Early on the morning of July 13th, the shot-up bodies of twenty-eight women and five men were retrieved from two apartments in a building complex in Zayouna, a neighborhood in eastern Baghdad. Both apartments were said to be sites of prostitution. By 10 A.M., the police had delivered the bodies to a city morgue, where they were strewn over the dirty, blood-streaked floor, one woman’s outstretched arms abutting another woman’s head, someone’s splayed legs near someone else’s torso. This is the third time this year that a group of women suspected of being prostitutes has been killed; this group was the largest to date, according to morgue workers.
“It’s the militias, the religious militias,” one morgue worker said of the perpetrators, a claim that others repeated. Some blamed As’aib Ahl al-Haq, an armed pro-Iranian Shiite group that is considered one of the more ruthless and undisciplined of the militias that are mushrooming in Iraq. Some of the militias participated in the carnage that followed the U.S.-led invasion in 2003; others formed in response to the fall of the northern city of Mosul, on June 10th, to a Sunni coalition that includes ISIS, a onetime Al Qaeda affiliate that now calls itself Islamic State.
In the past month, Islamic State has driven Christians out of Mosul and attacked Shiites, as well as anyone else whom it regards as an apostate. In the past week, members of the Yazidi religious minority have been a particular target, and tens of thousands of Yazidis have been stranded on a mountaintop. Islamic State and also, as the Baghdad murders this summer made clear, some Shiite militias have targeted those who live on the social margins and who participate in activities that they deem un-Islamic. An Iraqi prostitute, in a state of growing lawlessness, is a distinctly vulnerable figure.
“You know these females,” a morgue worker said, standing among the corpses. “Most of them are neglected, or separated from their families. I believe that, with most of them, nobody will ask for them, even if they’re kept here for days.”
Morgue workers in latex gloves cut away the women’s clothing—some of the dead wore the black cloak of conservative Muslims, others were in tight jeans and skimpy tops. One worker used a wooden probe to take a vaginal swab for an autopsy report. Others walked around with scalpels, cutting above the victims’ pubis bones to check for fetuses, removing their uteruses. Some had their bras or other items of their clothing tossed on top of them. Small pink pieces of cardboard with the words “UKNOWN IDENTITY” lay on top of each victim. Morgue workers say that since June they’ve seen an increase in the number of violent deaths of unidentified victims. They used to see two or three a day. Now the figure is often in the dozens.
A morgue worker laughed when he was asked if the bodies brought in that morning were an unusual occurrence. “This?” he said. “It’s a piece of cake. Before”—in 2006 and 2007—“the average was about a hundred and twenty, a hundred and forty bodies a day. There’d be so many, the corpses would extend out of the main room and into the offices.”
There’s a narrow room in the morgue where families can come to see if their missing are among the dead. Five large flat-screen televisions are mounted on one wall, opposite a row of chairs. Saad, a thirty-four-year-old morgue worker, sat on a chair near the wall of screens. He played a slide show of unidentified victims, men and women photographed with caked blood still on their faces, or hands bound behind their backs. An image flashed on the screen of a bloodied young man, naked, lying partially on his stomach. “His wife just identified him, he’s one of the thirty-three,” Saad said. He didn’t offer a figure for how many dead were in the records, but he estimated that about sixty per cent were eventually identified: “There are so many, many, many,” he said.
Often, the acts of violence, like the killings of these thirty-three people, briefly make headlines, but their aftermath is ignored. An investigation is apparently under way, but no one really expects anything to come of it. Each episode exacts a price—from the victims, from their families, from the morgue workers and others who come into close contact with the worst of what humans are capable of, as well as from the broader community, whose sense of security is dwindling.
“It hardens us a bit,” Saad continued. “We say we’re not scared, but I am. We’re all worried about the situation.” He says that when he goes home the slide show keeps playing in his head. He wonders if he shouldn’t have married, if he shouldn’t have brought a two-year-old son into this world. “Why leave people behind when you’re gone? I see these people,” he said, pointing to the screens. “They’ve left behind families. Honestly, there isn’t an Iraqi family that hasn’t been affected by violence in some way.”
The door opened, and two women walked in. One, who was younger, wore a white headscarf with black polka dots; the other was in a black headscarf, and her eyebrows were sharply drawn in. They handed a piece of paper to one of Saad’s two co-workers. It was a death notice, attesting that the women had identified one of the five men.
“She’s his wife,” Saad said, pointing to the younger woman.
The women were sisters. The wife, who was nineteen, asked for her husband’s personal belongings. He didn’t have any, she was told.
“He had money and a wallet. He was wearing a ring,” her sister said.
“Not when we saw him. He had nothing on him,” Saad said.
The husband, who was twenty-five, sold hummus from a street-side cart. The couple had three children, the youngest just five days old. “He left home in the early evening,” his wife told me. “That’s the last time I saw him. He didn’t come home. I called his uncle, who went looking for him. We didn’t find him.”
She turned to Saad: “Was there another man killed with him?”
“Several, and girls,” he said.
The wife, who had been slouching, sat up. “Girls?” she asked.
“Yes, there are thirty-three bodies from the same place.”
“Girls?” she repeated.
“Didn’t he tell you where he was going?” the wife’s sister asked.
“No, he’d just go,” she said. “Girls?” she asked again. “What girls? Can I see their pictures?”
Her request was denied. Other victims weren’t her business, she was told gently.
“You’re so naïve, you’re so young,” the sister said, shaking her head. “What are you going to do now?”
While they were preparing to leave, a woman in a black chador walked in with a scruffy teen-age boy and silently took a seat.
“Do you have somebody missing?” Saad asked her.
“Yes, my daughter,” she replied. Saad asked how long she’d been missing and where she’d disappeared. For a few days, the mother said, and from Zayouna.
The slide show began to play. The mother recoiled, and turned away from some images, but she kept watching. Time seemed to slow down. “Return to that photo!” she said, two minutes into the screening. She slapped her thighs, let out a shriek.
“No, Mama, I don’t think so,” the teen-age boy said.
“This one?” Saad asked. It was a horrific picture of a young woman, her face distorted and bloodied, who was wearing bright, pearly green eye shadow and had crude blond streaks through her dark-brown hair.
“They killed her!” The mother’s voice was shaky, breathless. “That’s her abaya!” she said, referring to the black cloak. It had intricate gold embroidery around the chest. “My eldest is gone!”
She asked who had found her, and where. Saad told her the details. The implications quickly sunk in.
“What do I tell your father?” she said. She was clawing at her cheeks, speaking barely above a whisper. “You’ve blackened our faces, Mama. Where can we go? You dug your grave and mine. Mama, I was so scared for you! I tried to protect you! I raised you properly!”
“Enough!” her son yelled.
The mother seemed to snap out of her soliloquy for a moment. “I thought maybe she’d gone to see our relatives,” she said to the room. The teen-ager asked about procedure, and he was told to get paperwork from another office. Then he ushered his mother out of the room.
