Dozens of Iraqis gather in a dimly lit room to scan hundreds of pictures on computer screens -- disfigured images of burnt faces, blown up body parts.

All are looking for that one identification mark that could help them recognise whether the picture displayed on the computer screen is of their missing relative for whom many have been searching for months.

"He is not among them," said Fadhila Bustan as she left the room on the ground floor of Baghdad's main morgue.

Bustan, 48, is searching for her 27-year-old son who disappeared last December.

On that day, Mustafa Talib Bustan, a married man with two children, drove off to work waving to his mother, his wife Zainab and the children.

"That was the last we saw of him. He never came back," said Bustan, dressed in a black hijab, a traditional Arabic robe worn by women.

Since then Bustan, sometimes accompanied by Mustafa's wife, has visited the morgue every week, hoping to gather some information of her son, even if only about recovering his remains.

She comes to the room at the morgue where she works through gut wrenching pictures of people slaughtered post-invasion Iraq.

What adds to her anguish is that Mustafa disappeared at a time when violence in Baghdad had declined significantly.

But then the area where her Shiite family resides -- Haifa Street in central Baghdad -- had become notorious for sectarian fights after the US-led invasion.

"During the peak of the sectarian fight we fled to another, safe, area. We returned after the violence dropped and then one day my son disappeared. I am sure he was kidnapped and killed. All I want are his remains," said Bustan.

In December 2007 -- the month Mustafa vanished -- 568 Iraqis were killed across Iraq compared to 1,992 in January the same year. The January toll was the highest since the sectarian strife erupted in February 2006.

Iraq's civilian casualty figures have always been controversial, but a conservative estimate by the British website Iraqbodycount.org puts the death toll at between 83,469 and 91,040 since the US-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003.



'We could keep bodies only five days in the morgue'

The World Health Organisation in a recent report said that between 104,000 and 223,000 died between March 2003 and June 2006 alone, while Iraqis say tens of thousands of people are missing.

The violence that ebbed in late 2007, however, is once again surging and since March the casualties are on the rise.

At least 1,082 Iraqis were killed in March and 1,073 in April.

Although the figures for the dead are available, Iraqi officials have failed to come up with statistics for those missing.

Munjid Ridha Ali, the head of Baghdad morgue, said that in 2007 more than 2,000 unidentified people were buried by the mortuaries in the Iraqi capital, and Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.

"During the peak of violence we could keep the bodies only for five days in the morgue as there were so many new corpses being brought in daily," Ali said.

"Some of the bodies were actually mere pieces of flesh... totally unrecognisable."

The Baghdad morgue is also visited by people from other provinces to see if the bodies of relatives who disappeared elsewhere had been found and brought to the facility.

Raunak Ali from the province of Diyala, north of Baghdad, had travelled nearly 70 kilometres (40 miles) to come to the morgue and look for the remains of her postman brother.

Morgue head Ali said his facility, the largest in Iraq, was still getting bodies of people killed in new violence or even those whose bodies were uncovered in mass graves.

"We take photographs of the corpse and other parts of the body and store them so that we can show them to the relatives who come here," he said.





Source: middle-east-online.com