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In Iraq, Every Day Is Memorial
Day
By Bobby Ghosh/Baghdad
05/28/07 "Time"
-- -- The Shi'ite militias that forced Azhour Ali Mohammed
from her home in Baghdad's al-Dolai district last month shot her
husband Amer dead before her eyes and torched all her worldly
possessions. And the fear that the killers may come back for
 her
and her two little children prevented her from mourning her
husband. "I could not hold a proper wake for him," says the
young widow. "He deserved at least that."
A society with as much experience of violence as Iraq — up to
half a million soldiers and civilians were killed in the war
with Iran in the 1980s, hundreds of thousands were massacred on
Saddam Hussein's orders in the 1990s, and tens of thousands have
died in the Shi'ite-Sunni sectarian carnage in the past two
years — learns to adapt its mourning traditions to its
circumstances. During the war with Iran, Saddam barred
newspapers from publishing wake notices; he worried that the
sheer numbers of such notices would advertise just how badly his
ill-judged war was going and demoralize his subjects.
(Ironically, the current Iraqi government has taken a page out
of the Saddam's rulebook, suppressing monthly death tolls and
barring journalists and photographers from the scene of bomb
blasts.) Undeterred by the dictator's orders, Iraqis developed a
new custom: families in mourning painted notices on black
banners — the name of the deceased, the manner of their death
and the date and location of the wake — and posted them on
street corners.
The practice continued after Saddam's fall. Many of Baghdad's
major intersections became festooned with black banners. The
mounting death toll from suicide bombings and roadside
explosions led to a boom in the funerary industry — coffin
makers, grave diggers, caterers. Wakes were often held in
mosques, and before sectarian hatreds flared up it was not
uncommon for Sunnis to use Shi'ite mosques, or the other way
around.
Affluent families put on more elaborate wakes, building giant
cylindrical tarpaulin tents in their gardens, where for three
days visitors paid their condolences and ate hearty meals. The
atmosphere was somber, punctuated by haunting lamentations
performed by "adadas," or professional mourners: at a 2004 wake
in Baghdad's Jihad neighborhood, I saw a group of old women in
black abayas sing threnodies for four hours, egged on by an
uncle of the deceased, who said, "Keep crying, I'll pay you
more." (The going rate for a group of addadas was $150 per day,
plus tips.)
Such ostentation is rare these days, since any display of wealth
is likely to attract the attention of criminal gangs and
kidnappers. Besides, mourning has itself become potentially
deadly: Sunni suicide bombers have been known to target Shi'ite
wakes, and Shi'ite militias have attacked Sunni funeral
processions. So when Azhour went to collect her husband's body
from Baghdad's central morgue, only her father and brother
volunteered to go with her. They put Amer's body in a simple
wooden coffin, strapped it onto the roof of the car and drove as
quickly as possible to the nearest Sunni graveyard. "I was
terrified that [Shi'ite militias] would see the coffin and stop
us," she recalls. "And once they found out that we were Sunni,
they would kill us as well."
Fear of Shi'ite militias also prevented Azhour from posting a
black banner to mark Amer's death. There was no question of
holding his wake in a mosque; fearful of attacks, many of them
refuse to allow wakes. Nor could Azhour hold the wake in their
former neighborhood, where their old friends and neighbors could
attend. So she invited a handful of family members to the home
of an uncle who lives across town. Nobody came.
As a poor widow, Azhour is now confronted with a world of
problems. All of the family's official papers and documents were
torched along with their other possessions: without them, her
children won't be admitted to any school, she can't collect
state-subsidized rations, or even rent an apartment. Traveling
in the city is dangerous: she could be stopped at any one of
hundreds of checkpoints and arrested for not having papers. To
get new documents, she must first return to the neighborhood
where Amer was killed, and get a note from the police station
there. But that's impossible, because the neighborhood is
controlled by the Shi'ite militias, who would likely shoot her
on sight. "Without my husband, I am now a nobody," she says.
"For the government, I don't exist."
She may not have been able to mourn Amer in the customary way,
but like countless Iraqis who have lost loved ones to violence,
Azhour's grieving has just begun.
Copyright ? 2007 Time Inc.
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