In Conflict’s Wake, Sorting Out the Dead

BAGHDAD —  The phone service is still out, so there’s no use calling, and there’s no newspaper or radio to bring word either. Instead, the families gather snapshots and identification cards and go in search of missing husbands and sons.

In a city brought to a standstill by the dysfunction of war, the rites of death have turned into a macabre carnival of corpses unearthed, moved and buried anew; of sun-dappled city parks hastily converted to communal graves.

Thousands of soldiers are missing; bodies have been turning up in urban dumping grounds -- some marked, some not -- at the military airport, alongside city bridges and in parks. Bodies of civilian war victims -- some of them children -- remain unclaimed too.

Desperate, the families gather at the gate of the International Red Cross office. They pour into emergency rooms. They are starved for any word, any clue about whether their relative was captured or killed.

“Even if we know he’s dead, we don’t tell them right away,” said Salaam Ali, a receptionist at the hospital formerly called Saddam’s Children’s Hospital. “We try to ease their fear and shock. We remind them to have faith, and break it to them gently.”

The stink of death sat heavy last week on a stretch of palm trees and cool shadows that runs from the gates of the presidential palace complex along the Tigris River. It was on this ground that Iraqi forces waged a fierce final battle against advancing U.S. troops.

“When I drove by here that night,” said Army Staff Sgt. Curtis Ratliff, “it seemed like the entire place was on fire.”

When the fighting was over, witnesses said, U.S. troops wrapped dead Iraqi soldiers in body bags, laid them in their trenches and bulldozed dirt over them.

But the graves weren’t deep, and spring days are long and hot in Baghdad.

Soon people in the homes ringing the park began to complain about the smell. Neighbors spread a fresh layer of soil, but it wasn’t enough to quell the stench.

So they complained to the volunteers who have been struggling to keep the city’s hospitals functioning. Men in green robes and surgical masks came in ambulances, laid stretchers in the grass and started digging. The dirt piles grew taller; the pits deepened. When the wind changed, onlookers clutched rags to their noses and gagged.

It was a surreal panorama of urban warfare’s aftermath: Children ran wild over turf still littered with unexploded hand grenades and rocket-propelled grenades. Purple flowers burst over a bullet-pocked fence. Boys cruised the neighborhood in an antique car stolen from a palace.

Meanwhile, a young camel that had escaped from the presidential collection of exotic animals paced back and forth over a fenced driveway as the men from the hospital dug a constellation of pits.

Soon the bodies were exposed to the light -- two, six, eight, all dug out by spade.

The neighbors clicked their tongues and shook their heads. Children tugged their shirts up over their noses. The body bags were lifted into ambulances and driven away.

The chaotic burials and exhumations playing out across Baghdad are a painful mangling of Islamic death rites, which call for bodies to be interred quickly and with appropriate oration. But in a city enmeshed in war, there wasn’t much choice.

“What else could they have done? At least they had the decency to bag them,” neighbor Haythan Abbas said. “It would be a terrible, terrible thing if they hadn’t.”

Some of the impromptu graves were dug by Iraqi soldiers for their fallen compatriots. As the spokesman of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Roland Huguenin-Benjamin, put it, the group burials are “not out of disrespect for the dead, but in respect for the living.”

There have been cases of bodies left to rot in the streets, he said, and of stray dogs mutilating the remains. “So the people just buried them,” he said. “Now it’s a major problem of identification.”

The bodies of soldiers unearthed at the gates of the Presidential Palace were ferried by ambulance to the children’s hospital on the edge of the city, where volunteers searched the remains for clues to identity. In another hospital, families can page through snapshots of dead faces that were taken by a French photojournalist who happened to be on hand when the corpses arrived.

It is by the grace of volunteerism that the bodies are looked after at all. Baghdad’s hospitals are chaotic and have been swarmed by looters. The director of the children’s hospital disappeared when the regime fell. The thankless job of seeking, exhuming and reburying slain soldiers and civilians has been taken on by civilians, many of them motivated by religion.

As they trudged through the makeshift hospital graveyard, the sun was hot, the smell stifling, the flies relentless. “I do it free of charge for Islam,” said volunteer Ridha Jumaa. “For God.”

Named or anonymous, the dead at the children’s hospital are lain to rest in shallow graves in a ruined garden -- the roses were unearthed to make room. If the families claim the remains, the bodies will be dug up again for a third burial.

Meanwhile, crude headstones sketch cursory descriptions.

“Republican Guard,” reads a placard for an unidentified corpse. “Tattoos on hand: ‘Ahmed, you are my brother,’ ‘You’re my life, Haider.’

“Unknown soldier. White trousers and brown checked shirt.”

“Girl, 2-3 years. Wearing yellow and red dress, white vest.”

Three men from Karbala wearing long robes and sandals strolled onto the hospital’s lawn and announced that they were looking for Yousef Shakir. The 29-year-old soldier was last seen when he deserted the army in southern Iraq and caught a ride to Baghdad with a buddy, they said.

“We haven’t heard anything since,” said his brother Vaher Shakir. “It’s been terrible, terrible.”

They were told to read the list of names at the front gate, then peruse the makeshift markers on the graves. If anything sounded promising, the corpse would be dug up and its face exposed for identification.

The Shakirs squatted to read the descriptions. They split up, moved slowly among the fresh mounds, stepped around the empty holes. The bodies are coming and going quickly. For a time, the staff segregated the Iraqis from the non-Iraqi Arabs, and the Muslims from the Christians. But it got too complicated, and soon the bodies were mixed.

They found no body that resembled their lost brother.

“We just keep looking and searching everywhere,” said Vaher Shakir. “God willing, he’s a prisoner of war rather than a dead body.”

A few yards away, a soldier was going home for the last time. Several men hoisted the body into a crude wooden box, then marched toward the gate with the casket on their shoulders. “There is no god but God,” they chanted.

Out on the street, fresh waves of families were reading the handwritten inventory with solemn eyes.

“Man wearing khaki trousers and shirt.”

“Age 50-60. Balding.”

“Wristwatch in reception for identification.”