For two days, 19-year-old Bedur Ibrahim lay in the mortuary of the al-Kindi hospital. Her family refused to collect her body, and the city authorities failed to provide a pathologist's report on her death.
Like all victims of violence here, Bedur's remains should have been brought to the city morgue. But doctors in Baghdad have admitted that - at the request of her parents - she was buried without ceremony in a common grave at the municipal cemetery.
The reason was as shameful as it was routine. Like many other women in Baghdad since the Anglo-American invasion a year ago, Bedur had been abducted from her home by armed men, gang-raped and murdered.
Even the head of the city mortuary, Dr Faqr Bakr, admitted to the Independent on Sunday that he knew her family would not have collected her body had it been sent to him.
Most women who suffer Bedur's fate leave no record of their ordeal. But she lived just long enough after being shot to tell nurses at the hospital what had happened.
Hanan Abdullah, the al-Kindi nurse who looked after Bedur until she died of her extensive injuries, described "a very distressed human being" who was looking for comfort in her last hours because she had been shunned by those she cared for most - her own family. "She told me what happened. She said: 'They took me at gun point from my home, raped me for 16 days and then they shot me.' "
Bedur was brought unconscious to the emergency department by the Khadmiya police, with no details of her family. The police officer told the hospital he would try to contact her father, but to no avail. "We operated on Bedur, and when she recovered consciousness she repeatedly asked for her mother," said the nurse. "When she realised that she would never come, I think she gave up and let herself die."
According to the Iraqi "honour" system, a woman who has been raped or abducted is considered to have brought shame upon her family. Under Saddam's regime, a rape victim would usually be killed by a brother or father to restore family honour unless she agreed to marry her abductor.
The day after Saddam Hussein's capture, the US proconsul Paul Bremer told Iraqis that there would be "no more suffering". But Yannar Mohammed, chairwoman of the Iraqi Women's Coalition (IWC), says that since the end of the war, about 350 women have been abducted. The few who survive their ordeal require protection from "honour" killings by their family. The IWC is about to open the first women's shelter in Baghdad, with no financial help from the occupation authorities.
The US State Department criticises countries which fail to curb human trafficking, but the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq has treated the fate of kidnapped women as an isolated phenomenon.
With the casualty toll ticking ever upward and troops stretched thin on the ground, the Bush administration is looking to mercenaries to help control Iraq. These soldiers-for-hire are veterans of some of the most repressive military forces in the world, including that of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and South Africa's apartheid regime.
In February, Blackwater USA, a North Carolina-based Pentagon contractor, began hiring former combat personnel in Chile, offering them up to $4,000 a month to guard oil wells in Iraq. The company flew the first batch of 60 former commandos to a training camp in North Carolina. These recruits will eventually wind up in Iraq where they will spend six months to a year.
"We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals – the Chilean commandos are very, very professional and they fit within the Blackwater system," Gary Jackson, the president of Blackwater USA, told the Guardian.
While Blackwater USA is not nearly as well known as Halliburton or Bechtel – two mega-corporations making a killing off the reconstruction of Iraq – it nevertheless is doing quite well financially thanks to the White House's war on terror. The company specializes in firearm, tactics and security training and in October 2003, according to Mother Jones magazine, the company won a $35.7 million contract to train more than 10,000 sailors from Virginia, Texas, and California each year in 'force protection.'
Business has been booming for Blackwater, which now owns, as its press release boasts, "the largest privately-owned firearms training facility in the nation." Jackson told the Guardian, "We have grown 300 percent over each of the past three years and we are small compared to the big ones. We have a very small niche market, we work towards putting out the cream of the crop, the best."
The practice of using mercenaries to fight wars is hardly new, but it is becoming increasingly popular in recent years. During the first Gulf War, one out of every 50 soldiers on the battlefield was a mercenary. The number had climbed up to one in ten during the Bosnian conflict. Currently there are thousands of Bosnian, Filipino and American soldiers under contract with private companies serving in Iraq. Their duties range from airport security to protecting Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Apart from Chile, the other popular source for military recruits is South Africa. The United Nations recently reported that South Africa "is already among the top three suppliers of personnel for private military companies, along with the UK and the US." There are more than 1,500 South Africans in Iraq today, most of whom are former members of the South African Defense Force and South African Police.
According to the Cape Times, among the South African companies under contract with the Pentagon are Meteoric Tactical Solutions, which "is providing protection and is also training new Iraqi police and security units," and Erinys, a joint South African-British company, which "has received a multimillion-dollar contract to protect Iraq's oil industry," the Cape Times reported.
The recruitment of its citizens, however, isn't making either the Chilean or the South African governments happy. The Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act prohibits South African citizens from direct participation as a combatant in armed conflict for private gain. Michelle Bachelet, Chile's defense minister, has ordered an investigation into whether such recruitment is legal under Chilean laws. Bachelet also was troubled by stories that soldiers on active duty are leaving the company to sign up as mercenaries.
It is also only a matter of time before U.S. soldiers grow unhappy with the presence of mercenaries in their midst. The high salaries and shorter terms of employment offered to mercenaries will inevitably make a serious dent on the military's budget. As Blackwater's Jackson acknowledged in the Guardian, "If they are going to outsource tasks that were once held by active-duty military and are now using private contractors, those guys [on active duty] are looking and asking, 'Where is the money?'"
Raenette Taljaard, a member of the South African Parliament, describes the ubiquitous reach of this "booming cottage industry" of private security companies:
"In addition to becoming an integral part of the machinery of war, they are emerging as cogs in the infrastructure of peace. US-allied military officials and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan are quickly becoming familiar with the 'brand services' provided by companies."
In the era of globalization, war has become just another industry to be outsourced.
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