Shot, stabbed, blown up,burnt: the bodies of Iraqis killed in Baghdad lie piled in overcrowded refrigerators at the city’s central mortuary, their ever-increasing number overwhelming both staff and storage space in a wave that marks the city’s descent into a Hobbesian world of crime and brutality.

“Our morgue was designed to cope with between five and ten bodies a day,” explained Kais Hassan, the harrassed statistician whose job it is to record the capital’s suspicious deaths. He gestured into the open door of a refrigeration unit at the stomach-turning sight of tangled corpses inside, male and female, shaded with the brown and green hues of death. “Now we’re getting 20 to 30 in here a day. It’s a disaster.”

Figures compiled at the central mortuary, on file and indisputable, shine a light through the murk of estimate and rumour surrounding casualty rates in Iraq. Of the 6,635 suspicious deaths in Baghdad recorded this year at the city’s Medical-Legal Institute, the complex incorporating the central mortuary, more than 75 per cent were killed by a bullet. Stabbing is the next most common cause of death.

October’s figures include 726 suspicious deaths, of which 494 were caused by gunfire. The vast majority did not die for reasons directly related to the insurgency but as the result of the crimewave scourging the capital’s streets.

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The institute’s deputy director, Abdul Razzaq al-Ubaidi, said: “Vengeance killings, kidnap victims, gang war, robberies — we don’t deal with bodies whose cause of death is already known by the police, for example those killed in bombings.”

The mortuary staff cannot agree whether the present situation could be described as better or worse than that which existed under Saddam Hussein. In August 2002, ten suspicious deaths led to post-mortem examinations. In August 2003, post-Saddam, 518 murders were recorded in the city in a similar four-week period. But the staff also remember when hundreds of victims of mass execution were dumped by the Baathist authorities at the mortuary and relatives were too frightened to collect them.

“Better or worse is irrelevant — they’re both bad,” Dr Hassan said. “And it could have been so easy for the Americans. Why did they disband the army and police last year and allow those weapons and munitions to pour into the hands of criminals in our streets? Why did they leave us for a year with no national army and police? I don’t know. Now we all suffer — them and us. Am I depressed? All the time.”

Pathologists struggle through lengthy post-mortem shifts to deal with the body load. They could work faster if there were more trolleys available but the institute was extensively looted in the “liberation” during the spring of 2003 and now has only eight, donated by the US.

“Meet our two most recent arrivals,” said Dr Hassan with an almost theatrical flourish, introducing two corpses being studied by pathologists. One was a man in his thirties, still handsome in death. Beside him, by contrast, lay stretched a tattooed body with most of its head blown off. “Fairly typical: both male, cause of death, multiple gunshot. Don ’t know if there’s any ID.”

For a society familiar with burying its dead within 24 hours, unidentified bodies — “John Does” in the vernacular of the West — were once a rarity at the mortuary. Now, though, they are commonplace and are discovered around the city almost daily, drifting in the margins of the Euphrates, dumped by roadsides or in rubbish tips. By Iraqi law they should be held in the mortuary for a two-month period before being buried, to allow relatives the chance to identify the corpses. But the system is so stretched that the time limit is seldom met.

“We’ve got twenty refrigerators here, each designed to hold eight bodies,” Dr Hassan continued, as flies settled on his suit. “Due to the numbers, we’ve pulled out the racks and are stacking them with up to 30 bodies a time. The overcrowding and electricty cuts mean we want them out of here as soon as possible. Usually every three weeks or so we bury about 20 unidentified bodies. Once this year we received 20 unidentified bodies in a 48-hour period.”

Other equally macabre trends are emerging. In Saddam’s time Dr al-Ubaidi had rarely encountered beheading. Today, if not commonplace, it is an increasingly frequent form of murder.

“Most of the time we get the head and body arriving together but sometimes separately,” he chuckled. “And in most instances we can identify the head immediately. Sometimes it gets strange though.

“Recently we were given a headless body found in Baghdad. Three days later the head came to us from al-Kut, far away.” He laughed again. “Beheading is getting popular as a means to terrify certain groups. It’s not just a way to kill, it’s a way to give a message.”

While the murder and mutilation of a handful of hostages have been used with great effect to terrorise Westerners it is the Iraqis, thousands of whom have been held for ransom since the occupation, who suffer the brunt of what appears to be a psychopathic modus operandi among kidnap gangs.

A bereaved father, Muhammad al-Tahi, found his son Ghaith, 31, in the central mortuary this month. He had been kidnapped in Baghdad in mid-October.

His captors, a Fallujah-based gang, negotiated for a fortnight over the ransom, finally collecting £2,600 from a pre-arranged pickup at the edge of Fallujah.

With the money in their hands they told Mr al-Tahi to call a specific police station at the edge of Baghdad. He phoned to discover that his son’s body had been found dumped in a nearby river. His hands and feet were bound. The corpse was covered in burns and the police confirmed that Ghaith’s eyes had been “drilled out”.

“He had been dead all along,” Mr al-Tahi told me as he waited in the mortuary trying to get more information, a man of composed, dignified sadness. “They had captured him and tortured him to death on the first day, then strung my family along for a fortnight to get the ransom. Both eyes removed by a drill! Why had they done this to my son? I still don’t know.”

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