Random bombings play havoc with psyche

IT was a photograph on the Times website that set my heart racing, my adrenalin spiking and gave me that strangely metallic taste of no taste in my mouth. Baghdad, its buildings and palm trees wreathed in smoke, like a Lower Manhattan on the Tigris on the morning of 9/11. Sitting at my kitchen table, I could hear the boom, smell the cordite filling Haifa Street.

I watched the television news with its mobile phone footage capturing the moment that two of the bombs went off. It was later that I had to turn off, when the camera caught a man walking away, uninjured but dazed, shaking his head gently at the cameramen who sought to stop him, as if his still mask might slip and his many griefs explode on to the pavement. It was the face of the people of Baghdad.

I can tell you what it is like to be in a city where death can explode at you at any moment, from a parked car, a donkey cart, from a single figure wrapped in an abaya. But I cannot tell you what it is like for such a place to be your home. To have your city transformed from a place bound by rules - familiar if horribly harsh - to one of senseless chaos.

Years ago, in my first job as a reporter in Cambodia I accompanied a psychiatrist to a refugee camp filled with the very last civilians to have lived under the totalitarian Khmer Rouge. The rest of the population had escaped their rule when their government fell in 1979.

This group had lived on in the Khmer Rouge's final enclave, fed with their paranoid propaganda for a further two decades.

They would, the psychiatrist told me, form a fascinating control group to compare with the rest of the population as he tried to tease out the impact of different and successive traumas on the Cambodian psyche. So far, he had discovered, the most psychologically damaging episode in Cambodian history had not been the Khmer Rouge era but the US carpet bombing that preceded it. Under the Khmer Rouge you could at least learn to play by the awful rules. During the Vietnam War you never knew when death would fall on you from the sky.

Such randomness can play havoc with the human psyche. I thought of that in Baghdad in 2003 when the bombs first started. A woman, screaming, ripping at her black abaya, yelled in my face as I stood helplessly by the thick pools of blood and flesh fragments left behind by a car bomb.

"Saddam killed people in mass graves, now the streets themselves are open graves," she howled. It became a mantra, repeated after every bombing.

The randomness of suicide bombing disturbed the order of even a malevolent universe. True chaos now ruled.

By 2005 Westerners were being systematically hunted down, kidnapped or killed. Yet when my best friend, Marla Ruzicka, an American aid worker, was killed in Baghdad, it was by an utterly random suicide bomb that was never meant for her.

There is a myth that people living in war zones get used to the carnage. It is not true. At the end of 2005 the Health Ministry declared a national psychiatric emergency after a pilot study found 90 per cent of adults in Baghdad were psychologically disturbed as a result of war experiences.

Out of 1000 people surveyed, 890 had witnessed a violent death first-hand - including all of the 27 children under the age of 12 in the survey. That such a study should have happened at all is a mark of the tenacity of Baghdad's struggling institutions and its once proud place as a centre of learning. But efforts to tackle the problem came to little. All but a handful of the city's psychiatrists, who carried out the survey, had fled.

Without professional help, people found ways to cope - or go mad. In Baghdad, the prop of choice was prescription drugs. Box upon box of Valium and Xanax crossed the pharmacy counters each day. Ali Hamdani, the Iraqi reporter for The Times, told me of a new twist: word had suddenly got out about a cardiac drug with euphoric side-effects, sparkling a pharmacy rush. In poorer areas, people who could not afford the pills broke into the pharmacies and stole them.

In 2006 the carnage grew, this time sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis. In addition to car bombs, there were kidnappings, executions, torture and drive-by shootings.

Randomness remained. You might be targeted as a Sunni or a Shia, but you had no warning of when such a strike would come - not while Baghdad was still mixed. Gradually the city broke down into ghettos where people huddled among their own, building walls against the randomness, trying to impose control on their own four walls, their own street.

This segregation is rarely mentioned by those citing the dramatic fall in violence. In most neighbourhoods, there are simply no "outsiders" left to kill, but still people are killed - several hundred a month.

Four million Iraqis have left since 2003, a disproportionate number from Baghdad. Only a fraction have returned. The weekend's carnage will remind them why they left. It will, in their new homes, set their nerves jangling and adrenalin pumping as if they were back there again, as if they had once again lost control.

Ali left for good earlier this year, as the parked car he was walking towards exploded, blown up by a sticky bomb planted moments before. He left days later and went to Damascus where I met him a few weeks later, in a restaurant in the Old Town.

We gasped at the weirdness of it all: us, walking down the street, speaking English - in the dark, even - in a place that was not Baghdad. A place that made sense, where a random fist of fate could be relied on not to fall.