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MORGUES FULL TO OVERFLOWING

November 14, 2006

BAGHDAD: Victims of Iraq's sectarian slaughter are no longer being kept for relatives but photographed, numbered and buried in government cemeteries because the country's morgues can store no more bodies.

Men fearful of an anonymous burial are tattooing their thighs with names and phone numbers.

In October, a bloody month for Iraqi civilians, about 1600 bodies were turned in at the Baghdad central morgue, its director, Abdul-Razaq al-Obaidi, said.

The city's network of morgues, built to hold 130 bodies at most, now held more than 500, he said.

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," Mr Obaidi said. "We simply don't have the staff."

Mr Obaidi said the daily crush of relatives was 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, the UN estimates about 100 violent deaths daily. Last week, the Iraqi Health Minister put civilian deaths over the entire 44 months since the US invasion at about 150,000 - close to the UN figure and about three times the previously accepted estimates of 45,000-50,000.

At some morgues, bodies are even being turned away.

"We have to reject them," said Hadi al-Itabi, of the morgue in Kut, southeast of Baghdad.

"We just don't have enough cold storage."

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 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, 48km north of Baghdad.

"There were three piles, each with about 20 bodies," Mr Beyat, 56, said of 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.

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.

AP
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