The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

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  IN THE WEST, Iraq had a reputation for being the most secular country in the region; its people were thought to be educated, cosmopolitan, modern. The reputation turned out to be decades out of date. After the oil-rich, freewheeling 1970s, when women wore miniskirts and alcohol flowed liberally, the effect of endless war, steady immiseration, and the Islamic revolution next door in Iran made Iraq far more conservative than most people on the outside, including Iraqi exiles, realized. Especially among the poor Shia, women disappeared under the hijab, or veil, and the abaya, the full-length black robe. The Shiite clergy became Saddam’s most serious internal opposition. To shore up his power with his own Sunni base after the disaster of the Gulf War, the newly pious dictator launched a campaign of Islamization: The words “Allahu akbar” were added to the Iraqi flag in Saddam’s own script, a copy of the Qur’an was written in his own blood, and gigantic Sunni mosques began to go up around Baghdad, beginning with the Mother of All Battles mosque. Many of them remained unfinished when the Americans arrived, and across the city’s horizon you could see the hulking shells of half-built domes encased in scaffolding, like the monuments of a warlike civilization that ended with some sudden catastrophe. In the ruins down below, the Shiite masses were coming out to claim the streets.

  March 2004 roughly coincided with the first lunar month of the Muslim calendar, Muharram. For the Shia, it was a tragic month, an unlucky month, Sheikh Emad al-Din al-Awadi told me, when no religious Muslim would get married or make an important decision. The tenth day of Muharram was Ashura, the anniversary of the death in A.D. 680 of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet, and the massacre of his followers at Karbala, where Hussein had come to stake his claim as leader of the faithful. Those who killed them immediately repented. They became the Shia, or “partisans” of Hussein’s father, Ali, who believed that the caliphate passed down through his descendants, as opposed to the Sunnis, whose caliphs were chosen from within the circle of religious authority and who located the Abassid caliphate in Baghdad, where it remained until the city was sacked by Mongol invaders in 1256. Beginning with the death of Hussein and continuing down through the history of the Arab Muslim world, the Shia were the great losers of this schism, enduring under the religious yoke of the Sunni caliphate, until it was abolished by Atatürk in 1920, and then under the temporal power of Sunni kings and dictators in the new Arab nation-states. In the light of this history, the most significant result of the American invasion of Iraq, and the larger American project of bringing majority rule there, was that, for the first time in their history, the Shia were going to take power in an Arab country.

  And now, 1,324 years after Karbala, Baghdad was festooned with the symbols of Shiite piety and penitence—the red flags of Hussein’s blood, the green flags of Islam, the black flags of grief bearing messages such as “Hussein Taught Us to Become Victims in Order to Gain Victory.” The chants, the parades, the beating of chests, the flaying of scalps and backs in ceremonies of atonement, also became displays of collective power. For the first time in more than two decades, the Shia were free to celebrate Ashura in Iraq. So the holy shrines of Baghdad and Karbala were unusually crowded with black-clad Shiite pilgrims from around the country, Iran, and the far-flung corners of the world, and, anonymous among them, a few Sunni jihadis wrapped in explosives.

  The Baghdad morgue became a charnel house filled with bodies, heads, limbs, and buckets of flesh. Outside the squat yellow two-story building, in a decaying neighborhood near the Tigris called Medical City, a man waited to enter and look for an eleven-year-old boy, a neighbor, whose father lay wounded in the hospital. Others were leaving with rags pressed to their faces. The authorities were rushing to complete the process of identification. There would be no forensic autopsies of the victims, I was told by Dr. Bashir Shaker, the young forensic-medicine specialist on duty. These followers of Hussein were the newest Shiite martyrs, and Islam forbade the violation of their bodies.

  On the day of my visit to the morgue, another death had come under Shaker’s review. “An interesting case,” he told me, more so than the terrible carnage of the Ashura bombings. The body of a woman, forty-one years old and never married, had been discovered with six gunshot wounds in the chest. Shaker’s initial examination found that she appeared not to be a virgin. This was what made the case interesting.

