Infinite occupation.

• Author: Toensing, Chris
• Position: Cover Story

Muwaffaq Tawfiq Hashim, his left leg mangled in the 1991 Gulf War, limps across the room to explain to us the markings on the map of Baghdad hanging on the wall opposite his desk. Thick black lines divide the Iraqi capital into several districts, and each district is assigned to one of the veteran soldier's colleagues. The recently founded Iraqi Society for the Handicapped, which Hashim directs, has received a small grant from a British agency to count and classify the people severely wounded or disabled in one of Iraq's three punishing wars since 1980, or during the occasional U.S.-British bombing in the thirteen years between the second and third wars, or in the hellish prisons of the deposed regime.

It is a daunting project. Hashim estimates that there are 3,000 to 4,000 disabled people in Baghdad who got their injuries during the 2003 war alone. But he and his co-workers, many of whom were also hobbled by war or torture, have no choice but to go door to door in the city's sprawling neighborhoods because no one else has collected the data.

Hashim knows that counting is a political act. Without statistics, his organization will be unable to convince authorities even to acknowledge the size of the disabled population, let alone to ameliorate their plight. Individual cases are easily waved away. Ali, with an almost sheepish smile, tells us how he acquired his prosthetic arm. One night, he was plucked off the street by henchmen of Saddam Hussein's elder son, Uday, who ordered Ali's arm fed to Uday's pet tiger in a drunken display of untouchable power, he says. (Though Uday's depredations were notorious in Baghdad, some of Ali's own neighbors don't believe his story.)

To make their voices count, the Iraqis who are disabled will have to count themselves. "When we go to Iraqis in charge, we find they have no authority," Hashim concludes. "When we go to the Americans, they give us something right away but very little."

Baghdad is still a city of mysterious bomb blasts, ubiquitous gunfire, and terrifying kidnappings for ransom. Yet most Iraqis face problems that are considerably more mundane--unemployment, intermittent electricity, impure drinking water, glacial traffic, choking pollution, and a dilapidated telephone network. One year after the end of the suffocating rule of Saddam Hussein's regime, they are tired of being told to wait for improvements. Unlike the Society for the Handicapped, they don't have any means of tackling their quotidian...