Word: haditha
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Death comes to Iraq now in many new and terrible forms. Though there is outrage among many Iraqis about the alleged massacre in Haditha last November, the violence on Iraq's streets is so unrelentingly horrific that even the worst atrocities have lost their power to shock. Few Iraqis even know how many people have died by the bullets and bombs. Definitive statistics are impossible to find in a country where the most violent provinces are out of bounds for journalists and human-rights workers, and where the state infrastructure--hospitals, morgues, police stations--is not up to the task...
...civilians being killed by Shi'ite death squads or Sunni insurgents and jihadis. U.S. forces often find themselves trying to prevent Iraqis from killing one another. On the same day that Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced that the government would launch an investigation into the 24 Haditha killings and called U.S. attacks against Iraqi civilians "a regular occurrence," at least 18 Iraqis died at the hands of their countrymen. The rate of sectarian killings has escalated sharply since the Feb. 22 bombing of a major Shi'ite shrine in Samarra. In Baghdad alone, morgue officials say they...
...Iraqi media had little interest in the Haditha story until last week, when it emerged that the Marines involved were likely to be punished. When TIME's first Haditha story ran in March, it was picked up by most of the Arab TV stations beaming into Iraq, but the local channels and newspapers repeated it with no comment or further reporting of their own. A senior Western diplomat who monitors the Iraqi media was surprised: "They treated it as just another atrocity, nothing special." There is one other explanation: Iraqis take it for granted that the military--any military--will...
...sign of Iraqis' utter mistrust of the leaders who have replaced Saddam that anger over Haditha has been directed as much toward the Iraqi government as toward U.S. troops. Like many Iraqis across the country, the survivors accuse their elected leaders of cocooning themselves in a highly fortified Baghdad enclave, with little thought for the plight of their countrymen. "The concrete walls of the Green Zone are too high, so they can't see what's happening to us," says Khaled Raseef, the spokesman for the Haditha victims' kin. Whatever they think of the Marines, Raseef says he was impressed...
Sheik Jamal's views on the Americans are not hard to divine--in his spare time he's a volunteer in al-Sadr's office in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood. But his take on the Haditha killings is purely practical: the local morgue dealt with those bodies, and they were all claimed by family members, so they aren't his problem. He has more pressing concerns. The escalation of killings in Baghdad puts him under tremendous financial strain: he makes his living as a professional mortician but receives no payment for burying unclaimed bodies, which he sees...