Counting Corpses
The Baghdad morgue is at the center of a debate about the number of
civilians killed in Iraq.
By Malcolm Beith
Newsweek
07/26/06 "Newsweek" -- -- - The morgue is several blocks away, but
the stench of rotting flesh wafts through the streets of the
northern Baghdad neighborhood of Bab Al-Muadham. The odor is so
powerful that doctors, police and cleaning workers cover their
mouths and noses as they walk through the halls of the one-story
building, struggling to avoid slipping on the black, oily film that
covers the floors. Visitors who come in search of missing family
members carry burning paper in hopes of masking the smell. Employees
dump fresh cadavers—some of them headless—into the refrigeration
units just off the main hallway.
Each refrigerator holds about 25 bodies, and they’re fully stocked;
leftover corpses, and even some solitary limbs, pile up nearby.
Morgue staff go about their business among swarms of black flies.
It’s just another day in Baghdad, and their unpleasant work pays the
bills. Privately, they admit that working in the morgue takes its
toll. “It’s a really bad job,” says 46-year-old Fadhil, who has been
employed as a cleaner at the morgue for a decade. “It’s turned us
into other creatures.”
With sectarian violence showing no signs of abating, Baghdad’s main
morgue has become a busy place. While Iraqi Prime Minster Nuri al-Maliki
is in Washington discussing security options with President George
W. Bush, armed Shiite and Sunni groups continue to wage war in the
heart of Iraq—often killing members of the opposite sect just for
showing the “wrong” identity card at a checkpoint. Many of them end
up at the morgue in Bab Al-Muadham. Back before the U.S.-led
Coalition invaded, the morgue typically received 10 bodies a day;
now, on some days the staff see 150 new arrivals. More than 1,000
bodies have arrived each month of this year; June’s tally was 1,595.
Civilian deaths in Iraq have been a contentious point since Day One
of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Anti-war activists and opposition
politicians often cite estimates of 100,000 civilian deaths said to
have resulted from the invasion and the subsequent violence. A
recent United Nations report calculated that 6,000 civilians died in
the violence in May and June alone. The morgue is at the heart of
that debate, because whoever controls the morgue controls the
numbers. That person is radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. One
day last week, a NEWSWEEK reporter saw more than a dozen militiamen,
dressed in the traditional black of Sadr’s army, patrolling the
facilities, keeping an eye on the staff. According to morgue
employees, Sadr’s Mahdi militiamen aim to control the flow of
information to give Sadr a leg up in the propaganda war. Ministry of
Health officials release statistics from time to time. Last week, a
ministry official told NEWSWEEK that the last few weeks have seen a
30 percent rise in victims, many of them found in the garbage or
floating down the Tigris—but they rarely reveal details about the
nature of the deaths, or the identities of the corpses. Sadr’s
political wing also controls the Health Ministry, and he has good
reason to keep such details hidden: they could incriminate Shiite
militias.
An overwhelming majority of the delivered dead are young Sunni men,
according to morgue employees. They appear to be the victims of
Shiite militias like the Mahdi Army. In recent weeks, a large number
of victims have arrived at the morgue with their hands and feet
bound together and their eyes and mouths sealed shut with tape,
according to several doctors at the morgue interviewed by NEWSWEEK.
Their jugular veins or wrists had been slit, leaving the victims to
die slowly. This technique, known as “the Khomeini guards method,”
was used on Iraqi soldiers during the war with Iran, according to a
Sunni doctor who works with the morgue. (He and other sources in
this report could not be identified for safety reasons.) Given the
Mahdi Army’s close links with Tehran, morgue employees have little
doubt about why Sadrist politicians and officials would want to bury
such details. “The Iraqi Shiite government accuses the [Sunni]
resistance groups of committing of such acts,” says the Sunni
doctor. “But all Iraqis know that [it’s] the Mahdi Army.”
Although the Ministry of Health officially denies any Mahdi Army
involvement in the running of the morgue, employees cite occasions
when the militia members on the premises have ordered them not to
refrigerate certain unidentified bodies—those with beards, for
instance, because they might be despised Sunni imams. Worse still,
they also say that militia members have on occasion taken mobile
phones from the clothes of the dead, and called their relatives to
inform them of the victim’s status. When the relatives came to
identify the body, the employees say, the militia followed them
offsite and killed them too.
With the bodies in Bab Al-Muadham steadily mounting, Maliki and Bush
will have to come up with practical solutions to quell the violence,
lest they appear out of touch with the daily reality of Iraq. At the
morgue, a radio blares an upbeat pop tune by Lebanese star Nanci
Ajram.
The morgue’s receptionist sits with a few other workers eating
sandwiches, flies buzzing between them and the nearby cadavers. “We
have to be patient,” says the receptionist. If the morgue’s intake
continues at the current rate, Iraqis may find that increasingly
difficult.
© 2006 MSNBC.com
