Jonathan Steele (The Guardian): Iraqis face a more brutal life

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Guardian Unlimited (London)
Dated Friday March 31

Iraqis face a more brutal life with each passing month
Terror and chaos reign, and the titanic challenge of ensuring political stability has barely begun to be addressed
By Jonathan Steele in Baghdad

The pavements outside the American embassy here are peppered with odd concrete structures. They look like oversized kennels, about four feet high and six feet long, with a low wall at each end. Painted on them, large letters explain their purpose - duck and cover.

This is deep inside the well-guarded Green Zone, but if mortar rounds start to fall as you walk or drive by, these pygmy bunkers are where you and up to 10 people can squeeze in and crouch until the coast is clear. Like the iconic image of the last helicopter leaving the roof of the US embassy in Saigon in 1975 with terrified people struggling to clamber aboard, these ugly shelters may eventually achieve similar symbolic status.

For Iraqis in Baghdad, duck and cover is already a metaphor for daily life. On each of the seven visits I have made here since Saddam Hussein was toppled, security conditions have worsened. The downward slide since my previous trip for the December elections seems particularly steep.

The spate of sectarian revenge killings that followed the bombing of the golden-domed shrine at Samarra last month is not yet over, in spite of an 8pm curfew imposed in Baghdad. Abductions and murders continue relentlessly. Bodies, often scarred by torture and with their hands tied, have been turning up on lonely roadsides at a rate of 13 a day. Shops close their metal shutters and streets start emptying at 4pm as people flee home well before the curfew. Many Baghdadis rarely venture out except to the corner store. Those who drive to work vary their routes. A doctor who uses taxis to get to her hospital says she tells the driver she's a patient, "since it makes kidnapping a bit less likely".

Read more.

A unfortunate antidote to all the nonsense about the insurgency being in its last throes, things being under control and whatever Laura Ingraham has been sending our way.

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. "turning up on lonely roadsides at a rate of 13 a day"

The good news is, it isn't 20 a day!

[kenny blankenship]

2. I only want to hear the good news from Iraq!