Volunteer who buries Iraq's anonymous victims: "It is as if the streets are flowing with blood"

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Iraqi volunteers bury more anonymous victims of violence now than during Saddam's rule: CNN
David Edwards and Nick Juliano
Published: Friday September 14, 2007

http://rawstory.com//news/2007/Baghdad_morgues_unclaimed_buried_several_to_0914.html

Every month in Iraq hundreds of victims are struck down by sectarian violence or massive bombing campaigns, and a small band of volunteers has taken it upon themselves to give the unclaimed dead a proper burial.

"We've been doing this for 20 years, under Saddam, but the numbers have increased, as have the difficulties," Sheik Jamal al-Sudani, who leads the volunteers, tells CNN correspondent Michael Ware. "Because now it is as if the streets are flowing with blood."

Before the US invasion of Iraq deposed dictator Saddam Hussein, the volunteers buried up to 40 people every month. In the war's worst months, that figure increased 50-fold as volunteers buried an average of more than 2,000 anonymous war victims, Ware reports.

As the war stretches through its fifth year, several hundred bodies remain unclaimed every month. The unidentified bodies of men, women and children are found on Iraqi streets and sewers as well as in bombing ruins; some are "so mangled and charred, they're unidentifiable," CNN says, while others are Sunni victims whose families are too fearful from their own lives to visit Iraq's Health Ministry morgue, which is controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr's hard-line Shiite followers.

"One thing is for certain: There won't be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms."

— George W. Bush, press availability in Monterrey, Mexico, Jan. 12, 2004