A small window in the city morgue is the last hope for people looking for their dead. Holding photographs of the missing, they peer through it to a computer screen where a worker flashes pictures of all the bodies no one has claimed. In Baghdad these days, it can be a lengthy process.
As the pace and intensity of the violence here increases, it is growing ever more difficult to match the missing with the dead. Car bombs explode, creating circles of chaos and mutilated bodies that often take days to sort out. Kidnappings punch holes in families for months.
Bodies, old and new, turn up daily. On Sunday alone, the authorities in Baghdad and three other cities found 46. Some of those found that day were buried in a Baghdad garbage dump. Others were discovered on a poultry farm south of here. Their tied hands and broken bodies are their most distinguishing features. So people go to the window for answers.
"Every day people come to me," said Ahmed Ali, an Interior Ministry worker who displays the photographs. "I listen to their stories. People are in pain. They say: `We know he's dead. We just want to bury him.'"
Bodies have surfaced almost without stop since the US invasion two years ago. First came the exhumation of mass graves from the time of former president Saddam Hussein. Those killings were often carried out in secret, and relatives were eager to finally find the bodies and some peace.
Since then numbers of bodies have risen and fallen on the waves of violence that have rolled through the country. One crest was reached in January, before national elections, when 111 unidentified bodies were taken to the morgue, workers said. Only about half were claimed.
The violence is cresting again, with more than 400 Iraqis killed since late last month.
"When they kill someone they just throw them away in deserted places," said Dr. Ibtihaj al-Aloosi, 60, a gynecologist who survived a five-day kidnapping in December. "The family has to go here and there to find them. This is very scary."
Unclaimed bodies collect at a rate of about 70 a month in Baghdad, far higher than before the US-led military campaign, but less than in the bloodiest years of Saddam's rule, when the state did most of the killing, said Dr. Abdul Razaq al-Obeidi, a doctor at the morgue.
Some bodies are eventually found by their families, but most languish in the morgue. They are given numbers and, after two months, buried in unmarked graves in two Baghdad cemeteries.
On May 12, workers were preparing to bury 25 bodies. The oldest cases are often the saddest, with families spending months looking for loved ones they know are dead. Rashid Khasheel arrived by taxi one morning recently from his home on a dangerous road to the city of Baquba to look for his 16-year-old daughter, Iman, who disappeared in February while she was out getting water. The only trace of her, Khasheel said, was her head scarf and her slippers. Khasheel found no match, and hobbled away to look for a taxi back home.
The unknown bodies keep coming. When a backhoe digging in a trash-strewn field in northeastern Baghdad was fired on this month, the police investigated and dug up the bodies of 14 men who had been killed. Twelve of them had been killed recently, and some appeared to have been tortured.
Last month, about 50 bodies were found floating in the Tigris south of Baghdad. Their identities were in dispute, with Shiites saying they had been victims of mass kidnappings.
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