Famously exposing the avarice of the U.S. funeral industry, Jessica Mitford’s book The American Way of Death (1963) confronted death and its attendant rituals, removing the shroud of taboo. For today’s military managers, talk of death is taboo once again. Military funerals and coffins have, for as long as possible, been kept out of public view.  Even less has come to light about the grief of Afghanistan and Iraq, where ordinary people deal with death as part of their everyday business.

 

Bombs and blasts have plagued Iraq ever since foreigners occupied the country in early 2003. [1] And during the recent weeks of haggling over the formation of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s government, the death toll has been especially grim. At least 400 people, many of them civilians, have died violent deaths across Iraq since the National Assembly approved a partial cabinet list on the 28^th of April. [2]

 

In news reports, the checkpoints and sniper fire and car bombs and suicide bombs begin to blur. In March, a bomb killed 47 at a funeral; photos showed white plastic chairs overturned, clothes and shoes scattered over a blood-spattered dirt floor. [3] In April, scores of bodies were pulled from the Tigris; and the bodies of more than a dozen Sunni farmers, who had come to Baghdad to sell produce, have been unearthed at a rubbish dump. [4]

Then came May. Two suicide bombers drove into a convoy of sport utility vehicles, the latter apparently owned by the Blackwater security company and headed for a U.S. command compound. [5] The bombs exploded; a busy traffic circle was suddenly the frame for mutilated bodies and blood-drenched schoolchildren. [6]
 
In Martyrs’ Square in central Baghdad, reports the London Times, a gun shop displays pistols and leather holsters, a coffin-maker’s shop is flourishing, and “the funeral business has never had it so good.” [7]  In a city where U.S. snipers keep watch from the rooftops, it’s the rare day that passes with no one falling victim to violence, so burial grounds have spread across the country. [8] At the Wadi al-Salaam (“Valley of Peace”) cemetery in Najaf, where hundreds of thousands of Shi’ite Muslims are buried in raised tombs and sunken crypts, gravediggers now work all day to cope with the influx of bodies. [9] Muslim dead are taken to cemeteries in coffins, but their bodies are then taken out and buried, in a shroud, directly in the ground; many of the used coffins are then recycled. [10] Before the U.S. invasion, the workers would bury about 60 a day.  The current work load is reaching 200 bodies a day -- many with signs of torture. [11] 

 

The price of burying a body ranges between 25,000 to 40,000 dinars (18 to 35 dollars), but could rise for deaths by assassination or bombing. [12] Current demand for burial grounds means the cost of plots has risen ten-fold. [13]  Even the price of a simple coffin can be prohibitive:  It’s risen from under $6 before the invasion to about $47, which is  a fortune for many Iraqis; so philanthropists order coffins in bulk and donate them to mosques. [14] 

 

Burying tens of thousands

 

The estimates of Iraqis killed vary widely. At the time of this writing, the British-based Iraq Body Count, a Web site that tallies official death reports, puts the toll from March 2003 between 21,523 and 24,415. John Sloboda, a professor of psychology at Keele University and a co-founder of the site, acknowledges the count is smaller than the true number because not every death is reported in the news media. [15]

A peer-reviewed study, carried out through an international team of public health researchers and published in October 2004 in the British medical journal Lancet, compared civilian death rates before and after the U.S. invasion, and concluded that about 100,000 Iraqis may have died due to its direct violence or from its offshoots: chaos leading to lack of sanitation and medical care. [16]  The researchers admitted that many of the dead might have been combatants. And that’s fair enough. Health is health; death is death. The idea that males of a certain age are destined to fight and die, and that somehow their numbers don’t count, is part of the fatalistic thinking that has, for so long, kept human societies spinning in destructive cycles of conflict.

