The Iraq War: 5 Years and Counting
March 19th, 2008 marked the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war and I believe the word ‘anniversary’ accompanies it entirely inappropriately. I encourage you read photojournalist Max Becherer’s experience in Iraq via The New York Times:
Five years have passed since I stood on the border of Iraq and Kuwait, watching the predawn sky for the first salvos in the Iraq war. I am reading political analyses and historical accounts of years that are past. I am thinking of all of the things that had not yet happened as I stood in the desert sand that day.
Whatever war is, it is a deeply personal experience for those who live in it. I am a photographer and have captured thousands of images of Iraq and the war there since that day. But when I stop reading about the war, I guess I get that faraway look I always saw, as I grew up, in the eyes of countless veterans and civilians who lived through war, including my mother. I don’t wonder what they see anymore. I see images. Not the images I took, as the shutter is closed the moment I capture a photograph. I see the images and feel the sensations I keep mentally when I am without the help of a lens. Sometimes they are still images and sometimes they are short movie clips of the people on all sides of the war who are no longer living.
Article here, and Max’s photography here and here.
© Max Becherer. A woman cries as she reaches under the blanket and touches an adult female body at Al-Khindi hospital. Al-Khindi hospital received about 25 dead and 75 wounded from three different bombs, which exploded around Baghdad according to a hospital doctor around mid-afternoon. The largest of the blasts was a car bomb that exploded near a crowded market in a mostly Shiite area called New Baghdad. Women at the entrance of the morgue cried “What’s wrong with the government? Why did they not do anything? They don’t have a solution for this?”
Another family member at the morgue said, “Each minute, we as Iraqis are waiting for death,” as he looked at the 20 odd bodies waiting for identification.”