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MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): These are the bodies of Baghdad's unclaimed dead, collected from the morgues, the streets and even the city sewers. They are the men, the women and the children no one ever came for. Without names, without family to mourn them, these are the lost souls of the war. Only these men are here to mark their passing, strangers, volunteers compelled by conscience to help.
When I enter the morgue, says Sheikh Jamal al-Sadani (ph) from Sadr City, I don't see these human beings as Christian, Shia or Sunni, but I see them in death, embracing each other, naked, hugging, piled one on the other. I look to them as human beings, with it my duty to bury them so their sanctity will not be violated again.
On this morning the men load into cars and the bus the nearly 150-mile journey to Najaf. When they arrive, the volunteers prepare the plastic sheets and cotton shrouds to wrap the dead and do what they can to repel the touch and odor of death.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): I only think about one thing, that one day I will face the same fate as these people have faced, and will there be someone to take care of me and bury me, too?
WARE: The bodies are ceremonially wrapped with earth and wrapped; each one numbered, photographed and listed on a computer database. And in graves dug by hand, the bodies are laid side by side, two to a grave.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): We've been doing this for 20 years under Saddam. But the numbers have increased, as have the difficulties, because now it's as if the streets are flowing with blood. Under Saddam they buried up to 40 people a month. Today the numbers are in the low hundreds. "Now you see Iraqis' houses meant to be a family's safest place. And they've become like graves for the families because any minute, any second, they're ready to die by explosion, air strikes or car bombs. And no man and no government, American nor Iraqi, can fix it," he laments, "because now that will take a miracle."
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