US:American Iraq war veterans are attempting suicide at the rate of 1,000 a month, writes Lara Marlowein Baghdad
IRAQ'S SHIA Muslims bore the brunt of repression, torture and mass murder for the three decades of Saddam Hussein's rule. And although thousands of Shia have died at the hands of Sunni suicide bombers and assassins in recent years, the Sunni, in the words of a US army officer, "are now the underdogs".
Most of the tales of heartbreak I hear these days are from Sunnis. Like the handsome young pharmacist, in his late 20s, who took his wife and children to live in the United Arab Emirates.
The family thought they'd escaped Iraq's violence and ethnic cleansing. "I had a good job. We had a nice apartment," the young man says. "Then we had to come back. The authorities rejected my work permit, just because I'm Iraqi."
Things were not necessarily great for Sunnis under Saddam Hussein either. When the pharmacist was a child, I later learned from a mutual acquaintance, his mother went abroad on holiday.
Because she had divorced her husband, who was a cousin of Saddam, the authorities refused to allow her back into Iraq. The child grew up separated from his mother.
I met Mohamed, a computer technician, the day after I'd visited his original neighbourhood of Sayidiya. "I was ethnically cleansed by my own people, the Sunnis," Mohamed says with bitter laughter.
"A rumour went around that I was working with the US military - I wasn't. Gunmen came to my house and told us to leave with what we could carry. I invested all my savings in that house: a home entertainment centre, beautiful furniture . . ."
The Sunni of Sayidiya are now allied with the Americans, but Mohamed won't go back: "I saw photographs of what they did to my house."
He harbours the tiniest hope of obtaining immigrant visas to the US for himself and his family. Though he's never lived in the US, he's Microsoft-certified and speaks with an American accent - a self-described "techie".
"I'm realistic," he says. "With my name, people will ask where I'm from and I'll say 'Iraq' and sooner or later some drunk will beat me up."
The Sunni extremists of al-Qaeda in Iraq have surpassed their Shia enemies in evil genius. Al-Qaeda allegedly forced the first woman suicide bomber, in the now relatively calm town of Ramadi, to blow herself up at a US checkpoint by kidnapping her son and threatening to saw off his head in front of her.
At least two Iraqis employed by private security companies were tortured for information. The first body was found with both legs beaten black with a pipe, every toe and finger crushed with pliers, saw-marks on the head, his right eye gouged out and bullets in his arm-pit, neck and head. The second was tied to a chair and acid was poured over his body until it ate into his organs. The kidnappers preserved the man's face because they wanted his family to recognise him.
The war is also taking its toll on the US economy and psyche. The Iraq conflict has gone on longer than the first World War, and its technology has evolved. US soldiers have exchanged the M-16s they brought in 2003 for shorter, lighter M-4 assault rifles ("ideal for urban combat", one soldier told me).
The Americans abandoned "chocolate chip" camouflage, now worn like hand-me-downs by the Iraqi army, for new ultra-thin uniforms that help sweat evaporate and blend in with the grey of Iraqi rubble. Humvees are now armoured underneath, to counter IEDs (improvised explosive devices), the single largest cause of US casualties. And they have metal grates with fake leaf canopies over the gunner's head, to provide shade and to repel grenades thrown from buildings or highway overpasses.
Brian Turner, a former US soldier who has emerged as America's Iraq poet (interviewed by Eileen Battersby in The Irish Times dated April 12th, 2008), conveyed the terror of IEDs in a poem entitled "What Every Soldier Should Know": "You will hear the RPG coming for you./Not so the roadside bomb." An army sergeant this week told me how infuriated and impotent roadside bombs make him feel, saying: "It's not a fair fight."
The insurgents have advanced too. On his previous tour, the army captain who showed me around Sayidiya lost a man to the first EFP (explosively formed penetrator or explosively formed projectile) in the Iraq war. The concave copper shape projects explosives with the force of a tank shell, far more lethal than the home-made IEDs of the early years of the war.
One no longer hears US soldiers purporting to spread freedom and democracy. The gung-ho rhetoric of 2003 has been buried with at least 4,080 US soldiers.
A Rand Corporation study last month found that one in five veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder or severe depression.
Veterans are attempting suicide at a rate of 1,000 per month. Brian Turner recorded the suicide of a US soldier on the banks of the Tigris on March 22nd, 2004 in a poem called "Eulogy": "And it happens like this, on a blue day of sun,/ when Private Miller pulls the trigger,/to take brass and fire into his mouth . . ."