Word: baghdad
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Residents in the area found the mutilated remains Monday, according to Maj. Gen. Mark Hertling, the commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq. Speaking to reporters in Baghdad, Hertling also showed U.S. documentation of another brutal murder in the Baquba area, where U.S. forces have in recent days launched a major offensive aimed at routing extremists who have been terrorizing the territory for months. Grainy video from a flying drone showed several men emerge from a car parked in a field. The figures opened the trunk and pulled out a struggling victim, who was then thrown into a ditch...
...Today Baghdad looks as you imagine it: a war zone direct from central casting. The detritus of car bombs and truck bombs, suicide bombers and firefights would be ample documentation of urban decimation if it only were safe for photographers to walk around and work on the streets...
...everywhere. Some form extended contiguous barriers, like paranoid rat mazes of concrete-and-sky tunnels. Some connect to nothingness, sitting at odd angles, left littering the highways, neighborhood streets and alleyways, forgotten pieces of drab, tan cityscape. Except for the helicopters thumping just above the low skyline, views in Baghdad are therefore always partly obscured...
Violence may be down 60%, but that only brings the city back to 2006 levels. Life in Baghdad in January 2008 is still a far cry from normalcy. Those of us who were here in 2003 and 2004 remember the backed-up traffic and streets wheezing with raw, unencumbered capitalism, let loose after decades of state-controlled socialism. Back then we ate lunch at hole-in-the chicken shacks. Today, those places literally are holes in the walls...
Four years later Iraq is exactly none of those things: free, democratic, peaceful internally or externally. Lines of humongous, heavily-armored American Humvees with steel chains dangling from their front ends roll through Baghdad, America's tax dollars in action, a panorama of monstrous battle cats going anywhere they want. It was never like this before. Back then, you could at least see the fresh faces of young American soldiers, even if their eyes were obscured by wrap-around Oakleys. Now their faces are steel plates, their eyes electronic sensors...