The Horror

By Heraclitus

I know I'm not very cheery, but the news out of Iraq couldn't be worse. Well, unless it were more complete; there's little or no reporting from the most violent areas. First, there's this from the BBC: Violence sweeps Iraq on Ramadan. Even worse, however, is the UN's recent report on torture in Iraq. This was also covered by the BBC, under the title "Iraq torture 'worse after Saddam.'" The places of torture include, but are by no means limited to, prisons run by the US.

But the most damning account of what's happening in Iraq is this article in The Independent by Patrick Cockburn. The article should be read in full, but I'm going to quote much of it here. We're way beyond the point of foreign jihadis holed up in Falluja. In most of Baghdad, law and order seem to have broken down completely: "One US Army major was quoted as saying that Baghdad is now a Hobbesian world where everybody is at war with everybody else and the only protection is self-protection."

But alongside the general chaos and bloodletting anarchy there are Sunni and Shia militias fighting each other, often in the uniforms and with the weapons of the government. It seems ridiculous to call this situation anything other than civil war:

Nobody in Iraq is safe. Buses and cars are stopped at checkpoints and Sunni or Shia are killed after a glance at their identity cards. Many people now carry two sets of identity papers, one Shia and one Sunni. Car number plates showing that it was registered in a Sunni province may be enough to get the driver shot in a Shia neighbourhood. Sectarian civil war is pervasive in Baghdad and central Iraq. Religious processions are frequently attacked. On 19 and 20 August, a Shia religious pilgrimage came under sustained attack that left 20 dead and 300 wounded.

Government ministries are either Shia or Sunni. In Baghdad this month, a television crew filming the morgue had to cower behind a wall because the Shia guards were fighting a gun battle with the Sunni guards of the Electricity Ministry near by.

One thinks, obviously, of Beirut and the Lebanese civil war, and I defer to others on the question of which civil war has seen a more complete evaporation of centralized power. But between the Sunni and Shia militias, what remains of "al-Qaeda in Iraq," foreign operative from Iran, Syria, and who knows where else, the mercenaries, and the US and the official Iraqi government cowering in the Green Zone, Iraq today makes the scene from Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen ("Marlowe") asks the Marines in the middle of the night, "Who's in charge here?," look like an interlude from Little Women.

And then there's the torture:

The brutal tortures committed in the prisons of the regime overthrown in 2003 are being emulated and surpassed in the detention centres of the present US- and British-backed Iraqi government. "Detainees' bodies show signs of beating using electric cables, wounds in different parts of their bodies including in the head and genitals, broken bones of legs and hands, electric and cigarette burns," the human rights office of the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq says in a new report.

The bodies in Baghdad's morgue " often bear signs of severe torture including acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones (back, hands and legs), missing eyes and wounds caused by power drills or nails", the UN report said. Those not killed by these abuses are shot in the head.

Human rights groups say torture is practised in prisons run by the US as well as those run by the Interior and Defence ministries and the numerous Sunni and Shia militias.

And the general sense that this is hell on earth:

The pervasive use of torture is only one aspect of the utter breakdown of government across Iraq outside the three Kurdish provinces in the north. In July and August alone, 6,599 civilians were killed, the UN says.

Iraq is in a state of primal anarchy. Paradoxically, the final collapse of security this summer is masked from the outside world because the country is too dangerous for journalists to report what is happening. Some 134 journalists, mostly Iraqi, have been killed since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The bi-monthly UN report on Iraq is almost the only neutral and objective survey of conditions in the country. The real number of civilians killed in Iraq is probably much higher because, outside Baghdad, deaths are not recorded. The Health Ministry claims, for instance, that in July nobody died violently in al-Anbar province in western Iraq, traditionally the most violent region, but this probably means the violence was so intense that casualty figures could not be collected from the hospitals.

The Iraqi state and much of society have been criminalised. Gangs of gunmen are often described on state television as "wearing police uniforms" . One senior Iraqi minister laughed as he told The Independent: " Of course they wear police uniforms. They are real policemen."

On 7 September, the Iraqi authorities announced the execution by hanging at Abu Ghraib prison of 27 prisoners, including one woman, convicted of terror and criminal charges. It is the first mass execution since Saddam Hussein's rule.

Ahmed Chalabi, anyone?