Smash hit

When the police found that no porters were available to help, they threw the bodies off the truck. It was then that Siddique noticed the corpses of two boys aged about 12 lying in the pile on the ground.

“Each had a piece of knotted green cloth tied around his neck and I could see they’d been strangled,” the doctor said. He also noticed round holes that were slightly inflamed in several parts of their body, a sign that they had been tortured with electric drills before being killed. “Even their eyes had been drilled and only hollow sockets remained,” he said.

When he pointed out the injuries to his friend, the pathologist shrugged and took another drag on his cigarette, saying this was now routine.

“We have turned into a zoo,” Siddique told me. “What level have we sunk to, to kill people in such a manner and hardly to notice any more?”

The doctor sat with me for a long time, silent and seemingly unable to move. Then he began to give voice to his thoughts.

“Did those children scream in pain? Did the torturers laugh as they drilled? If we ever had a just cause as a country occupied by foreigners, it was lost the moment the resistance started beheading and drilling human beings. No matter how noble their cause when it began, they have now reached a dead end.”

After a relentless series of increasingly difficult and dangerous visits to Iraq, I had hoped to stay away from Baghdad for a few months. Yet Zarqawi’s death appeared to represent a breakthrough for the coalition. With a new prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, in power, I was not the only one to feel the time might be ripe to return. President George W Bush also arrived in the city last week — three years after he had declared “mission accomplished” for the coalition effort in Iraq.

Although US officials were generally cautious in their assessments of a wounded insurgency, there was no mistaking the revived morale of the forces. Backed by tanks and armoured vehicles, more than 75,000 soldiers and Iraqi policemen launched a fresh attempt to retake the streets of Baghdad from the militias and jihadists who have brought the city to its knees.

Yet it quickly became clear as I sought out both victims and perpetrators of the violence that the surge in military morale is not shared by many civilians.

Samir Mehdi Matar, a 40-year-old father of four, is a Shi’ite schoolteacher. Married to a Sunni woman he fell in love with at university, he has never been tempted to side with any of the warring Muslim factions.

He lived in a mostly Christian district where few of his neighbours were concerned about his religious or political affiliations. He kept pictures of Shi’ite imams in his home, but claims never to have flaunted his religion.

Shortly after leaving for work last April he received a phone call. His house had been wrecked by an explosion. His two daughters, Samaa, 16, and Zahraa, 4, were killed by a bomb that had been placed on a windowsill below the room where they slept.

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