Monday, November 13, 2006
Iraq's morgues overwhelmed
Security
Baghdad's morgues are full. With no space to store bodies, some victims of the sectarian slaughter are not being kept for relatives to claim, but photographed, numbered and quickly interred in government cemeteries. The fear of leaving the bereaved without a corpse to bury is so strong that some Iraqi men now tattoo their names, phone numbers and other identifying information on their upper thighs, despite Islam's strict disapproval against such practices. In October, a particularly bloody month for Iraqi civilians, about 1,600 bodies were turned in at the Baghdad central morgue, said its director, Dr. Abdul-Razaq al-Obaidi. The city's network of morgues, built to hold 130 bodies at most, now holds more than 500, he says.
In morgues across Iraq where capacity stretches beyond thin, bodies are even being turned away. Iraq's bureaucracy of death is overwhelmed. The task of identifying and interring bodies is all the more difficult because of the clandestine nature of the killings: Increasingly, Iraqis are being killed far from home and in secret, the victims of kidnappers and sectarian death squads. With nowhere else to look when a friend or loved-one goes missing, family members first check the local morgue.
The government cemetery in Kut, opened on Sept. 24, already holds the graves of 135 unidentified victims. Hundreds of such bodies have been fished ashore at the town of Suwayrah where they are snagged in nets stretched across the Tigris to prevent river weed spreading into the surrounding canal network. Health Ministry officials are discussing how to handle the overflow of bodies. One proposal under consideration is the use of refrigerated trucks, manned by staff entrusted specifically to help identify bodies.
With government unable to handle the load, the task of burial usually falls to Islamic charities and other social groups that rely on public donations. One of the biggest, the organization of powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, has buried more than 3,000 unidentified bodies outside the southern holy city of Karbala since Sept. 1, according to an al-Sadr aide, Raad al-Karbalaie. Trucks from the capital arrive several times a month carrying loads of 50 or more bodies each. Mosques affiliated with the organization take up special collections at Friday prayers to fund the burials, while the men who inter them donate their time and labor, he said.