  Before the American invasion, the doctor said, one violent death a month arrived on the tables of the city morgue. This number revealed two conditions of Iraqi life under Saddam: The state owned a near monopoly on violence and most of its victims disappeared without a trace in unmarked mass graves. One effect of Iraq’s liberation from Baathist tyranny was the widespread dispersal of violence, and its utter unpredictability. In occupied Iraq, between fifteen and twenty-five murder victims arrived at the morgue every night, most of them with gunshot wounds. Every two weeks, the unclaimed bodies were released to the authorities for obscure burial. Shaker estimated that five cases a week involved Baathists executed in reprisal killings; their families typically retrieved the bodies without informing the police. With barely functioning courts, a weak, ill-trained, and often corrupt new police force, a foreign occupier that was failing to provide security, and a general atmosphere of lawlessness—kidnappings, carjackings, highway banditry, shootings by jumpy American soldiers at checkpoints, suicide bombings, urban firefights, murder for revenge, for money, for every reason or no reason—Iraqis didn’t expect to start receiving the justice that was denied them throughout the Saddam years anytime soon.

  The details of Dr. Shaker’s “interesting case” cast suspicion on the dead woman’s family. The number of gunshots suggested something other than the new gang style of killing. The doctor called such a crime “washing the shame.” Honor killing was an old tradition in Iraq, he said, though in this case with a new element: Before the war, the family would have burned or drowned the woman to disguise the murder. “Now you can kill and go,” Shaker said. “No need to cover the crime.” The standard prison sentence for “washing the shame” was six months.

  The woman’s case was referred to a committee of five doctors, including Iraq’s leading hymen expert, who had done his advanced research and taken his board degree in the subject. The committee found that the woman’s hymen was extremely thin but intact. Case closed. The family would not be investigated, and, without the means to find other leads, the police would seal the woman’s file.

  Down the hall from the morgue, housed within the same Medico-Legal Institute where Shaker was on staff, was another examination room, with a reclining chair and stirrups. This was where virginity exams on living subjects took place. Before the war, when there was rule of law of a sort, Shaker performed five or six a day—most of them on suspected prostitutes, but also on runaways, kidnap victims, and girls who had suffered some accident and whose parents, for the sake of marriageability, wanted a medical certificate establishing their chastity. These exams could have explosive consequences, and their results had to be carefully guarded. Women were shot dead by relatives on their way out the institute’s front door; in cases when a husband killed his bride on their wedding night and the exam showed that she was one of the 40 percent of Iraqi women with a condition known as “elastic hymen”—that is, she was still a virgin—the danger of reprisal came from her family. An entire subspecialty of forensic medicine in Iraq dealt with virginity. In any criminal case involving a woman, it was the most important piece of information. “It rules our life,” Shaker said. The most surprising thing about these details of his profession was their ordinariness.

  In March 2003, a week before the start of the war, a sixteen-year-old girl whom the former regime’s police had found wandering disoriented through the streets was brought to the Medico-Legal Institute. Upon examining her, Shaker found that her virginity had been recently and violently taken. The girl, named Raghda, was beautiful, with pale skin and large, dark eyes, and she was so miserable she could hardly speak. Raghda seemed nothing l
ike the teenage prostitutes Shaker examined, and he gently persuaded her to tell him what had happened.

  Raghda had gone to audition as a television introducer at the studio owned by Saddam’s psychopathic older son Uday. Along with the six other finalists, she was taken to a room where Uday—crippled from a 1996 assassination attempt—was seated in a chair, holding a pistol in his lap. He ordered the girls to undress and walk in a circle around his chair. When one girl begged to be excused, Uday raised the pistol and shot her dead. After that, the other girls, including Raghda, did as they were told. In the following days, Uday (who was committing some of his last crimes in power, while an invasion force gathered along Iraq’s southern border) raped the girls one after another, then threw them out on the street, drugged, with a wad of cash, which was how Raghda was found by the police. When she told them her story, they gave her a beating and then brought her to the Medico-Legal Institute.

