Baghdad now forced to 'export' bodies

Jihad Karbalai, Agence France Presse

...Islamic custom dictates that a body should be buried within 24 hours of its death, but with sectarian death squads and suicide bombers roaming the streets of Baghdad, the city's mortuaries are overflowing with unclaimed corpses. The city's health authorities have come up with the best solution they can think of in these dark days. Each body is photographed with a digital camera, and assigned a number in a computer database. Then, it is loaded in one of the refrigerated vans and taken to one of the Shiite holy cities for burial. Once upon a time, all bodies just went to the massive graveyard of Najaf, but authorities there could not cope with the constant stream of corpses and now overflow cemeteries have been established in Karbala. Here, the bodies are assigned to numbered graves (...) Many families never find loved ones, and some Sunni relatives would fear to travel to Shiite Karbala amidst the communal bloodletting, but those who match a face to a grave can at least pay last respects...

continua / continued