Counting Corpses (Sadr controls the Baghdad morgue)

[Barrett808]

Counting Corpses
The Baghdad morgue is at the center of a debate about the number of civilians killed in Iraq.
By Malcolm Beith
Newsweek

The morgue is several blocks away, but the stench of rotting flesh wafts through the streets of the northern Baghdad neighborhood of Bab Al-Muadham. The odor is so powerful that doctors, police and cleaning workers cover their mouths and noses as they walk through the halls of the one-story building, struggling to avoid slipping on the black, oily film that covers the floors. Visitors who come in search of missing family members carry burning paper in hopes of masking the smell. Employees dump fresh cadavers—some of them headless—into the refrigeration units just off the main hallway.

Each refrigerator holds about 25 bodies, and they’re fully stocked; leftover corpses, and even some solitary limbs, pile up nearby. Morgue staff go about their business among swarms of black flies. It’s just another day in Baghdad, and their unpleasant work pays the bills. Privately, they admit that working in the morgue takes its toll. “It’s a really bad job,” says 46-year-old Fadhil, who has been employed as a cleaner at the morgue for a decade. “It’s turned us into other creatures.”

...whoever controls the morgue controls the numbers. That person is radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. One day last week, a NEWSWEEK reporter saw more than a dozen militiamen, dressed in the traditional black of Sadr’s army, patrolling the facilities, keeping an eye on the staff. According to morgue employees, Sadr’s Mahdi militiamen aim to control the flow of information to give Sadr a leg up in the propaganda war. Ministry of Health officials release statistics from time to time. Last week, a ministry official told NEWSWEEK that the last few weeks have seen a 30 percent rise in victims, many of them found in the garbage or floating down the Tigris—but they rarely reveal details about the nature of the deaths, or the identities of the corpses. Sadr’s political wing also controls the Health Ministry, and he has good reason to keep such details hidden: they could incriminate Shiite militias.

An overwhelming majority of the delivered dead are young Sunni men, according to morgue employees. They appear to be the victims of Shiite militias like the Mahdi Army. In recent weeks, a large number of victims have arrived at the morgue with their hands and feet bound together and their eyes and mouths sealed shut with tape, according to several doctors at the morgue interviewed by NEWSWEEK. Their jugular veins or wrists had been slit, leaving the victims to die slowly. This technique, known as “the Khomeini guards method,” was used on Iraqi soldiers during the war with Iran, according to a Sunni doctor who works with the morgue. (He and other sources in this report could not be identified for safety reasons.) Given the Mahdi Army’s close links with Tehran, morgue employees have little doubt about why Sadrist politicians and officials would want to bury such details. “The Iraqi Shiite government accuses the resistance groups of committing of such acts,” says the Sunni doctor. “But all Iraqis know that the Mahdi Army.”

(more)

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14030362/site/newsweek/page/2/

[Kagemusha]

1. WHAT!?!?! "Close links to Tehran"!?!? Wrong militia, journalist man!

Maliki's Dawa party is a lot closer to Iran than Sadr will ever be, and for that matter, it's SCIRI (and al-Hakim) who are Iran's #1 fans in Iraq, having trained their militia in Iran for years in preparation for taking over the country once the US did the dirty work. Sadr's forces are recruited from poor Shiites in Bagdhad and from Marsh Arab areas.

Edit: And I'm not saying that Sadr's people don't control the morgue or whatever. I wouldn't know. But Sadr's force has become a bogeyman for everyone just like Zarqawi did... it's just that, Sadr's people were NOT trained in Iran, so I don't see where the Sunni quoted gets away with saying that this is a trademark of the Mahdi Army as opposed to the Badr Brigade, say. He acts like there's only one possible suspect and the proof is behaving just like Iranians, which fits Badr more than Mahdi. The journalist obviously didn't double check that kind of detail. Might've been hazardous to his health if he had tried.

[bemildred]

2. This is ignorant drivel. nt