Just another month in the life and death of Iraq
We jump from days to months.
Back in June, in Part VI of our "Just another day in the life and death of Iraq" series, I reported on the "horror show" at one of Baghdad's morgues. In a separate post, Creature, quoting CNN, noted that "[t]he main Baghdad morgue reported receiving 6,025 bodies in the first five months of the year, including those of 1,398 civilians killed in shooting attacks and other violent crimes in May".
The numbers -- what are numbers? these are human beings! -- seem to be getting worse:
And it's actually even worse than that: "A report from the United Nations combining morgue and hospital body counts for June showed that, on average, more than 100 people were being killed every day."
1,398 -- 1,595 -- 1,815 -- 6,025. How do you even digest such figures? Even 100 seems like an abstraction from reality. There is so much violence in Iraq, so much death -- so much death beyond our ability to keep track of it, so much death beyond our limited and fragile comprehension -- that we can do nothing with it but turn it into an abstraction, a statistic. Indeed, the scale of death is simply so enormous as to overwhelm us and to compel us for our own well-being to turn away from it, to ignore its reality, its essential meaning.
1,815 bodies at the Baghdad morgue mean 1,815 human lives ended, 1,815 individual stories of pain, suffering, loss. You can't assign a quantitative value to any one human life. How do you assign value to 1,815 human lives? How do you represent that horror? How do you even understand it?
Back in June, in Part VI of our "Just another day in the life and death of Iraq" series, I reported on the "horror show" at one of Baghdad's morgues. In a separate post, Creature, quoting CNN, noted that "[t]he main Baghdad morgue reported receiving 6,025 bodies in the first five months of the year, including those of 1,398 civilians killed in shooting attacks and other violent crimes in May".
The numbers -- what are numbers? these are human beings! -- seem to be getting worse:
Figures compiled by the city morgue indicated Wednesday that the number of killings in the Iraqi capital reached a new high last month, and the U.S. military said a new effort to bring security to Baghdad will succeed only if Iraqis "want it to work."
The Baghdad morgue took in 1,815 bodies during July, news services quoted the facility's assistant manager, Abdul Razzaq al-Obeidi, as saying. The previous month's tally was 1,595. Obeidi estimated that as many as 90 percent of the total died violent deaths.
And it's actually even worse than that: "A report from the United Nations combining morgue and hospital body counts for June showed that, on average, more than 100 people were being killed every day."
1,398 -- 1,595 -- 1,815 -- 6,025. How do you even digest such figures? Even 100 seems like an abstraction from reality. There is so much violence in Iraq, so much death -- so much death beyond our ability to keep track of it, so much death beyond our limited and fragile comprehension -- that we can do nothing with it but turn it into an abstraction, a statistic. Indeed, the scale of death is simply so enormous as to overwhelm us and to compel us for our own well-being to turn away from it, to ignore its reality, its essential meaning.
1,815 bodies at the Baghdad morgue mean 1,815 human lives ended, 1,815 individual stories of pain, suffering, loss. You can't assign a quantitative value to any one human life. How do you assign value to 1,815 human lives? How do you represent that horror? How do you even understand it?
posted by Michael J.W. Stickings at
6:04 AM
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