Word: baghdad
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Sniper fire, Baghdad...
...grin and a boyish obsession with ThunderCats cartoons and X-Men comic books. But by 2006, with a new baby boy named Keoni in the house, he decided to re-enlist. He hoped a career in the military would provide a stable income for his family. He arrived in Baghdad last October and was promoted to sergeant and squad leader. Two weeks later, he came into an enemy sniper's sights in Baghdad while leading a patrol. His squad fights on without him. "I wish to hell," Barbara says, "they'd get them home...
...practice continued after Saddam's fall. Many of Baghdad's major intersections became festooned with black banners. The mounting death toll from suicide bombings and roadside explosions led to a boom in the funerary industry - coffin makers, grave diggers, caterers. Wakes were often held in mosques, and before sectarian hatreds flared up it was not uncommon for Sunnis to use Shi'ite mosques, or the other way around...
...Affluent families put on more elaborate wakes, building giant cylindrical tarpaulin tents in their gardens, where for three days visitors paid their condolences and ate hearty meals. The atmosphere was somber, punctuated by haunting lamentations performed by "adadas," or professional mourners: at a 2004 wake in Baghdad's Jihad neighborhood, I saw a group of old women in black abayas sing threnodies for four hours, egged on by an uncle of the deceased, who said, "Keep crying, I'll pay you more." (The going rate for a group of addadas was $150 per day, plus tips...
...likely to attract the attention of criminal gangs and kidnappers. Besides, mourning has itself become potentially deadly: Sunni suicide bombers have been known to target Shi'ite wakes, and Shi'ite militias have attacked Sunni funeral processions. So when Azhour went to collect her husband's body from Baghdad's central morgue, only her father and brother volunteered to go with her. They put Amer's body in a simple wooden coffin, strapped it onto the roof of the car and drove as quickly as possible to the nearest Sunni graveyard. "I was terrified that [Shi'ite militias] would...