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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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November 12th, 2006 - Baghdad’s
Morgues Working Overtime |
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Baghdad’s Morgues Working Overtime Christopher Bodeen and Qais Al-Abshir Associated Press Sun, Nov. 12, 2006 Baghdad, Iraq - 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. Men
fearful of an anonymous burial are tattooing their thighs with names and
phone numbers. 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. Bodies are sent for burial
every three or four days just to make room for the daily intake, sometimes
making corpse identification impossible. "We can't remove all
the bodies just so that one can be identified and then put them all back in
again," al-Obaidi said. "We simply don't have the staff." Al-Obaidi said the daily
crush of relatives is an emotional and logistical burden. "Every day, there are
crowds of women outside weeping, yelling and flailing in grief. They're all
looking for their dead sons and I don't know how the computer or we will bear
up," he said. While no one knows how many
Iraqis have died, daily tallies of violent deaths by The Associated Press
average nearly 45 a day. About half of them are unidentified bodies discovered
on city streets or floating in the Tigris River. The United Nations estimates
about 100 violent deaths daily and the Iraqi health minister last week put
civilian deaths over the entire 44 months since the U.S. invasion at about
150,000 - close to the U.N. figure and about three times the previously
accepted estimates of 45,000-50,000. In morgues across Iraq where
capacity stretches beyond thin, bodies are even being turned away. "We have to reject
them," Hadi al-Itabi of the morgue in Kut, southeast of Baghdad, said he
told men who turned in the bodies of six slain border policeman last week.
"We just don't have enough cold storage." 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. Abbas Beyat's joined the
line outside Baghdad's central morgue after his brother Hussein disappeared a
month ago while driving through the mainly Sunni town of Tarmiyah, 30 miles
north of Baghdad. The family had already paid a $60,000 ransom to an
intermediary who then disappeared with the money. "There were three
piles, each with about 20 bodies," Beyat, 56, said, describing the scene
inside the morgue. "The clerk told me to
dig through them until I found my brother. I had to lift them off until I
found him," he said. Like many of those abducted, Hussein Beyet bore the
marks of torture, with holes from an electrical drill visible in his skull,
Beyat said. Others never find their
loved ones' bodies at all. 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. On the day he turned away
the border policemen's bodies, Al-Itabi said Kut's morgue had already buried
15 unidentified corpses pulled from the Tigris River, all of them bound,
bullet-riddled, and heavily decomposed. 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. Most of the dead are
mutilated by torture, a practice common on all sides, but especially
prevalent among Shiite murder gangs that have snatched thousands of Sunnis
from their homes and neighborhoods since the Feb. 22 bombing of an important
Shiite shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad. 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. "That would solve a big
problem for us," al-Obaidi said. 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, each
says. "They've already been
photographed and have numbers attached, so hopefully the families can
identify them someday," al-Obaidi said. "Then they're free to
exhume them for reburial." 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. Um Amir's trip to the
Baghdad morgue came too late. One month after her brother
Adnan Hussein disappeared while selling plastic sacks in western Baghdad's
Bayaa neighborhood, the 56-year-old Sunni housewife identified him from a
picture stored on the Baghdad morgue's computer. "The clerk told me he
had already been buried," Amir said. "They needed the space for new
bodies." AP correspondent Sameer N.
Yacoub contributed to this report. © 2006 AP Wire and wire
service sources. All Rights Reserved. External link:
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/nation/15996811.htm |