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Secrets of the morgue4/7/2023 They were not recorded by the government nor by the occupying armies nor, of course, by the Western press. A civilian died.Īgain, there was no official account of these deaths. Another explosion, officially said to be caused by a mortar, turned out to be a mine set off beneath a pile of watermelons as a US patrol was passing. Only yesterday was it discovered that a suicide bomber had walked into a popular café, the Emir, and blown himself up, killing two policemen. ![]() On Monday, the thump of a bomb in the Karada district was never officially explained. One of the problems in cataloguing the daily death toll is that the official radio often declines to report explosions. I don't want to die under a new constitution. But this is the real story - the killing of the people. Then they said that his brother had been killed three or four weeks back because he was a member of the religious Shia Dawa party which was the enemy of Saddam. "We had a body here the other day and the relatives said he had been murdered because he had been a Baathist in the old regime. We don't know who's killing who - it's not our job to find out, but civilians are killing each other. "But these could be American bullets fired by Iraqis. "In some of the bodies, we find American bullets," a mortuary attendant told me. So many civilians are dying that the morgue has had to rely on volunteers from the holy city of Najaf to transport unidentified Shia Muslim dead to the central city's large graveyard for burial, their plots donated by religious institutions. Doctors have been told that bodies brought to the mortuary by US forces should not be given post-mortem examinations (on the odd ground that the Americans will have already performed this function). Still others may have been murdered as collaborators. Some of the women were probably the victims of "honour" killings - because male relatives suspected them of having illicit relations with the wrong man. A few listed as killed by "blunt instruments" might have been the dead of traffic accidents. Some men and women were shot at US checkpoints, others murdered, no doubt, by insurgents or thieves. There is no way of distinguishing the reasons for these thousands of violent deaths. Over a year, this must reach a minimum of 36,000, a figure which puts the supposedly controversial statistic of 100,000 dead since the invasion into a much more realistic perspective. ![]() Most are between 15 and 44 - the youth of Iraq - and, if extrapolated across the country, Baghdad's 1,100 dead of last month must bring Iraq's minimum monthly casualty toll in July alone to 3,000 - perhaps 4,000. The dead, it seems, do not count.īut they should. The writing of the new constitution - or the failure to complete it - now occupies the time of Western diplomats and journalists. Never in recent history has such anarchy been let loose on the civilians of this city - yet the Western and Iraqi authorities show no interest in disclosing the details. ![]() It is clear that death squads are roaming the streets of a city which is supposed to be under the control of the US military and the American-supported, elected government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari. "The July figures are the largest ever recorded in the history of the Baghdad Medical Institute," a senior member of the management told The Independent. While Saddam's regime visited death by official execution upon its opponents, the scale of anarchy now existing in Baghdad, Mosul, Basra and other cities is unprecedented. Then they have been shot in the head - in the back of the head, the face, the eyes. Many have their hands fastened behind their backs with handcuffs and their eyes have been bound with Sellotape. "They have terrible burn marks on hands and feet and other parts of their bodies. "We have many who have obviously been tortured - mostly men," one said. Mortuary officials have been appalled at the sadism visited on the victims. In many cases, the remains have been shattered by explosions - possibly by suicide bombers - or by deliberate disfigurement by their killers. Between 10 and 20 per cent of all bodies are never identified - the medical authorities have had to bury 500 of them since January of this year, unidentified and unclaimed.
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