'The cheapest thing in Iraq is a human life'

“They brought three Sunnis they had captured at Baladiyat mosque to Sadr city last night,” a senior Shia official in the ghetto told The Times yesterday. “The Sadrists had lost two men attacking the mosque so as revenge they executed the three publicly in the streets at 11pm. They have at least 50 or 60 others prisoner; Sunnis captured from different neighbourhoods.”

At the city’s main mortuary yesterday corpses were piled in the corridors according to the districts where they had been discovered. Periodically a policeman would shout the name of a district to the crowd outside and take families to see if they could find their missing men.

There were no stretchers, sheets or shrouds. The bodies were simply identified, pulled from the piles, dumped into cheap coffins and removed from the building by any available transport. Some were simply tied to the roofs of taxis.

“Don’t cry,” one man told his daughter. “We’ve got to get used to this by now. The cheapest thing in Iraq is a human.”

tags: violence  iraq  shia  sunni  baghdad