Word: jamal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...understand just how brutal the war in Iraq has become, spend a day at work with Sheik Jamal al-Sudani. A Baghdad mortician, he travels to the holy city of Najaf every Friday to bury the capital's unclaimed and unknown dead--the scores of bodies that turn up every day, bearing no identifying characteristics save the method by which they were murdered. On a typical trip to the Wadi al-Salaam cemetery last month, Sheik Jamal and a small band of volunteers unload the grim cargo they have brought 100 miles from the Iraqi capital in an old flatbed...
...given Friday, Sheik Jamal inters Iraqis killed by roadside bombs ("I can tell how close they were to the blast from the extent of burning and depth of the shrapnel wounds"), execution ("Their hands are usually tied behind their back, and they've been shot in the head"), garroting and beheading. He buries victims of U.S. air strikes, some of whose bodies have been fused together by the heat of the explosion "so you can't tell which limb belongs to which head." Every now and again, he will get a body bag with charred-black body parts, dismembered...
...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...
Money is only one of his problems. The Friday trips to Najaf are fraught with danger. The road from Baghdad runs through some of the most lawless parts of Iraq, where criminals routinely kill commuters to take their cars and terrorists have been known to attack funeral corteges. Sheik Jamal says his weekly convoy--one truck and several carloads of volunteers--has never been attacked, a fact he attributes to divine intervention. "It's God's work, and he finds a way for us to do it," he says...
...head of the Preventative Security Apparatus, which is charged with overseeing security in the West Bank and Gaza, enraging Hamas leaders who felt their new power was being undermined. The Hamas-led Interior Ministry responded by forming its own paramilitary force under the command of veteran militant Jamal Abu Samhadana (whom Israel wants dead). Thus was the stage set for this week's gun battles, which occurred the day after Abbas went to Gaza for meetings with Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, in which they sought unsuccessfully to find ways to solve a financial crisis that stands...