The Baghdad morgue is a fearful place of heat and stench and mourning, the cries of relatives echoing down the narrow, foetid laneway behind the pale-yellow brick medical centre where the authorities keep their computerised records. So many corpses are being brought to the mortuary that human remains are stacked on top of each other. Unidentified bodies must be buried within days for lack of space – but the municipality is so overwhelmed by the number of killings that it can no longer provide the vehicles and personnel to take the remains to cemeteries.<\/p>\n
July was the bloodiest month in Baghdad’s modern history – in all, 1,100 bodies were brought to the city’s mortuary; executed for the most part, eviscerated, stabbed, bludgeoned, tortured to death. The figure is secret.<\/p>\n
We are not supposed to know that the Iraqi capitol\u2019s death toll last month was only 700 short of the total American fatalities in Iraq since April of 2003. Of the dead, 963 were men \u2013 many with their hands bound, their eyes taped and bullets in their heads \u2013 and 137 women. The statistics are as shameful as they are horrifying. For these were the men and women we supposedly came to \u201cliberate\u201d \u2013 and about whose fate we do not care. <\/p>\n
The figures for this month cannot, of course, yet be calculated. But last Sunday, the mortuary received the bodies of 36 men and women, all killed by violence. By 8am on Monday, nine more human remains had been received. By midday, the figure had reached 25.<\/p>\n
\u201cI consider this a quiet day,\u201d one of the mortuary officials said to me as we stood close to the dead. So in just 36 hours \u2013 from dawn on Sunday to midday on Monday, 62 Baghdad civilians had been killed. No Western official, no Iraqi government minister, no civil servant, no press release from the authorities, no newspaper, mentioned this terrible statistic. The dead of Iraq \u2013 as they have been from the beginning of our illegal invasion \u2013 were simply written out of the script. Officially they do not exist.<\/p>\n
Thus there has been no disclosure of the fact that in July 2003 \u2013 3 months after the invasion \u2013 700 corpses were brought to the mortuary in Baghdad. In July of 2004, this rose to around 800. The mortuary records the violent death toll for June this year as 879 \u2013 764 of them male, 115 female. Of the men, 480 had been killed by firearms, along with 25 of the women. By comparison, equivalent figures for July 1997, 1998 and 1999 were all below 200.<\/p>\n
Between 10 and 20 per cent of all bodies are never identified \u2013 the medical authorities have had to bury 500 of them since January of this year, unidentified and unclaimed. In many cases the remains have been shattered by explosions \u2013 possibly by suicide bombers \u2013 or by deliberate disfigurement by their killers. <\/p>\n
Mortuary officials have been appalled at the sadism visited on the victims. \u201cWe have many who have obviously been tortured \u2013 mostly men,\u201d one said. \u201cThey have terrible burn marks on their hands and feet and other parts of their bodies. Many have their hands fastened behind their backs with handcuffs and their eyes have been bound with Sellotape. Then they have been shot in the head \u2013 in the back of the head, the face, the eyes. These are executions.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Saddam\u2019s regime visited death by official execution upon its opponents, the scale of the anarchy now existing in Baghdad, Mosul, Basra and other cities is unprecedented. \u201cThe July figures are the largest ever recorded in the history of the Baghdad Medical Institute,\u201d a senior member of the management told the Independent.<\/i><\/p>\n
It is clear that death squads are roaming the streets of a city that is supposed to be under the control of the US military and the American-supported, elected government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Never in recent history has such anarchy been let loose on the civilians of this city \u2013 yet the Western and Iraqi authorities show no interest in disclosing the details. The writing of the new constitution \u2013 or the failure to complete it \u2013 now occupies the time of Western diplomats and journalists. The dead, it seems, do not count. <\/p>\n
But they should. Most are between 15 and 44 \u2013 the youth of Iraq \u2013 and, if extrapolated across the country, Baghdad\u2019s 1,100 dead of last month must bring Iraq\u2019s minimum monthly casualty toll in July alone to 3,000 \u2013 perhaps 4,000. Over a year, this must reach a minimum of 36,000, a figure which puts the supposedly controversial statistic of 100,000 dead since the invasion into a much more realistic perspective.<\/p>\n
There is no way of distinguishing the reasons for these thousands of violent deaths. Some men and women were shot at US checkpoints, others murdered, no doubt, by insurgents or thieves. A few listed as killed by \u201cblunt instruments\u201d might have been the dead of traffic accidents. Some of the women were probably the victims of \u201chonour\u201d killings \u2013 because male relatives suspected them of having illicit relations with the wrong man. Still others may have been murdered as collaborators. Doctors have been told that bodies brought to the mortuary by US forces should not be given post mortem examinations (on the grounds that the Americans will have already performed this function).<\/p>\n
So many civilians are dying that the morgue has had to rely on volunteers from the holy city of Najaf to transport unidentified Shia Muslim dead to the central city\u2019s largest graveyard for burial, their plots donated by religious institutions. \u201cIn some of the bodies, we find American bullets,\u201d a mortuary attendant told me. \u201cBut these could be American bullets fired by Iraqis. We don\u2019t know who is killing who \u2013 it\u2019s not our job to find out, but civilians are killing each other.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a body here the other day and the relatives said he had been murdered because he had been a Baathist in the old regime. Then they said that his brother had been killed three of four weeks back because he was a member of the religious Shia Dawa party, which was the enemy of Saddam. But this is the real story \u2013 the killing of people. I don\u2019t want to die under the new constitution. I want security.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the problems in cataloguing the daily death toll is that the official radio declines to report explosions. On Monday, the thump of a bomb in the Karada district was never officially explained. Only yesterday was it discovered that a suicide bomber had walked into a popular caf\u00e9, the Emir, and blown himself up, killing two policemen. Another explosion, officially said to be caused by a mortar bomb, turned out to be a mine set off beneath a pile of watermelons as a US patrol was passing. A civilian died.<\/p>\n
Again, there was no official account of these deaths. They were not recorded by the government nor by the occupying armies nor, of course, by the Western press. Like the bodies in the Baghdad city mortuary, they did not exist. Last month was the bloodiest month in modern Baghdad\u2019s history with an unprecedented number of dead brought to the city’s morgue. Nearly four times the number prior to the invasion and most of them unrecorded and unreported<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Iraq"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nhttp:\/\/news.independent.co.uk\/world\/fisk\/article306436.ece<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"