Mick Hartley

Control of Basra is handed over to Iraqi forces today, but the Times report from Marie Colvin is grim reading:

It was just after 11pm and the shopkeeper was closing up for the night when a van screeched to a halt outside. The back doors flew open. “Someone inside threw a woman onto the street,” he said. “She was lying on the road but she was still alive. A man lent out and shot a machine-gun into her body.”

As the van raced away, the shopkeeper ran over to her. She was aged 25 to 30 with long dark hair and was lying face up. “There was so much blood,” he said. “The police just took a photograph and put her in the back of a van.”

There have been 48 women killed in six months for “un-Islamic behaviour”. The murders in the teeming southern port of Basra have highlighted the weakness of the security forces and the strength of Islamic militias as Britain prepares to hand over control to Iraqi officials today.

In another case, two teenagers saw a woman beaten to death by five or six men from the Mahdi Army, Basra’s most powerful militia. One picked up a rock and crushed her skull. The teenagers were told that their home and family would be destroyed if they betrayed the killers.

More here:

There are two photographs in every police file. One is a long shot of a woman’s discarded body, the other a close-up of her last expression.

All the women fell foul of the unwritten rules of the new Basra – they dressed wrongly, they left the home to work, or perhaps they were merely rumoured to have a boyfriend.

Forty-eight manila files have been opened in the past six months. Not one case has been solved. The bare number cannot begin to conjure the horror of these deaths at the hands of Islamic extremists who have the port city in a tightening grip of fear.

In one folder at the Basra police station, the young woman in the autopsy photograph seems to be straining upward in agony, her eyes popping in terror. She is “female unknown identity, found in Hayer Hussein neighbourhood, behind the electric station. 24/8/2007”.

In another, a woman’s nose has been crushed. Trails of blood run from her closed right eye like lines of tears. She is “female unknown identity, found in Al-Mishraq al-Jaid neighbourhood, behind the car dealer. 7/11/2007”.

Their autopsies revealed painful deaths. One woman found in “a red dress” had a 9mm bullet wound in her left hand, three in her right hand, three in her right upper arm, and three in her back. Two of the women were beheaded, one with a saw.

Residents say police have not been investigating. “Everyone knows the militias are doing this, but the police live in fear of them. We all do,” said a middle-aged businessman who was too afraid to give his name.

The walls of Basra would be a good place to start looking for the killers. One graffito on a wall bordering the main Al-Dijari road reads: “We warn all women of Basra, especially those who are not wearing abbaya [a long, loose black cloak worn over everyday clothes], that we will kill you.” It is signed in the name of an offshoot of the Mahdi Army, the strongest militia in Basra.

It is not just women who live in fear. Professionals such as engineers, doctors and scientists have been dragged from their homes and murdered.

Not, sadly, a proud legacy.