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Iraq’s Marlo Stanfields

Newsweek has a fascinating, if gruesome account of how Iraqi death squads are working to conceal their dirty deeds: There’s no question that violence across Iraq has declined: in December 2006, approximately 3,000 Iraqi civilians were killed across the country; this November about 600 were. But the problem—and the reason no one from U.S. commander ...

By Blake Hounshell

December 18, 2007, 2:34 PM

Newsweek has a fascinating, if gruesome account of how Iraqi death squads are working to conceal their dirty deeds:

Newsweek has a fascinating, if gruesome account of how Iraqi death squads are working to conceal their dirty deeds:

There’s no question that violence across Iraq has declined: in December 2006, approximately 3,000 Iraqi civilians were killed across the country; this November about 600 were. But the problem—and the reason no one from U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus on down is declaring victory yet—is that those statistics do not tell the whole story. Body hunters like Sowadi, Baghdad residents and local gunmen all say that militias are making more of an effort to disguise their grisly handiwork—burying bodies in shallow graves, dumping them in city sewers. Robert Lamburne, director of forensic services at the British Embassy, has spoken to dozens of Iraqi policemen and examined bodies—relatively fresh—from one of several graves uncovered recently. His judgment: “There’s less killing, but there’s more concealment.”

In the past two months, more than half a dozen mass graves have been found in Iraq, at least half of them in Baghdad. At one site discovered in late November, in a yard in Baghdad’s Saydiya neighborhood, bodies and their severed heads were buried in two separate holes, according to a source at the Ministry of Interior who isn’t authorized to speak on the record. An additional 16 bodies were found buried in a ditch north of Baghdad last Thursday. Dumping bodies is nothing new in Iraq: Saddam Hussein filled mass graves with tens of thousands of Iraqis. But in the heat of the civil war, militias boldly advertised their slaughter. Bodies—headless, burned, slashed open and perforated with drill holes—were left in plain sight as a message to others. Now, with most Baghdad neighborhoods dominated by one sect or the other, the death squads can afford to be more subtle in their killing. “Many militia groups just make people disappear,” says Hicham Hassan, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

For those of you who watch HBO’s The Wire, this is a familiar storyline. If you just bought the DVDs of Season Four, I won’t spoil it for you. Suffice it to say, though, that there is going to be an accounting in Iraq someday as more bodies are discovered. The only question is, will anyone be held responsible?