From Reuters, an article by Luke Baker, posted on Khilafah
If anyone had any lingering doubts about the full extent of violence in Iraq, they need only visit Baghdad's morgue. The fridges and autopsy rooms of the beige stone block are crammed full of corpses, some of them so badly mutilated or decomposed that identification is nearly impossible. Every day, around 30 new bodies arrive, the latest victims of a two-year wave of war, crime and insurgency that has left coroners struggling to keep up with the chaos. ....
The situation in Baghdad has grown so bad that corpses not claimed from the morgue after a few weeks are now being buried in makeshift graves to make room for new arrivals. Since the beginning of the year, more than 400 unclaimed or unidentified bodies have had to be dealt with in this way. They are buried by municipal authorities in Baghdad or by a Shi'ite Muslim volunteer group that takes the corpses to a cemetery in Najaf, a religious city south of the capital. Pictures are taken of the bodies beforehand, and as many other details as possible are collected, so that if relatives do eventually turn up, the deceased can be tracked down. ....
Each day, dozens of families arrive at the morgue looking for missing relatives. They view pictures of the dead on a computer, trying to identify loved ones. If the pictures are unclear, they are allowed to trawl through the morgue's vaults. .... every month up to 20 percent of the bodies are unclaimed ... |