Sunday 30 July 2006

Baghdad - As violence in the Iraqi capital continues to rise, the task of tracking down missing people here has become a grim ordeal. Iraq's anemic investigative agencies have been ill-equipped to keep up with soaring crime, so for families seeking information, the morgues have often provided the only certainty.

Now, even the morgues have become a source of danger, at least for Sunni Arabs. In recent months, Shiite militias have been staking out Baghdad's central morgue in particular, and the authorities have received dozens of reports of kidnappings and killings of Sunni Arabs there.

Many Sunnis now refuse to go there to look for missing family members and are forced to take extraordinary measures to recover a relative's body, including sending Shiite friends in their stead.

"We have to fight just to get our bodies from the morgue," said Omar al-Jubouri, the human rights director of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni political group.

He and other Sunni community leaders say they suspect that an increasing number of Sunni bodies are going unclaimed and are receiving pauper's burials.

Set in Medical City, a sprawling complex of dreary buildings in northern Baghdad, the central morgue, which is run by the Shiite-controlled Health Ministry, has become the main stop on the quest for the missing. Every week, hundreds of unidentified bodies from around the capital - found in fetid swales, in shallow mass graves, floating in the Tigris - are taken there.

The choking stench of decomposing bodies is sickeningly evident outside the one-story building and gets worse as the day gets hotter. A side alley through which bodies are delivered is covered in mysterious, septic substances. Bloody clothing and other belongings stripped from the victims sit in a pile awaiting incineration in a large furnace.

Mr. Jubouri and other Sunni leaders blame the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia, for the reported attacks at the morgue. The militia professes loyalty to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr and is accused of aggravating the sectarian frenzy that has ravaged Iraq in recent months. The Ministry of Health is run by Mr. Sadr's allies.

In interviews, ministry and police officials denied that the morgue had a security problem or that Sunnis were being made targets there.

"It is just a theory," said Amer al-Khuzaie, one of three deputy health ministers. "There's a feeling of this, but what's the reality? Beyond this feeling, we cannot say."

But in Iraq's current climate of violence and dread, perceptions count as much as reality, and Sunnis have largely stopped going to the morgue.

Security at the morgue is provided by a special government force that guards federal buildings, the deputy health minister said. But Sunni leaders say the guard force, like the rest of Iraq's police forces, has been infiltrated by Shiite death squads. They have also accused morgue employees of working as informers for Mahdi Army members lurking on the perimeter of the complex.

The Sunni leaders say the informers will notify militia members when a Sunni arrives to claim a body. (All visitors must show identification, and a person's sect is often evident by their name.)

Mr. Jubouri said every part of the process has become vulnerable, with Sunnis attacked in the compound, while leaving with a body and upon arriving at their homes.

In May, about a dozen Sunni relatives from Tarmiya, northeast of Baghdad, drove to the morgue to look for two cousins who had been kidnapped two weeks earlier. Mindful of the reports that Sunnis had been attacked there, the family had decided to travel in a large group for protection.

But at the front gate, the relatives were surrounded by five carloads of gunmen, said a family member, who only allowed publication of his first name, Thaer, out of fear for his safety. "They asked us to lie on the ground," he said in a recent interview here. "They checked our ID's, looked at our names."

The gunmen, who Thaer said he suspected were from the Mahdi Army, plucked two men from the group and took them away. The rest of the family fled without entering the morgue.

The family paid a hefty ransom for the release of those two men, but never found the two kidnapped cousins. After the morgue attack, Thaer said, a Shiite acquaintance of the family visited the morgue but could not find the cousins. Thaer suspects their bodies were taken away to clear room for new arrivals, he said.

Mr. Jubouri says he receives three or four calls a day from Sunni Arabs fearful of visiting the morgue.

He sometimes calls the Iraqi Army to dispatch soldiers to accompany a party member to the morgue, or sends party officials to help. Other families have resorted to sending delegates who might be less attractive targets for Shiite militias, including the elderly and women.

But some Sunni Arabs brave the threat.

On a recent morning, a group of about seven visited the morgue to recover the body of a relative, a 32-year-old carpenter who had been killed in his workshop by two gunmen. The relatives took the body to an adjacent building where it was given a ceremonial washing.

In an antechamber of the body washing room, the victim's brother, who gave his name as Abu Sarmed - an honorific meaning father of Sarmed - said the family was terrified of being in the morgue "because we're a group of Sunnis."

Visiting the morgue, he explained, was an act of moral necessity and tradition. The family members were trying to give their relative a proper burial, he said, even if that meant risking their own lives.

While the morgue tries to keep bodies for at least a month, officials often have to unload them much sooner because the building only has the refrigerator capacity to store about 100 bodies at a time, Mr. Khuzaie said. On occasion, the morgue has received several hundred bodies in a day.

Health officials say scores of bodies go unidentified every week, though there is no way to determine the victims' sectarian affiliations.

At least twice a week, a member of Mr. Sadr's organization, Sheik Jamal al-Sudani, gathers a crew of men to pile the bodies onto a large truck and drive them to the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala for an anonymous Shiite burial. Mr. Sudani said the lightest loads number about 70 bodies while the heaviest have topped 250.

Early on Friday morning, Mr. Sudani's workers, wearing white boots and white plastic gloves, received bloodied and disfigured bodies through the morgue's side door, zipped them into black body bags and hauled them into the back of the truck, chanting, "There is no other god but Allah."

"We take care of them," said Mr. Sudani, who stood to one side watching the ritual. "Sunni, Shiite, Christian - it doesn't matter. They're all victims."

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Hosham Hussein contributed reporting for this article.