CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE.(Iraq War)

On the March morning I visited the Baghdad morgue, which is in a decaying neighborhood near the Tigris River, a young forensic-medicine specialist named Dr. Bashir Shaker was on duty. It was the day after Ashura, one of the most important religious holidays on the Shiite calendar, which commemorates the murder of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, and the massacre of his followers at Karbala, in 680 A.D. Thirteen hundred and twenty-four years later, Baghdad was festooned with the symbols of Shiite piety and penitence: the red flags of Hussein's blood, the green flags of Islam, the black flags of grief bearing messages such as "Hussein Taught Us to Become Victims in Order to Gain Victory." For the first time in decades, Iraqi Shiites felt free to observe the day of martyrdom and the forty days of full-throated mourning that follow. The chants, the parades, the beating of chests, and the flaying of backs in ceremonies of atonement also became displays of collective power.

The shrines of Baghdad and Karbala were therefore unusually crowded with black-clad Shiite pilgrims that day--and when suicide bombers in their midst detonated a series of explosions it was the worst civilian massacre since the start of the war. The death toll in the two cities was at least a hundred and eighty, and the Baghdad morgue became a charnel house filled with bodies, heads, limbs, and buckets of flesh. Outside the morgue, a man waited to enter and look for the corpse of an eleven-year-old boy, a neighbor, whose father lay wounded in the hospital. Others were leaving with rags still pressed to their faces, a response to the stench inside. The authorities were rushing to complete the process of identification. There would be no forensic autopsies of the victims, Shaker told me; these followers of Hussein were Shiite martyrs, and Islam forbade the violation of their bodies.

Before the American invasion of Iraq, Dr. Shaker said, only one murder victim arrived at the city morgue each month. This statistic underscores two conditions of Iraqi life under Saddam Hussein: the state had a near-monopoly on killing, and most of the victims of the state disappeared into unmarked mass graves. One unintended effect of Iraq's liberation from Baathist tyranny has been the widespread dispersal of violence. In occupied Iraq, between fifteen and twenty-five murder victims arrive at the Baghdad morgue daily, most of them with gunshot wounds. Shaker estimated that five cases a week involve Baathists executed in reprisal killings; their families typically retrieve the bodies without informing the police. With barely functioning courts, a weak, ill-trained, and often corrupt new police force, a foreign occupier that has failed to provide security, and a pervasive atmosphere of lawlessness, Iraqis don't expect the justice that was denied them during the reign of Saddam Hussein to materialize anytime soon.

The day I visited, Shaker said that he was reviewing "an interesting case," unrelated to the Ashura bombings. The body of a woman, forty-one years old and never married, had recently been discovered with six gunshot wounds in the chest. Shaker's initial examination had found that the woman appeared not to be a virgin, and the number of gunshots suggested that the murder was premeditated. These details cast suspicion on her family: Shaker said that such a crime was called "washing the shame." Honor killing is an old custom in Iraq, he said, though in this case there was a new element: before the war, the family would have burned or drowned the woman to disguise the murder. "Now you can kill and go," Shaker said. "No need to cover the crime." The standard sentence for "washing the shame" is six months.

The woman's case was referred to a committee of five doctors, including Iraq's leading hymen expert. To Shaker's surprise, the committee found that the woman's hymen was extremely thin but intact. Case closed: the family would not be investigated, and, without the means to find other clues, the police would seal the woman's file.

Down the hall from the morgue, which is in a squat, two-story yellow building called the Medico-Legal Institute, is an examination room with a reclining chair and stirrups. This is where virginity exams on living subjects take place--most of them on suspected prostitutes, but also on runaways, kidnapping victims, and girls who have suffered an accident and whose parents, for the sake of marriageability, want a medical certificate establishing their purity.

An entire subspecialty of forensic medicine in Iraq deals with virginity, Shaker said. In any criminal case involving a woman, it's the most important piece of information. "It rules our life," he added. The surprising thing about these details of his profession is their ordinariness. In the West, Iraqis developed a reputation for cosmopolitan modernity that is now decades out of date. In order to win the support of Iraq's clerics, Saddam obliged people to adopt a harsh form of traditional Islam. In private matters of religion, family, and the treatment of women, the vast majority of Iraqis are far more conservative than most outsiders understand.