Baghdad Burning: "We’re also having water difficulties, though people have grown accustomed to that. You can tell first thing in the morning that the water is cut off. I woke up this morning and knew it even before I had gotten out of bed. The house just sounds… dry. You strain your ears for the familiar house sounds and they aren’t there- there’s no drip-drip-drip from the faucet in the bathroom down the hall. There’s no sound of dishes being washed in the kitchen downstairs. There’s no sound of a toilet being flushed, and certainly no sound of a shower. The house is dry."

...

"Many areas in Baghdad seem almost shrouded in black these last two weeks- ever since the A’aima Bridge tragedy. There’s a mosque a few kilometers away from our house and the last two years we’ve been accustomed to seeing the large black banners draped across its outer walls. On each banner are carefully painted words in elaborate Arabic fonts announcing the death of another Iraqi and notifying people that the male members of the family would be receiving condolences inside the mosque for the next few days.

Now, the dusty beige surface of the mosque wall is nearly invisible under the black of death announcements. The eye can barely take it all in. The most disquieting thing about the banners is that many of them no longer carry a single name- after the bridge stampede, the banners now announce the deaths of two, three, four members of the same family."

(Via Iraq The Model.)