UNEMBEDDED

Thorne Anderson

Thorne began his work in Iraq in October 2002, photographing the impact of UN sanctions on the lives of ordinary Iraqis. He has spent 10 months in Iraq and, on his most recent trip, crossed the font line in Najaf with Phillip Robertson to spend three days in the besieged Imam Ali shrine with fighters of the Medhi Militia as they battled against the overwhelming firepower of U.S. forces. 

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Thorne Anderson 

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  • For the first time in 20 years, millions of Shiite muslims were allowed to freely make a pilgrimmage to the holy city of Karbala in southern Iraq. Pilgrims walked day and night to reach the shrine of Imam Ali.  This pilgimage became a symbol of the resurgence of Shiite power after years of repression under Saddam Hussein.
  • A Mehdi Militia night patrol guards an intersection in Sadr City in anticipation of an American incursion. The Mehdi Militia is the armed wing of a Shiite anti-occupation movement led by the young cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr.
  • Younger men leap during a wedding dance while older men watch from the wings at a nighttime wedding celebration in Deshah village in the Ramadi district. Ramadi is located inside the {quote}Sunni Triangle,{quote} the heartland of proud Sunni tradition.
  • Mehdi Militamen melt tarmac to camouflage explosives in Sadr City streets. These roadside bombs (know as IEDs in the military) are the biggest killers of American troops.
  • Members of the Mehdi Militia run for cover during a gunfight  with Iraqi police during the three-week siege of Najaf.
  • A wheelchair-bound member of the Mehdi Militia takes a nighttime tour of the outer walls of the Imam Ali shrine. The shrine was at the center of a three-week American seige of the old city of Najaf where Mehdi Militia fighters loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr staged a rebellion against the Iraqi government and American military occupation.
  • An man rushes his daughter to the emergency room at the Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad. The girl was injured when a kids' neighborhood scuffle over a ball turned into a gun fight between adults. Without a police force in the weeks following the U.S.-led invasion, gunshot injuries became commonplace.
  • Twelve-year-old Isra Abdulamir lost her right arm when her predominantly Shiite village, Abu Faloos, was hit with an American bomb during an attack in the {quote}no-fly zone{quote} in southern Iraq in 1999, before the American-led invasion. Isra was walking home from school with a group of children when the bomb detonated. Five other children were injured and four were killed.
  • A doctor in the Fallujah Hospital raises an X-ray to point out head injuries to 9-year-old Hussein Ali Al-Jumaili, whose home in the nearby village of Al-Sheker was attacked in American airstrikes. His 12-year-old brother was also seriously injured in the attack and three members of his family, including his father, were killed. The Al-Jumaili family says they were visited the following morning by an American army officer who said the attack was a mistake and offered an apology for the deaths and injuries. An army spokesperson did not aknowledge any mistakes and said that one {quote}enemy fighter{quote} was killed in the airstrike.
  • Family members wail and beat themselves in Shiite tradition as a coffin containing the remains of  brothers, Naim and Fasal, is brought home for mourning. The two were killed when the regime of Saddam Hussein crushed Shiite uprisings in central and southern Iraq in 1991. Their bodies were secretly buried in an unmarked mass grave in Hilla which was exhumed for the first time tin May, 2003. The men's mother and cousins and widows searched for more than a week before locating their identity cards in clothing tangled in their bones.
  • Mourners prepare to lower the body of Sheikha Beijiya into her grave in a cemetary near Fallujah. The elderly woman was killed -- along with her daughter, son-in-law, and one-year-old grandson -- by American soldiers who say they opened fire on the family's car when it failed to stop at a temporary checkpoint on the road from Fallujah to Baghdad.
  • A young boy watches his relatives repair a rocket propelled grenade launcher in the home of a Shiite fighter for the Mahdi Militia in Sadr City.
  • A mixed crowd of young Iraqis ventures out for the evening in Zowra Park in Baghdad. Socializing after dark in Baghdad ebbs and flows with the persistent cycles of suicide and car bombings which have plagued the city.
  • Women struggle to form a line at a gas distribution center. The U.S. army, in cooperation with the former Iraqi government's distribution ministry, set up the center to provide essential fuel for cooking and water purification.
  • Police Comander Muhammad Shaqeer Abdul Razzak, stands in the looted armory of his police station in the Adhamiya neighborhood in Baghdad. Razzak was wounded in the chaos after the American invasion,  and his weapon was confiscated by the Americans, but he returned to keep watch on what was left of his station until it could be rehabilitated.
  • A lone man walks through a thoroughly destroyed business and residential street west of the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf. The street was a front line fighting position for American army and Mehdi Militia fighters during a nearly three-week battle that left much of the old cit of Najaf and surrounding neighborhoods in ruins.
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