The Iraqis' Stories: Baghdad's Morgues Working Overtime

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.

Read the rest at the LA Times