Word: saddamism
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...society with as much experience of violence as Iraq - up to half a million soldiers and civilians were killed in the war with Iran in the 1980s, hundreds of thousands were massacred on Saddam Hussein's orders in the 1990s, and tens of thousands have died in the Shi'ite-Sunni sectarian carnage in the past two years - learns to adapt its mourning traditions to its circumstances. During the war with Iran, Saddam barred newspapers from publishing wake notices; he worried that the sheer numbers of such notices would advertise just how badly his ill-judged war was going...
...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...
...Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki-and the Shi'ite factions in general-has little interest in making concessions to the Sunnis. "The Shi'ites suffer from a battered-child syndrome. They simply don't trust the Sunnis," said a senior U.S. official. There was a long history, even before Saddam Hussein's massacres, of Sunni prejudice and pogroms against the Shi'ites. In recent months, the al-Maliki government has sent several clear signals of anti-Sunni intransigence. It has supported the "voluntary" relocation of Sunni Arabs from the disputed, Kurdish-dominated city of Kirkuk. And in an instance that...
...neck of a naked prisoner cringing at her feet. Even when the shots were pixilated or cropped for modesty, nothing could hide the raw cruelty of U.S. soldiers ridiculing the manhood of Iraqi captives. Of all places, these atrocities occurred at Abu Ghraib prison, once the infamous home of Saddam Hussein's torture chambers...
...trouble at Abu Ghraib was a long time brewing. The 260-acre prison complex lies behind tall walls off a highway 20 miles west of Baghdad. In the days of Saddam it housed thousands of criminals and political prisoners who were subjected to unspeakable torture at the whim of the regime. The U.S. military decided to reopen the prison last August for all Iraqis being detained and renamed it the Baghdad Correctional Facility. But reminders of the prison's grim history were inescapable. From the ceiling of each 10-ft.-by-12-ft. cell still dangled a large hook, which...