Early on the morning of July 13th, the shot-up bodies of twenty-eight women and five men were retrieved from two apartments in a building complex in Zayouna, a neighborhood in eastern Baghdad.
Both apartments were said to be sites of prostitution. By 10 A. This is the third time this year that a group of women suspected of being prostitutes has been killed; this group was the largest to date, according to morgue workers.
Some of the militias participated in the carnage that followed the U. In the past month, Islamic State has driven Christians out of Mosul and attacked Shiites, as well as anyone else whom it regards as an apostate. In the past week, members of the Yazidi religious minority have been a particular target , and tens of thousands of Yazidis have been stranded on a mountaintop. Islamic State and also, as the Baghdad murders this summer made clear, some Shiite militias have targeted those who live on the social margins and who participate in activities that they deem un-Islamic.
An Iraqi prostitute, in a state of growing lawlessness, is a distinctly vulnerable figure. One worker used a wooden probe to take a vaginal swab for an autopsy report. Some had their bras or other items of their clothing tossed on top of them. They used to see two or three a day. Now the figure is often in the dozens. A morgue worker laughed when he was asked if the bodies brought in that morning were an unusual occurrence. Five large flat-screen televisions are mounted on one wall, opposite a row of chairs.
Saad, a thirty-four-year-old morgue worker, sat on a chair near the wall of screens. He played a slide show of unidentified victims, men and women photographed with caked blood still on their faces, or hands bound behind their backs. An image flashed on the screen of a bloodied young man, naked, lying partially on his stomach. Often, the acts of violence, like the killings of these thirty-three people, briefly make headlines, but their aftermath is ignored.
