At Baghdad morgue, a daily influx of bodies

Scores of people make grim trip to morgue each day to look for loved ones kidnapped or killed in sectarian violence. - By Thibauld Malterre
Middle East Online
May. 09, 2006

Baghdad morgue, an aging one-storey building in the north of the Iraqi capital, is the last stop for those embroiled in the country's bitter and bloody rivalry between Shiites and Sunnis.

Dozens of people from both Muslim sides make the grim trip to the morgue each day, where they wait and search together for their loved ones, most of whom were kidnapped and brutally killed in communal bloodshed that has rocked the insurgency-wracked country.

"I came to search for my neighbor who was kidnapped three days ago," said one visibly emotional man who was standing at the morgue's iron gate waiting to be allowed inside the complex.

"He was found yesterday with three bullets in the body. He was also tortured. There were signs of electric shocks on his body."

Accompanying the man was another friend of the victim, wearing a white scarf on his head to deflect the May heat, who charged that his friend had been murdered.

"It was a sectarian murder," he said.

"His name was Ali Hassan al-Duri. He was 36 years of age and had two children," he said. "He was killed because he was a Sunni and he lived in Sadr City."

Sadr City, which lies in the south of the capital, is a stronghold of impoverished Shiites loyal to firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

The district houses hundreds of militiamen belonging to Sadr's Mehdi Army which is often accused by Sunni Arabs of killing men from Iraq's once powerful minority community since the sectarian violence broke out.

Hundreds of Iraqis have died in tit-for-tat killings between the two communities since the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in the northern town of Samarra in February.

But Baghdad remains the epicenter of the carnage that has further upset the already precarious security situation of the country three years after the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

On one recent day, hundreds of people were waiting outside the iron gate, trying to gain access to the morgue.

Most of them were men, dressed in traditional clothes or T-shirts, some covering their noses with handkerchiefs or pieces of cloth to avoid the stench emerging from deep inside the morgue.

A few families were seen arriving with wooden coffins bearing religious inscriptions.

In the crowd, standing behind a low wall and hiding a cigarette in her palm was a woman dressed in a full-length black abaya, who was there with her husband to search for their dead nephew.

"He came from Samarra to sell vegetables in Baghdad," she said.

"He was kidnapped with his two friends. Their bodies have already been found after they were shot," she said, fighting back tears.

The morgue, which holds hundreds of bodies, usually dispatches unclaimed corpses after several weeks to the southern cities of Najaf or Karbala for burial.

The cost of burying these unidentified bodies is often paid through money received from donations.

But the morgue retains photographs of each of the buried, in case of a late claim by relatives.

The waiting relatives watched as several policemen arrived in a pickup truck, then entered the building with a body they discovered in the Shiite district of Habibiyah, in eastern Baghdad.

"Our police station brings at least two or three bodies per day," said a police officer accompanying the body.

At the same time, a group of six people crossed the complex, carrying a coffin on their shoulders and slowly chanting "There is only one God... And Mohammed is his prophet."

They then placed the coffin at the rear of a van.

Another old man was waiting to procure the body of his nephew.

"For a week we have been searching hospitals, morgues, police stations... to find the body of Rafet Ibrahim and we finally find him here," he said.

"We located him by seeing his picture," he said, adding that Ibrahim, 27, was married and the father of a daughter. He had worked with a local electricity firm and lived in Baghdad, but was kidnapped and killed near Taji, north of the capital.

As most waited for the bodies of relatives or friends who died violent deaths, one young man was waiting in a corner to collect a body of someone who had not died due to sectarian conflict.

"I just want to take back my old neighbor who died alone in his house and he does not have any family," said Mohammed Qassim, 32.

Unfortunately, he was unable to receive the body after nearly 70 Iraqi soldiers attached to a special unit, backed by a group of US military officers, suddenly stormed the building and asked everybody to step aside.

The troops arrived in armored humvees, similar to those used by the US military, and were carrying sophisticated M4 rifles, rather than the old Kalashnikovs carried by their other fellow army colleagues.

They were there to search for 14 bodies of their colleagues, who were shot dead while on leave.