Will American Troops Be Leaving Iraq?

The statements from the Pentagon about troop withdrawals are either A) empty political spin to take pressure of the President or B) preparing the US to cut and run, leaving Iraq in a civil war. No matter what, the Pentagon and Administration are lying.

Overflowing morgue testament to Iraq's mayhem
27 Jul 2005 13:31:39 GMT

Source: Reuters

By Luke Baker

BAGHDAD, July 27 (Reuters) - If anyone had any lingering doubts about the full extent of violence in Iraq, they need only visit Baghdad's morgue.

The fridges and autopsy rooms of the beige stone block are crammed full of corpses, some of them so badly mutilated or decomposed that identification is nearly impossible.

Every day, around 30 new bodies arrive, the latest victims of a two-year wave of war, crime and insurgency that has left coroners struggling to keep up with the chaos.

All are classified as "suspicious deaths" and the vast majority have been shot, says Faik Amin Baker, the director of the Medical Legal Institute, which oversees the morgue.

More alarming still is that these are only the bodies that require an autopsy; they do not include those that die of natural causes or in attacks where the cause of death is clear.

"Before the war we used to get maybe 250 bodies a month. Now it is 800 or 900 a month from the Baghdad area alone," says Baker, who trained at Guy's Hospital in London and has overseen operations at the morgue for the past 15 years.

"The situation has worsened dramatically. We cannot cope."

While it is difficult to make comparisons with other violent cities around the world because Iraq is also a war zone, the number would give Baghdad a rate of somewhere around 230 "suspicious deaths" each year for every 100,000 residents.

In Bogota, Colombia, often considered one of the most violent cities in the world, the murder rate seldom exceeded 90 per 100,000 even at the peak of the 1990s drug wars.