Coffins Pour Into Iraq City, Refugees Say

Motorcades of coffins carrying Saddam Hussein’s Gulf War dead are streaming to the Iraqi holy city of Najaf, refugees from Kuwait report.

Jordanian Amina Madi said she saw at least 200 coffins of military and civilian dead stacked on vehicles that stopped to refuel in the southern Iraqi city at midweek.

Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad on the Euphrates River, is one of the holiest cities for Shiite Muslims, who form the majority in Iraq.

“We saw cars, pickup trucks and vans packed with coffins. Some pickups were holding three or four coffins on the roof,” said Madi, who waited in line for eight hours to fill up her car’s gas tank.

“Some women were wailing, others were sobbing and some were mumbling things we could not even understand.”

Gas station employees told her the dead would be buried at a nearby cemetery.

Her son, Abdul Salam, said he heard a grieving relative of one victim curse President Bush, saying: “May God take you, Bush.”

About 20,000 Iraqis, civilian and military, were killed in the first 26 days of the war, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Sadoun Hammadi was quoted by an Iranian newspaper as telling officials in Tehran. The U.S.-led allied coalition says it is targeting military and strategic sites only, not civilian areas.

Coffins of military dead were draped in Iraqi flags that said, “Martyrs of the Army,” Madi, 50, said. Those of civilians were wrapped in plain cloth.

Iraqi officials took Western journalists to Najaf early in the war to show bomb damage to what they said were civilian areas. Reporters saw no evidence that the shrine to Imam Ali, son-in-law of the prophet Mohammed, had been hit.