'We can't live like this'

Five years ago, there was a children's playground on the flat lot between the brown walls of the Abu Hanifa mosque and the even browner waters of the Tigris River, a rare place for families to escape the incessant turmoil that even then defined life in Iraq. Residents still reminisce about how boys and girls from the surrounding north Baghdad neighborhood of Aadhamiya would play on the ancient swing set and seesaw, while women would push strollers through a park shaded by palm trees. Older kids played soccer in a nearby field. But like so much of the old Iraq, the playground is now gone, replaced by long, ragged rows of white tombstones marking the burial places of more than 4,000 Aadhamiya residents who have died since the war for their country began on Mar. 20, 2003. "I used to take my children here every Friday. It was a place to enjoy life," said Muayad Natiq, a 49-year-old resident who was strolling in the cemetery this week. "Not any more. Most of those buried here are teenagers. First, they came here to play games. Then they came here to shoot [at the Shia neighborhood of Kadhamiya across the Tigris]. Now they lie dead here." On Apr. 9, 2003, the same day the United States Army arrived in Baghdad and toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein, residents of mainly Sunni Aadhamiya quietly began burying their dead inside the walls of the Abu Hanifa mosque. But there was only room for 250 bodies. By July of 2006, as the country descended into all-out sectarian war between the minority Sunnis and the majority Shiites, the neighborhood's residents moved the now-unused swing set and seesaw aside and converted the playground into a cemetery. Almost every day since, 30-year-old Ahmed Akram has buried fresh corpses under the soil. At first, the white tombstones were laid in orderly rows. But the rows have since disappeared almost completely as groundskeepers bury bodies wherever they can, sometimes up to two dozen dead each day. Since the US occupation began, more than 4,330 people–more than 1 percent of Aadhamiya's pre-war population of 300,000–are buried here. Now there's no more room, and the bodies keep coming, so the cemetery is expanding to the adjacent soccer field. "Every time I bury someone here I remember that this was a place that we use to come for enjoyment," Akram said, leaning on his shovel during a break between digging two fresh graves. "Every time I bury a child, I imagine their face asking me why and for what all this happened." The overflowing graveyard in Aadhamiya is a microcosm of what has happened across Iraq in the past five years. The lowest-end figure for how many Iraqi civilians have died violent deaths since the US invaded is just over 82,000. Other studies, which include deaths indirectly caused by the war, put the figure as high as 1,185,000. Judging from the Aadhamiya graveyard–one cemetery in one neighborhood of one city in Iraq–the latter number seems far closer to the mark. There's little sense that Sunni and Shiite, Arab and Kurd are ready to patch up their vast differences. When plans surfaced last month to reopen the Imams Bridge that connects Sunni Aadhamiya to the Shia neighborhood of Kadhamiya on the other side of the Tigris, residents on both sides protested, demanding it stay closed. Akram supported the decision. Last April he buried his 30-year-old cousin, Nabil, who had worked as a translator for the US Army until he was kidnapped by Shia militiamen. The body Akram buried was mutilated almost beyond recognition. Among other indignities, Nabil's eyes had been torn out and his mouth filled with acid. "We can never forgive them," Akram said, his eyes flashing with hate. "Even if we did, they would never forgive us."