  “If you want to help me,” Raghda told the doctor, “go tell my parents their daughter was found dead.”

  On March 18, the day before the war started, Shaker completed Raghda’s paperwork. “Notice that there is the appearance of complete hymen rupture from the top to the base. This is the result of an erect penis or a tool of the same quality. It occurred not long ago—about two weeks or more, and cannot say exactly when. In conclusion, the hymen membrane was ruptured longer ago than two weeks and cannot say how long. End of report.” Raghda was returned to the police. Shaker never learned her fate.

  Over the course of his career, Shaker served in the Iraqi army and took part in the occupation of Kuwait, a period he would only describe as an existence utterly separate from the rest of his life. His testimony in trials sent homosexuals to execution. At the morgue he handled the nightly traffic of violent death. A bloody Friday that March of 2004 brought thirty-two bodies, including two German and Dutch water engineers gunned down by insurgents on a road south of Baghdad, and two Iraqi journalists shot to death by American soldiers as they drove away from a checkpoint. For Shaker, such cases were purely intellectual matters. The effect of this dispassion showed in the cold, handsome gaze of his blue eyes, in his blunt uninflected manner of speaking, in the way his smile turned almost automatically into a sneer. But he never got over Raghda.

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  WHEN I MET HIM, Dr. Shaker was looking for a change in his life. “Any change,” he said, “better or worse.” He had a restless mind and hated boredom, and since the Americans represented something new, he welcomed spending time with me and became my guide to Baghdad’s morbid underside. I assumed that this forward-thinking man of science, with a flat-top haircut and a clean-shaven jaw, wanted a relatively secular, liberal Iraq. I kept waiting for him to catch my eye in the middle of one of his clinical descriptions and shake his head over the backwardness of a society obsessed with virginity and prostitution. It never happened.

  Shaker was born in 1968, the year the Baath Party came to power. “For thirty-five years, I feel I was dead,” he said. “Only these last weeks I’m beginning to live.” The fall of Saddam and the arrival of foreign occupiers—who happened to be the makers of his favorite old movies—had, at last, brought the chance for a new life. Eager to obtain travel documents and venture outside Iraq, he sold his private dermatology practice and a piece of land he’d received as a soldier. His first foreign trip was to Amman, Jordan, where he had arranged to meet an Iraqi girl who was living in exile in Amsterdam. They married after two days. “Like a movie,” he said. Without consummating the marriage, because it had not been an Islamic service, they went back to their respective cities and waited for the situation in Iraq to become more stable.

  But these same foreign occupiers now presided over the chaos that created the brisk business Shaker saw every night at the Baghdad morgue. On a morning when I was allowed inside, the wet blood on the floor and on the empty stretchers was drawing flies. The stench of death was real enough that I had to breathe through a bandanna. The morgue had the filthy, improvised atmosphere of a front-line hospital, and nothing was less ceremonious than the dead themselves. In the hall, bodies lay uncovered on tables. A man with a broad mustache, his throat slashed so deeply that he had almost been decapitated, found naked under a pile of garbage in a middle-class district. A man with a gunshot wound in his head, his blue eyes open and filmy, the orange plastic tip of a breathing tube stuck in his mouth like a whistle. The small, blackened corpse of a woman burned over most of her body. In the gloomy chill of the refrigerated room, six naked bodies lay sprawled on the floor, two women and four men. One of the women, believed to be a prostitute, had been shot through the nipple—by a relative, Shaker assumed. Some of these corpses, he said, would never be claimed; there would be no washing of bodies, no Muslim burial rites, only disposal.

  On the way out, I passed a well-dressed man who was staring down at the waxen face above the slashed throat. He was the dead man’s cousin; he had searched all the hospitals before ending up at the morgue. When he looked up, our eyes briefly met. He seemed at a loss, as if he were seeking an explanation. He shook his head once and turned to leave, talking frantically to himself.

