All modern wars have their iconic images. For many Americans the Vietnam war was an abstract moral problem until they saw a haunting photograph of girl fleeing her village after it had been bombed with napalm. She was naked and screaming-in pain from extensive burns, and from shock-and many foreign editors were reluctant to publish the image. Because they relented and the photograph became one of the most famous images of its era, millions of readers caught their first glimpse of the awful destruction that was routinely visited upon Vietnam’s defenceless peasantry, all of it supposedly in the name of Democracy. After that photograph ‘napalm’ wasn’t a technical term any more, it was an inhuman weapon that burned little girls and sent them screaming into a dark world. Many years later, Kim Phuc, the girl in the photograph, posed for another memorable image, holding her young son as he looked peacefully out at the world over her badly burned shoulder.
The American occupation of Iraq has produced several iconic images-the toppling of Saddam’s statue, cellphone footage of his execution, suicide bombers filmed on closed circuit television, grainy video of insurgents executing hostages-but none of these, for all their shock value, has had the impact of that screaming girl. Every day we listen to brief reports of ‘sectarian violence’ and grow numb to the endless list of mass casualties. All that most of us can think of when we hear those words is a large, indistinct group of Iraqis known as Shia, hunting down a smaller but equally vague group called Sunni-or vice versa. The genocidal tensions behind that stock phrase have been almost completely lost through overuse. So much so that many casual listeners probably believe that the situation, however bad it may be, is not likely to get much worse, once the right number of American troops are allowed to surge into the right theatres, and to shore up the current government long enough for ‘dialogue’ and ‘power sharing’ to fend off the threatened deluge.
Anyone who would like to believe that myth should consider the following story. A week ago, Saleem Amer, a reporter for America’s National Public Radio (NPR) was escorting his wife to the market in Baghdad after weeks of warning her not to go there alone. As they walked down the main street in el-Alam, an ethnically mixed neighbourhood, they passed a group of teenage boys playing football in a parking lot. Suddenly two cars pulled up next to the parking lot and several men stepped out and opened fire with a machine gun. They took careful aim at the children and kept firing until most of them had been killed. Then, as chaos broke out around them, the gunmen escaped unharmed.
The boys were Sunni and Shia, and although their families had lived together peacefully for years the killings immediately threw the entire neighbourhood into a pitched gun battle. Sunni households fired at their Shia neighbours, and these returned fire until both sides ran out of ammunition nearly two hours later. In the days that followed, Shia militia and Sunni insurgents both sent armed men into the neighbourhood to uphold an uneasy standoff between the warring families.
Reflecting on the lack of local leadership, Amer doubted that the situation would improve anytime soon. “There is no government in my neighbourbood,” he said. “People are allowed to kill each other, without any problem. It’s like we are living in a zoo-people turned [out] to be animals . . .” Amer also observed that, “People want a declared civil war. So it can settle everything. These reconciliation plans, or whatever, it’s nothing.”
So far nobody has published photographs of the children’s corpses lying in the parking lot, perhaps none exist. Consequently, their barbaric murder is not likely to amount to anything more than a footnote to the daily carnage in Iraq. That is a second tragedy, for the massacre of innocents should be an outrage always and everywhere. Men who fire machine guns at teenagers will not think twice about ethnic cleansing, or genocide. These are the animals who are taking over the zoo that is Baghdad, and unless something drastic is done soon, they will get their chance to settle everything.
The war in Iraq is not only about democratisation, oil revenues, partition, and the suppression of a Shia crescent. It is also about the horrific pressures overwhelming ordinary people and making them turn against each other. A screaming girl woke the world up to the horror of Vietnam, it is a sad measure of how de-sensitized we have become when nine children can be gunned down in Baghdad in the middle of a Saturday afternoon and their deaths pass largely unnoticed.