The Lancet findings were ignored by the U.S. government -- a government that offers no findings at all. In 2002, in an interview broadcast by CBS News after U.S. warplanes dropped more than 2,500 bombs and flattened two Afghan villages, Donald Rumsfeld famously said: “I don’t do body counts.” [17] General Tommy Franks, who has commanded U.S. troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq, echoed the remark, saying: “You know we don’t do body counts.” [18]  Professor Richard Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that for the Bush administration, it’s “politically advantageous not to count and not to know.” But Kohn suspects the U.S. military keeps a general count. [19] 

 

A stream of speculations emerged from Afghanistan in the season of the “body count” remarks; officials in Kabul wouldn’t talk because the issue was too “political” or not “comfortable.” [20] But it was known that most injuries and deaths resulted from aerial bombing, a feature of modern U.S. military action that can reduce villages to rubble yet keep troops relatively safe. The Lancet survey suggested a similar pattern, tracing many violent deaths to air strikes, and finding many victims under the age of 15. The full death toll was unknown: After Marines killed hundreds of Iraqis in the siege of Fallujah, the city’s General Hospital director, Rafie al-Issawi, told of “an unknown number of dead being buried in people’s homes without coming to the clinics.” [21]  Athletic fields turned into cemeteries. At one ball field, an Associated Press reporter saw rows of freshly dug graves with wooden planks for headstones, some with markings indicating the dead were children. [22]

 

Iraq stops counting

In October 2004, Iraq’s Health Ministry, which had routinely provided figures to the media, stopped releasing totals of Iraqi adults and children killed. [23]  The same month, the New York Times discussed a weeklong effort to count the Iraqi dead, who included restaurant workers and fighters, politicians and journalists, a young photographer who had contributed pictures to the Associated Press, a judge, a medic, workers in a palm grove, and members of a family attempting to check on their home. [24]  The dead included Dina Mohammed Hassan, a reporter for the Kurdish television network Al-Huriya, shot in the back and face by three men who called her a collaborator. [25] Hassan’s death, according to the International News Safety Institute, followed the deaths of at least 57 journalists in Iraq since the spring of 2003. [26]

 

Barbers have been kidnapped, beaten viciously, and even murdered, accused of giving Western-style haircuts. [27] Early this year, six children saw U.S. troops shoot their parents right in front of their eyes  when their car failed to slow down for a roadblock.

“The U.S. considers all of Iraq a combat zone,” says a Pentagon report which was completed at the end of April 2005 and accidentally declassified. [28]  In one week of March 2005, it said, 17 suicide bombs exploded in Iraq -- averaging 23 people killed per detonation.

 

Grim warehouses

People are also dying in U.S. custody. At an Article 32 hearing for Willie Brand, who’s accused of killing a detainee at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, soldiers recounted learning to administer “compliance blows” in an Army course covering tactics for handling “combative” detainees. [29] Willie Brand, who works as a private security guard in civilian life, admitted battering a detainee who was chained to the ceiling. Another soldier reportedly bragged of hitting the detainee, Habibullah, with at least 50 knee jabs “and he deserved every one.” It took the brother of a former Taliban commander “a few hours” to lose consciousness before dying shortly after midnight on the 4^th of December 2002. [30] The next day, Dilawar, a taxi driver, was also brought to the Bagram Collection Point and also battered to death. Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the pathologist, would testify that that Dilawar’s leg tissue had been so damaged by repeated blows that “it was essentially crumbling and falling apart.”

 

The Pentagon acknowledges that U.S. forces have held more than 50,000 detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past three years, and at least 26 of them have died in U.S. custody in what military investigators have concluded or suspect were criminal homicides. [31]  This count excludes detainees deemed to have died of natural causes, and deaths caused by soldiers suppressing detainee riots.

 

In clandestine prisons in Afghanistan, in Egypt, and elsewhere, the United States holds an unspecified number of detainees without any legal process, outside review, family notification or monitoring by human rights groups. [32]  Earlier this year, the Washington Post reported a previously unpublicized case of a young Afghan, held in secret in an abandoned warehouse, code-named the Salt Pit, just north of Kabul. [33]  In late 2002, after a Central Intelligence officer allegedly ordered Afghan guards to strip him and chain him overnight to a concrete floor, he froze to death. The CIA officer -- described by colleagues as “bright and eager” and “full of energy” -- has since been promoted.  The detainee was buried, with no notice to his family, in an unmarked grave.