THE morning rush had begun at the health ministry’s morgue in Baghdad, and by 9.30am last Thursday 36 coffins already lined the street outside. A muffled wailing came from the minibuses parked nearby where women shrouded in black waited to go inside and search for loved ones, knowing too well what they would find.

The single-storey Al-Tub al-Adli morgue, whose nondescript appearance belies the horrors within, has become synonymous with the seemingly unstoppable violence that has turned Baghdad into the most frightening city on earth.

It is here that bodies from the nightly slaughter are dumped each morning. The stench of decaying flesh, mingled with disinfectant, hits you at the checkpoint 100 yards away.

Each corpse tells a different story about the terrors of Iraq. Some bodies are pocked with holes inflicted by torturers with power drills. Some show signs of strangulation; others, with hands tied behind the back, bear bullet wounds. Many are charred and dismembered.

So far this year, according to health ministry figures, the mortuary has processed the bodies of about 6,000 people, most of whom died violently. Some were killed in American military action but many more were the victims of the sectarian violence that US and Iraqi forces are struggling to contain.

For all the coalition’s recent successes in securing elections that brought a new government to power and in killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the commander of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the morgue remains a chilling reminder of the scale of the challenge ahead.

It receives 20 to 30 bodies on a quiet day. Last month it processed a record 1,384. Most autopsies have been cancelled; there are simply not enough doctors or officials to cope.

For Iraqis who suffer the loss of a family member, a dreaded ritual ensues. Everyone knows there is no point in reporting a missing person to the police — no action will be taken. The first stop is always the morgue. The lucky ones find a body straight away. For others, the morning walk past the coffins has to be repeated. Their search can last for days.

As a former trauma specialist in a hospital casualty department, Dr Baker Siddique, 29, thought he was inured to scenes of carnage. But nothing he had witnessed prepared him for a visit to a pathologist friend working at the mortuary.

“I saw a street packed with people and coffins standing up vertically,” he said. “There wasn’t enough room to lie them horizontally.”

His voice faltered and his eyes filled with tears as he recounted the agony of a woman in black who discovered the bodies of her four sons that day.

“I have never heard screams of pain like that,” he said. The woman collapsed on the floor, throwing dirt over her head — a gesture of grief and helplessness that has become tragically commonplace in Iraq.

As the doctor talked to his friend, a police pickup truck pulled up with a dozen or more bodies piled in the back. “I could not believe that the dead were brought in such a way,” Siddique said. “They were one on top of the other like animal carcasses.”

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