Beheading Videos Replace Porn as Baghdad's Favorite TV
BAGHDAD, Iraq (Sept. 26) - In an outdoor food market under the fierce midday sun, a crowd of men and boys were watching video footage of a truck bomber seated behind the steering wheel, smiling and murmuring his last words before crashing into U.S. military vehicles on an overpass.
Elsewhere, the TV set in a coffee shop was offering customers the video of foreign hostages being beheaded.
In a city battered and traumatized by 17 months of violence that seems to grow worse by the day, real-life horror has become the viewing fare of choice, supplanting the explosion of pornography that filled the post-Saddam Hussein vacuum.
Baghdad wakes up each day to explosions, gunfire, ambulance sirens and the clatter of low-lying American helicopters. But the ferocity of this month's violence in the heart of the Iraqi capital is unprecedented - fierce gunbattles, car bombings that claim dozens of lives, brazen kidnappings, assassinations and barrages of mortars and rockets.
It threatens to destroy what's left of peoples' hopes for their country, which ran so high when the hated Saddam was toppled.
The horrifying videos on display or sold for as little as 30 cents apiece are all over Baghdad these days.
''Soon after the regime fell, porno discs were all the rage,'' said Attallah Zeidan, a co-owner of a second hand bookshop in Baghdad's Old City. ''Now it's beheadings.''
Elsewhere, the TV set in a coffee shop was offering customers the video of foreign hostages being beheaded.
In a city battered and traumatized by 17 months of violence that seems to grow worse by the day, real-life horror has become the viewing fare of choice, supplanting the explosion of pornography that filled the post-Saddam Hussein vacuum.
Baghdad wakes up each day to explosions, gunfire, ambulance sirens and the clatter of low-lying American helicopters. But the ferocity of this month's violence in the heart of the Iraqi capital is unprecedented - fierce gunbattles, car bombings that claim dozens of lives, brazen kidnappings, assassinations and barrages of mortars and rockets.
It threatens to destroy what's left of peoples' hopes for their country, which ran so high when the hated Saddam was toppled.
The horrifying videos on display or sold for as little as 30 cents apiece are all over Baghdad these days.
''Soon after the regime fell, porno discs were all the rage,'' said Attallah Zeidan, a co-owner of a second hand bookshop in Baghdad's Old City. ''Now it's beheadings.''
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