Chaos Still Weighing Heavily on Iraq

Iraq is suffering from a serious aftermath of the war as western culture such as pornography has inundated Iraq and social ills such as human trafficking and murder are on the rise.

After the collapse of the Hussein regime, Iraq is in a state of anarchy and is undergoing a second war, referred to as the war against the `destruction of traditional values and order,` the state owned Xinhua News Agency reported recently.

Half naked Hollywood stars and brutal murder scenes are finally being shown in Iraq. At theaters in Baghdad, movie posters are exhibiting sexual pictures with erotic words such as `sex and desire,` showing that a Moslem country can indeed tout abstinence as a virtue. What wasn`t ever imaginable in Iraq before is now a reality.

If you enter a theater in Baghdad to watch Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger with their machine guns blaring, you are likely to watch not an action movie as advertised but hardcore porn. The smut movies are mostly from the U.S. or France, and even children can enter if they have the money.

You can easily get imported western liquor such as Scotch, French cognac and vodka from Eastern Europe in front of the Palestine Hotel, a place most frequented by foreign correspondents and U.S. soldiers.

It is not yet clear how the liquor got into Iraq. These days, young men are seen drunk in the streets, even during daytime hours in Baghdad. Recently Iraqi religious leaders warned people that drinking is against the laws of the Koran and two shop keepers of liquor stores were reportedly gunned down.

Traffickers of humans carrying guns, kidnapped a girl in front of a large group of people in the middle of downtown Baghdad on May 30, but nobody could do anything about it except watch as the helpless girl was carried away.

In Baghdad, around one case of human kidnapping occurs every day, with teenage girls the prime targets. Sometimes traffickers demand ransom but they usually sell the kidnapped girls on the human traffic market closely tied to prostitution rings.

Baghdad citizens were also recently shocked by four gang members wearing shirts marked “hired assassins”, riding around downtown Baghdad.

Most of these hired assassins are ex-convicts who were freed just before the Iraq war. The assassins got the idea of advertising themselves as they believe many people have grudges against people who had vested rights under the Hussein regime, local media reported.

After the war, guns have become more easily available and various crimes such as looting, rape, murder, and drug traffic have sharply increased throughout the country.

Yoo-Sung Hwang yshwang@donga.com