STREETS OF BLOOD

摘要

To understand just how brutal the war in iraq has become, spend a day at work with Sheik Jamal al-Sudani. A Baghdad mortician, he travels to the holy city of Najaf every Friday to bury the capital's unclaimed and unknown dead-the scores of bodies that turn up every day, bearing no identifying characteristics save the method by which they were murdered. On a typical trip to the Wadi al-Salaam cemetery last month, Sheik Jamal and a small band of volunteers unload the grim cargo they have brought 100 miles from the Iraqi capital in an old flatbed truck. Sheathed in powder-blue body bags are the remains of 72 men, many of them bearing signs of terrible torture-holes in the skull made by power drills, mutilated genitals, burns. They are the signature of the shadowy Shi'ite groups that have been kidnapping and murdering hundreds of men and boys, most of them Sun-nis, in a campaign that has terrorized Baghdad's neighborhoods.