Washing away terror's map of blood

Washing away terror's map of blood

Neela Banerjee NYT

Friday, March 5, 2004
NAJAF, Iraq

In a large white room where the air was damp from open water faucets and the stunned grief of a few women, Khalila Sharif washed away the bitter past from the body of a 20-year-old schoolteacher from Baghdad.

The young woman's name was Aida Jabber. When suicide bombers detonated their explosives at the Khadamiya mosque in Baghdad on Tuesday, they took with them, among so many people, this woman who was described by her friends and relatives as gentle and devout.

Ms. Sharif had to cope with what was left of her, scrubbing the remains of its map of blood, masking with cotton wadding and two shrouds the evidence of trauma, so that the body would be pure enough for a proper Muslim burial.

Ms. Sharif sang softly of mothers and daughters as she worked, verses that are recited when one loses the other. Protected by a shin-length apron of plastic sheeting, she dipped a red bucket into a large tank that overflowed with water, sprinkled camphor into it and splashed the body that lay before her on a concrete platform.

Ms. Jabber was the second woman brought on Wednesday from Baghdad, where some 70 people died. More would come, Ms. Sharif knew, not only from the capital but also Karbala, where at least 110 people had been killed, and she, like the other independent Muslim body washers here, would have to soothe and clean their remains.

"This is typical for me," Ms. Sharif said, squaring her shoulders and offering a pained smile as she explained what the years in this room had done to her, "because like the Arabic saying goes, I have a dead heart."

When Shiite Muslims die in Iraq, their relatives often bring them to be buried in Najaf, one of the holiest cities in their faith, about 115 miles south of Baghdad. The dead must be clean to go to God. So when the victims arrive in Najaf, they are turned over to the men and women whose sole task is to wash the bodies of the dead. The work runs in families, and Ms. Sharif's mother and grandmother were body washers.

Over the last 25 years, the washers have seen a cruel history stamped on the bodies that passed before them. There were the Shiites executed under Saddam Hussein, whose relatives were forced by the security police to pay for the bullets that killed them, said Riad Abboud, who works in the men's quarters next to Ms. Sharif.

There were the dead from this last war, and now each terrorist bombing echoes through the tiled chambers here in the form of yet more bodies. It is getting harder for the body washers to bear, Mr. Abboud said.

"We are tired, so very tired," he said, during a lull in the day. "From early in the morning to nighttime, we're here and we see a stream of these bodies."

Islam calls for people to be buried within a day of their deaths. But the bombings often make that impossible, Mr. Abboud said. By the time a family locates someone, identifies the victim, gets the paperwork done to collect the remains, days pass. Mr. Abboud thinks that the dead from the mosque bombings will trickle in for at least a week. By then, if experience is any gauge, he said, another bombing will occur, and the cycle of washing victims whose bodies have been shattered will begin again.

"It's like the terrorists have a monthly schedule," he said.

There are at least five places where bodies are washed in Najaf. The work day at the main Al Sadr washing center usually begins at 7 a.m. and finishes at 5 p.m. There is a wing for men and one for women.

Midmorning on Wednesday, relatives brought the bodies of those who died of heart failure or the maladies of old age. But by 11 a.m., vans and pickup trucks carrying the rough wooden coffins of bombing victims rolled into the dusty parking lot, letting out brothers and mothers sobbing with tears.

At 1:45 p.m., Ms. Jabber's brothers carried her coffin into the women's washing room and left. Women are usually washed at home, and Ms. Jabber's mother, Mulkhia Dhakhel, insisted on helping.

In her blue shift and black socks, Ms. Dhakhel stepped onto the wet concrete platform. She and Ms. Sharif opened the blanket in which the body lay. The explosion had shredded Ms. Jabber's clothing, her black robe spreading like a braid undone and her bright Shetland sweater bunched at her feet. They pulled away the blanket, and a strand of broken prayer beads fell next to her.

A terrible wound to the head had killed Ms. Jabber. Seeing it sapped Ms. Sharif. She did not want to go on, she said later.

The women cut away the clothing with a knife and doused the body with water. Ms. Sharif dusted on powdered soap and washed the limbs. The room softly rang with the weeping of the women and their recitations from the Koran. But Ms. Dhakhel did not cry.

Ms. Sharif wanted her to cry. It would have made things easier, she said. Two of Ms. Dhakhel's other daughters were in the hospital with wounds from the attack. Only one came home with her body whole.

"I was waiting for you to wash me," Ms. Dhakhel said to her silent child. "And look at what happened. Who will wash me now?"

Thin sheets of bloody water splashed off the platform into a gutter. The soap smelled sweet. Ms. Sharif scoured the young woman's feet with a pumice stone. She sent the mother away to wash the blood from her own body. Then Ms. Sharif quickly padded the wounds with loose cotton wads. She wrapped the body in one shroud, and then a plastic sheet, and then a shroud stenciled with excerpts from the Koran. She and the mother sprayed perfume over the neatly, tightly wrapped and tied body. The men returned to load the body into the coffin.

"Don't feel afraid," Ms. Sharif told the dead woman as she placed the lid on the coffin. "God put faith in your heart."

Watching parents part with their children is the hardest part of his job, said Mr. Abboud, the father of four. "It's destruction, whether now or before," he said, in a room next to the one in which the men are washed.

Mr. Abboud, 33, has been washing bodies since he was 13; his mother was a body washer. He began to see brutality regularly in 1986, when Mr. Hussein began executing Shiites in political purges. "Since the fall of Saddam, I told myself things would improve," he said.

But now, he hears the news one day, and wishes he did not have to come to work the next. A sense of responsibility to the dead pulls him here, he said, and a feeling that if he did not attend to them, few others would.

The accumulated grief of the years has begun to take its toll, he said. He said he is irritable all the time. He said he feels dirty.

"It's disgusting that I eat with these hands with my wife and children," he said. "I should be eating separately."

His family's tradition of washing bodies will end with him, he said. He will not allow his children here. "I was destroyed by this job," he said. "Why would I let this happen to my kids?"

Just then, a van pulled up carrying the body of a 24-year-old killed at a Baghdad mosque. Mr. Abboud glanced wearily at the door, pushed himself up and went to the room where the water always flowed.
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