Doggery

Sinan Antoon

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"Well-armored marines, and their well- armored dogs, supervising a checkpoint near Falluja, Iraq." Thus read the caption beneath the photo in the 29 April edition of The New York Times. The two marines each had a German shepherd on leash. All, human and canine, were armed with bulletproof vests. Both marines were motioning to the crowd with their right hands. Were they pointing to the lucky, or perhaps unlucky, Iraqis who would be allowed to re-enter their hometown? The crowd, appropriately placed in the photo's background as an object, consisted of tens of men, women and children. Most were standing, some squatted on the dirt.

At least a thousand Fallujans, many of them women and children, have been granted permanent residency in the afterlife. AC 130's were bombing the city to weed out "insurgents" and add to the piles of civilian casualties -- all part of the extended campaign of collective punishment unleashed against the entire city following the killing and mutilation of four mercenaries a few weeks ago by a mob. Now half of the city's inhabitants have been displaced and are either living with relatives or in makeshift camps in Baghdad.

The sight of soldiers accompanied by German Shepherds reminded me of the notorious Quwwat al-Tawari' (Emergency Forces) who used to be seen at soccer matches in the 1980s in Baghdad when Uday Saddam Hussein used to lord over sports in Iraq and when he attended matches to watch his own team play. His rabid dogs brought their own dogs to herd us, the spectators, into line and control the crowd. Sometime they would unleash them to bite a few of us into submission. But there are no soccer matches in Falluja at this time. There is a bigger and much bloodier game taking place in, around, and over the entire city with 200,000 civilian spectators who stand to lose either way.

The city's stadium has become a makeshift cemetery for all the dead who couldn't be buried elsewhere because of the continued bombing. As I was writing this, one of Saddam's old bulldogs, with impressive credentials in slaughtering civilians, was summoned from oblivion and de-Ba'thification to lead the so-called Falluja Brigade and secure the city. It is more cost effective, you see, to have Iraqis killing each other.

Speaking of games and dogs and how much has (not) changed for Iraqis in the last year, one need only take a peak at what has been taking place at the Abu Ghraib prison for some time now. I say some time, because our film crew tried to visit Abu Ghraib last July when we were shooting a documentary about Iraq, but we were denied access even though we had press passes. Now we know why. The latest snapshots show American military police and private contractors giving Iraqi detainees, most of whom are civilians detained at random from checkpoints, a taste of western-style justice in the very same torture chambers where Saddam carried out his detestable violation of every human right. In addition to an array of humiliating sexual acts, there were reports of detainees being attacked by military dogs.

In the meantime, Saddam, the ex-chief warden of Abu Ghraib, gets regular visits from the International Red Cross and there are even reports that his first wife, Sajida, who recently arrived in Qatar, will be allowed to visit him soon. If he's reading the newspapers or following the news, he must be sporting a smile, and a wide one. Not as wide as the abyss to which he's taken Iraq, but he knows that he left Iraqis in good hands.

* The writer is an Iraqi poet, novelist, and member of InCounter Productions, a collective of artists whose first documentary film, About Baghdad , will be released this month.