  While the morgue overflowed, the examination room down the hall, with its reclining couch and stirrups, was usually empty. Before the war it had been the other way around. These two sections of the Medico-Legal Institute didn’t just occupy the same floor; they existed in a kind of fragile moral relation, as if the social control of virginity offered the last defense against the anarchy that led to murder. Shaker, a religious Shiite, wondered if the Iranian method of public whippings might be the answer to Baghdad’s prostitution epidemic which, he said, was flourishing in the lawlessness of the occupation. “It’s strict, it’s horrible, but it has good results,” he said. “Prostitution now is normal.” He blamed the Americans, and especially Bremer, who had threatened in February to veto any interim constitution that declared Islam to be the principal basis of law. Personal freedom, Aseel’s most ardent desire, was a moral disaster to Bashir Shaker. “When they give everybody their rights, it’s causing bad things in society, it’s corrupting us,” he said. “If Islam is the main source of law, none of these things would happen.”

  It was one measure of America’s inability to achieve its goals in Iraq that a man like Bashir Shaker, who had everything to gain from the overthrow of Saddam and the opportunities it opened up, now felt himself pulled toward a harsher brand of Islam in reaction to the pervasive insecurity of the occupation. The doctor said that he belonged to “the middle level of mind” in Iraqi society, between the strictly religious masses below him and the secular elite above. “There are many Iraqis like me,” he said. In Iraq, there was nothing unusual about a doctor who loved Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant, advocated the public whipping of prostitutes, and believed that executed homosexuals got what they deserved. But the middle level of mind meant inner conflict. Shaker feared the effects of living outside Iraq, and of the images transmitted into his house by the satellite dish that he installed on the roof when it was still illegal and highly dangerous under Saddam. He had fallen in love with an independent-minded Iraqi who grew up in Holland and wore low-cut shirts; if she came to Baghdad, he wanted her to start covering her hair and acting like a more traditional Muslim woman. His work fascinated him, but he worried that his daily immersion in death would coarsen his soul. “The doctor of forensic medicine deals only with bodies,” he said. “So maybe in the end I will become like you—an existentialist.”

  Shaker lived with his mother, brothers, and sisters on a tidy side street in the vast, impoverished, overwhelmingly Shiite district of two million people in northeastern Baghdad that some Baghdadis still called by its original name, al-Thawra, which means Revolution. Saddam, who was as hated there as anywhere in Iraq, inflicted his own name on the place; immediately after his fall, residents proclaimed that Saddam City was now Sadr City, after Grand Ayatollah Mohamed Sadiq al-Sadr, a leading Shiite cleric who was assassinated in 1999, almost certainly
on Saddam’s orders. Sadr’s uncle, Ayatollah Mohamed Baqr al-Sadr, the greatest Shiite scholar of the previous generation, had been tortured and killed along with his sister in 1980. Saddam’s brutal suppression of the uprising that followed the Gulf War in 1991 shattered the established Shiite clergy in the holy city of Najaf, a center of the rebellion: Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei died soon afterward, and Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was placed under house arrest. Saddam picked Mohamed Sadiq al-Sadr, imprisoned at the time, to take over the leadership of Iraq’s Shiite community. So Sadr was elevated with Saddam’s blessing and Baathist money, and through the 1990s he built up a network of thousands of followers whom he recruited among young, poor, and uneducated Shia in the countryside, gave six-week religious instruction in Najaf, and then dispersed throughout the largely Shiite cities of the south, as well as Baghdad’s al-Thawra. Sadr’s message was a Shiite blend of nationalism and populism: He spoke for the dispossessed and blamed the troubles of Iraq’s Shia on the fact that so many of their religious leaders, such as Khoei and Sistani, originally came from Iran. Sadr’s followers attributed superhuman powers to him. One of Shaker’s younger brothers told me that, on Judgment Day, God will see everyone as he truly is: A liar will appear to God as a dog, an arrogant man as a tiny insect, a drinker as a pig. But Ayatollah Sadr saw human beings this way while he was still alive.