Smash hit

But what reason is there to believe that this man is really alive and crying out, yards below the earth? In the week since its “liberation”, the city has gone through several stages. After the shock of battle came days of looting, which have petered out into intermittent nocturnal gunfights between looting gangs and British patrols.

In the past few days the city has had to deal with the physical havoc wreaked by the war — no electricity, little water and soaring food prices. But over the weekend another kind of damage has manifested itself — the psychological trauma of almost a quarter of a century of violence.

At its most obvious, it is seen in the children of Basra. There is little sign of them on the streets, no impromptu games of football or chase. Most are being kept at home by their parents, but many would not go out in any case.

“My oldest daughter is 14 and because she understood more than the younger ones, she was much more frightened by the bombing,” Khalid al-Idreesi, a doctor at the teaching hospital in Basra said. “But we have no facilities for counselling or psychiatric treatment here. It is hard enough to treat the injured.”

There are unpleasant things going on in the minds of adults, too. It is striking, for example, how many portraits of Saddam Hussein are still in place. At the maternity hospital, the doctors speak openly of their loathing for him — but there he is, staring down from the wall in the director’s office.

“Inside their brains, people are still afraid of Saddam,” Dr Mohamad Chaffat, a paediatrician, says. “When people see his cadaver, then they will believe he is gone. Until then, they’re afraid.”

The portrait in front of the hospital has been removed, but it was done by men from outside the hospital at 3am.

Perhaps it is no wonder, for no Iraqis have suffered for as long as the Basranis. During the Iran-Iraq War, the city was shelled, on and off, for eight years.

After the 1991 liberation of Kuwait, thousands of Iraqi conscripts were incinerated in their vehicles by American aircraft on the infamous Basra road. In Saddam’s brutal quelling of the abortive Shia uprising of the same year, thousands more were arrested, executed or simply disappeared.

“There was peace before Saddam in the 1970s,” Ahmed al-Idrisi, Dr Khalid’s 80-year-old father, says.

It is a measure of the trauma felt in Basra that the voices from the ground are not those of men arrested recently but from all of these conflicts.

“I have two brothers who disappeared,” says a man named Abu Ali Talib, and he spells out their names for me to write in my notebook.

“Perhaps they are down there.” But they have been missing since the Shia uprising, 12 years ago.

It may be a dozen years more until the people of Basra can accept the cries they are hearing are not those of living men who have miraculously survived but the voices of dead men, of ghosts, who will never be coming home.

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