BLACK

“BLACK”! Is it a mere color? In the world, people ride black cars, use black laptops, write in black ink, put on black shoes, etc… But in Baghdad, this word means something else. “Black” hovers over the city. Whatever we see becomes black even if it is red.

Starting from the black funeral banners that decorate almost every street, to the black smoke of explosions that rock the city’s morning like fireworks everyday, and the black shrapnel that pave the roads, “black” became an everyday scene.

The latest violence that rocked the capital left many houses damaged, and mostly with family members wounded or dead. But what is worse is the daily discovery of the dead bodies dumped in the garbage or in the Tigris. This horrible phenomenon left a grave ordeal over the houses of the Iraqi people. The scene of women wearing “black” mourning the loss of a son, a relative, or a friend becomes as black as how life looks like in Iraq. Just today, Iraqi police retrieved the bodies of 11 people, nine of them beheaded, including a 10-year-old boy, in Suwayra, south of Baghdad.

Finding these bodies became an everyday show. Most of the victims are young men in their twenties. Who kidnapped them and who killed them? No one knows for sure. Everyone says something different than the other. Eventually, the lives of the people became so cheap to be even condemned by government officials who are responsible for maintaining security in the country.

Car bombs left the Baghdad looks like a woman with cuts on face, arm and whole body, bleeding asking for help but no one is listening. Her beloved ones are dying one after the other. Like other women, she decided to wear black to mourn herself and the others. She lost everything. She lost her beauty that once was a center of gravity to anyone who wants to have fun.

Every morning, I go to a nearby neighborhood waiting for a colleague of mine to take me to where we work. I do this to escape the notion that someone may discover what I do and where I work. Yesterday, as I was waiting near the intersection for my colleague to pick me up, a man on a motorcycle passed by and yelled at a police man at a nearby police checkpoint. I hold my breath for a second and said “God! I hope he does not blow up himself.” And he did not. It appeared that he was a friend of the policeman and tried to joke with him in this silly way. However, the same policeman along with his other colleagues was killed by a car bomb exploded thirty minutes after I left with my college to work. It exploded exactly where I was standing!

This morning, I took the same route and stood in the same spot waiting for the same colleague. The street was covered with shattered glass of broken windows and shrapnel of the burned and destroyed cars. Buildings, including a famous restaurant, turned out to be rubble. People at the non-functional shabby traffic lights post were gazing in pain. An old man shook his head in despair, a woman put her hand on her mouth in shock looking at the destroyed restaurant and other people were walking carefully on in the street in case a shrapnel or a piece of glass cut their feet. The spot where the car exploded was “black” and the whole street looked black. The everyday street yellow-uniformed cleaners did not show up. They maybe either killed in the explosion or afraid to come in case another explosion crops up as another police checkpoint replaced the one that was attacked.

Despite the pain and the daily death threats, life goes on in Iraq. But, Iraqis are not the same ones a year, two years, or three years ago. They became sad, desperate, tired of being tired, hopeless and full of pain. My friends, who all are in their twenties, and I always try to amuse ourselves but unlike the way we used to. These days, the ghost of kidnappings and killings haunted our minds. We don’t feel comfortable even when we visit each other. Wherever we go, we don’t carry any identification, even the work ones. We don’t trust anyone in the streets. Just in Baghdad, the health ministry announced that 122 young men under the name of “Omar” were killed, most of them is believed were killed intentionally by Shiite militias.

We are not even sure that the men at the checkpoints are policemen or not. Yesterday, the bodies of two journalists working for al-Nahrain TV station were found shot dead in Baghdad. The channel officials said the slain journalists were stopped at a police checkpoint. As usual, the interior ministry denies that and said these men did not belong to them. My guess is that it is either they know that these men belong to them and then lied or they don’t know which is the worst. Armed men move freely in the capital while the ministry does not know. What a disaster.

Summer has begun and all its problems started. It’s been a week now since the one-hour a day of electricity disappeared. Owners of the local generators of the neighborhoods stopped supplying us with power. Their excuse is they are short of diesel to run the generators. We were left helpless enduring a day of 100 F degrees. The worst part is at night. No Iraqi, except the ones inside the green zone, sleeps well at night. Even our nights are “black”…

As a young man, I can endure many things these days as I used to since I was born, but watching my parents’ ordeal is something else. I cannot endure the fact that they are depressed and desperate. Few days ago, my father was so sad. He said he feels he is in a prison, a big prison, called Iraq. My mother, who sometimes feels scared when someone slams the door, was scared few days ago when a car bomb exploded at the corner of the street where we live shattering the glass of the windows. She, my father, aunt, and two cousins were just about to have lunch. They said the house was full of dust blows due to the effect of the blast. The next day another car bomb exploded at the entrance of a famous market near our house. The market was one of my mother’s favorite. It was the last thing she expects to be targeted. One day I told them not to go there anymore. I regretted that as I saw the sad look on their faces. “What can we do? It’s the last place left,” my father said. I had no words to say. I just don’t want to lose them.