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By Jihad Karbalia
Karbala, Iraq: Occasional
mourners crouch weeping before fresh piles of earth marked simply
with numbers, anonymous discs that are the final tribute to the
latest victims of Iraq’s pitiless sectarian war.
Almost every week freezer trucks
drive south from Baghdad to Karbala carrying scores of corpses, some
blackened by fire, some maimed by power tools, many with their hands
bound tightly behind their backs.
In May 314 unidentified corpses
were brought to Karbala to add to the 2,017 anonymous graves already
lying in rows across the overflow cemetery, victims of Iraq’s many
overlapping civil conflicts.
Saleem Kadhim, a spokesman for
the city health directorate, said trucks still bring up to 70 bodies
a week, four months after the start of a US and Iraqi security plan
aimed at restoring peace to the capital.
“There are two cemeteries, the
first is in Karbala and the second in Najaf, both assigned for
unidentified corpses,” he told Agence France-Presse. “After
being left for three months at Baghdad’s morgue, the bodies are
brought here.”
“The al-Sadr office in Karbala
receives the bodies, numbers them and registers information on them.
The information is kept in records at their office, the bodies then
will be sent to the cemetery,” he said.
When AFP visited in October, a
team from the Iraqi health ministry hosed congealing blood from the
floor of one of the trucks, while gravediggers used bolt-cutters to
sever the cords binding the wrists of a bloodied cadaver.
Islamic custom dictates that a
body should be buried within 24 hours of its death, but with
sectarian death squads and suicide bombers roaming the streets of
Baghdad, the city’s mortuaries are overflowing with unclaimed
corpses.
The city’s health authorities
have come up with the best solution they can think of in these dark
days.
Each body is photographed with a
digital camera, and assigned a number in a computer database. The
corpse then is loaded in a refrigerated van and taken to one of the
Shiite holy cities for burial.
Once, all bodies just went to the
massive graveyard of Najaf, but authorities there could not cope
with the constant stream of corpses and now overflow cemeteries have
been established in Karbala. AFP
Here the bodies are assigned to
numbered graves.
“Three families came to Karbala
last month and recognized their relatives’ bodies,” said Kadhim.
In October in the Al-Wadi Al-Jadid
cemetery outside Karbala, more than 100 were laid out on a barren
plain while workers used mattocks and baskets to scoop out
individual grave plots.
Workers employed by the “Office
of the Martyr Sayyid al-Sadr,” the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s
Party, which is accused of having a hand in the sectarian clashes,
unloaded the bodies.
They then scrubbed them down with
sand—in place of scarce water—and rolled them up in white
shrouds and sheets of plastic.
Each was lowered into a grave,
then marked with the number assigned to the body on the Baghdad
database.
Many families never find loved
ones, and some Sunni relatives would fear to travel to Shiite
Karbala amid the communal bloodletting. But those who match a face
to a grave can at least pay last respects.
For the Sadr movement’s
volunteers it is a harrowing job.
“All this blood flowing is
about to become the third river in Iraq,” said Salem Hassan, in a
bitterly ironic nod to Iraq’s traditional name, the Land of the
Two Rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.
In Baghdad, US officials admit
that their latest security plan faces tough resistance from
insurgent fighters and they have only been able to impose control on
around a third of the city’s neighborhoods.
The graves are not yet
full.
 --AFP
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