would break
it, and pushed the barrel of his gun at my chest again, I recall being
impressed with how clean and new it looked. I relented, but followed him
around, fearing for my camera.
-
- The Zayuna station commander arrived wearing civilian
clothes and a worried look. He told me I could not take pictures of dead
policemen, and ordered me to erase the ones I had taken. The tall angry
officer demanded I give him the film. I explained to him that it was digital
and he shouted that I should erase all the pictures. I pressed various
buttons and scowled in mock concentration, pretending to delete the pictures.
One of the slain colonel's men arrived, and smacked himself on the head
when he saw his superior officer's body, falling to his knees and sobbing.
"Sir! Oh sir!" he cried. "Why did you go out alone?"
He rolled in agony, screaming, "It was his first time out alone!"
-
- A family walking by recognized the commander and called
to him. He smiled at the mother and her children, asked them how they were.
"Alhamdulillah," praise god, he said warmly, when they inquired
how he was doing. They kissed hello and hugged. The family left and he
returned grimly to the body of Colonel Basel Abdel Aziz, who looked to
be about 50 years old, raising it with the help of two of his men onto
the bed of a pickup truck. An officer found two empty nine millimeter shell
casings and gave them to the commander. A man from a shop nearby splashed
a bucket-full of water onto the pool of blood, spreading it across the
road, and the air was thick with its pungent smell.
-
- Rana convinced the commander to take us with him and
the body back to the police station. On the way he told us that this was
the sixth officer from his station who had been assassinated, and another
one had died in an explosion. A different officer commented that the killers
were "very organized and systematic. They want to prevent stability."
The vehicles weaved through concrete barriers arranged to slow down potential
suicide bombers as a son of Colonel Basel, who looked to be in his 20s,
ran out and began moaning and beating a car. Other officers told him to
say "ya Allah", oh God, and urged him to be strong, but he fell
down and lay still, and they carried him inside. A second, younger son
of about 15 years, could be heard crying as he ran past the barriers and
pushed the other policemen away.
-
- "Every day we lose another one of out brothers,"
one policeman said, "Every day I leave my house and kiss my wife and
children goodbye not knowing if I will return." Another officer complained
that "his family will get nothing. Even in the worst of times under
Saddam, the family of a dead police officer received a salary, or a car
or a house even. Now they get nothing. If the situation for the police
does not improve we all soon all quit." I asked a police officer about
the problems they faced. "Three problems a day," he said, "breakfast,
lunch and dinner." He and his men asked me to tell the Iraqi Governing
Council about their difficulties.
-
- Two American military Humvees rumbled into the base and
several soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division emerged to look around.
A towering officer leaned over the pickup truck and gazed with indifference
at the body, shining his flashlight and asking his translator to tell him
what had happened. The officer admitted he had no clue who was behind these
attacks, but expressed confidence that "we'll find them eventually".
On the way home past Fardos Circle I saw an immense sign above a building.
A few Iraqi men and women in uniform smiling proudly and in Arabic was
written "Iraqi Security Forces, The New Future." When I returned
to my hotel, I told Karim, a photographer, about what I had seen. He asked
me if I had heard about the explosion in Fallujah. I asked him if he had
heard about the deputy chief of police in Mosul getting assassinated. He
said: "It's all small news, so you never hear of it. It's all small
news, but it's all bad news."
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- Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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- http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FB28Ak01.html
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