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Body Count in Baghdad Nearly Triples
Coffin maker Abbas Hussein Mohammed opened a new shop in Baghdad to cope with rising demand. Last month the capital's morgue received 1,536 victims of violence.
(By Khalid Mohammed -- Associated Press)
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The issue of civilian casualties has been politically charged since the start of the Iraq war. Soon after the invasion, U.S. and Iraqi officials for a time forbade Baghdad's medical officials to release morgue counts.
About a week after the bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine in Samarra in February this year, a Baghdad morgue official, a Health Ministry official and an Interior Ministry official -- all of whom oversaw the morgue's body counts -- said 1,000 or more people had been killed as Shiite militias rolled openly across Baghdad to carry out retaliatory killings. Iraqi officials and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, called that figure exaggerated, saying only about 350 people were killed. An international official in Baghdad said Health Ministry officials had cited the higher toll before lowering it in response to what he said was political pressure.
The Health Ministry is run by the Shiite religious party of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and is guarded by his militia, known as the Mahdi Army. Sadr's militia and that of the country's other main Shiite religious party have been blamed for much of the continuing Sunni-Shiite violence.
After the Samarra bombing, morgue officials brought in refrigerated trucks to hold corpses and crammed refrigerators in the morgue far beyond their intended capacity. Most of the corpses taken to Baghdad's morgue are unidentified and are held for long periods awaiting identification.
This week, Health Minister Ali Hussein al-Shamari said morgue workers plan to begin shooting videos of the unclaimed bodies so that officials can bury them after three or four days rather than storing them at the morgue for the required two weeks.
Health officials were also working to increase the number of refrigerators to allow the morgue to handle as many as 200 to 250 bodies a day, Shamari said. Two new buildings were planned, in the districts of Karkh and Rasafa.
Morgue officials also intend to double the pay of the morgue's overworked doctors and award bonuses, the health minister said.
Shamari made his comments to a Health Ministry in-house newspaper. The ministry's spokesman, Qasim Yahia, on Thursday confirmed the details in the account. Yahia said expansion had "nothing to do with the violence and killing."
Magazzeni, the U.N. human rights official, said, "Reducing the level of violence and the number of civilians killed is crucially important." Doing so would take a "common effort" by the U.S. and Iraqi military, police and Iraq's debilitated justice system, he said.
Special correspondent Naseer Nouri and other Washington Post staff in Iraq contributed to this report.
