According to NPR’s hourly news reports this morning, they are turning people away, including the bodies of 5 Iraqi Guardsmen. Read this LA Times report that gives the picture of Iraq as the land of the dead and dying.
On a recent day, coffins were stacked against the wall outside the morgue, waiting to be filled. Every half hour or so, police officers arrived, unloading bodies from their pickup trucks. Each time, crowds of people rushed forward to see whether their missing relatives were among them.
But even the grim morgue statistics — 3,472 violent deaths in Baghdad from January through March — do not present the full picture of the violence in the capital.
That number does not include those killed in bombings or during gunfights between insurgents and security forces because they are generally are not brought in for autopsy at the central morgue. At least 351 civilians were killed in bombings across the capital during the first three months of the year, according to calculations based on daily reports by hospital and police officials.
Those reports, considered conservative, did not include slain Iraqi security forces, Iraqis killed by U.S. or Iraqi forces, and Iraqis killed outside the capital.
——-
In the Sunni cemeteries serving Baghdad, a city of 5 million people, demand for tombs is so high that people are buried between old graves or at the edges of the burial grounds. Near the gate of one Sunni cemetery tucked inside the Ghazaliya neighborhood, a sign proclaims, “Fee for burial — only 175,000 dinar,” or about $120.
Leave a Reply