Iraqis struggle to cope with stampede's toll

BAGHDAD -- The hospital walls here are papered with photos of the dead. It could be New York City after Sept. 11 or Sri Lanka after last year's tsunami. But these pictures are not of the lost. They are of the found.

Relatives searching yesterday for missing loved ones from a deadly stampede of pilgrims faced a gruesome collage of postmortem photos lining the lobby, hallways and outside walls of the hospital in Baghdad's Medical City complex. They scanned the pictures -- the swollen, bloodied bodies with teeth broken and eyes frozen open -- praying that they would find a familiar face and yet praying they would not.

''This is my daughter," cried Abdul Hussein Khadim, after peeling a photograph of his 12-year-old from a hospital wall. ''Where is she? Does anyone know?"

A day after a deadly stampede killed at least 965 people participating in a religious procession, Iraqis struggled yesterday to cope with the loss. The victims, mostly Shi'ite Muslims, were killed while crossing a bridge over the Tigris River when tens of thousands of pilgrims were squeezed by security barriers and panicked by false rumors of an impending suicide attack.

Even for a society hardened by daily bloodshed and decades of oppression, the scale of the disaster was overwhelming, both emotionally and logistically.

Mosques ran short of wooden coffins. Gravediggers in the holy city of Najaf, a preferred burial site for Iraq's Shi'ites, worked without breaks. Suppliers of traditional mourning tents were inundated with requests in Sadr City, the Shi'ite slum in the capital where many of the victims lived. Every major street in the slum was dotted with funeral tents, where mourners gathered to pray, listen to recordings of Koranic verses and sip unsweetened Arabic coffee.

Grieving relatives scoured the capital for funeral supplies, at times taking their search to outlying cities. ''We had to get a [tent cloth] from Baqubah," said Nouri Mohammed Mayahi, an unemployed ironworker whose neighbor's son died on the bridge. ''We're still waiting for it to arrive."

Facilities where bodies are washed and prepared for burial were swamped, causing an hourslong backlog. Such delays heightened tensions, because Muslim culture dictates a rapid burial.

''Last night I washed 16 bodies," said Saad Hilayil, a corpse-washer at the Sayid al Shuhada mosque. ''The mosque was filled with bodies. Coffins were stacked next to each other."

The mosque's supply of eight coffins was quickly used up, and a second site for preparing bodies had to be opened in a neighboring home.

Underscoring lingering sectarian tensions in Baghdad, a brief gunfight erupted yesterday evening between Shi'ites on one side of the bridge and Sunni Arabs on the other. The fight appears to have been sparked by grieving Shiites who fired guns in the air as they crossed the bridge, drawing fire from Iraqi security forces on the other side, according to an Interior Ministry official. Shortly thereafter, residents on both sides of the bridge began firing. Three people were wounded, the official said.

During the day, police divers dragged the Tigris for bodies but found only one drowned boy. ''I fear the rest were swept away by the current," one diver said.

At the Medical City complex, meanwhile, scores of relatives searched for missing loved ones.

Refrigeration trucks normally used to ferry frozen chickens or antibiotics were commandeered to store the overflow of bodies from the morgue freezers. Volunteers covered their mouths and noses with masks and scarves as they opened the truck doors to permit relatives to climb inside and lift sheets covering bodies to look for the missing. Overcome by the stench, one volunteer stumbled away and vomited on the sidewalk.

''It's an indescribable feeling of grief," said Thar Mohammed, who usually delivers medical supplies to the hospital but volunteered the use of his truck for storing dead.

By last evening, several dozen bodies citywide remained unclaimed, hospital officials said.

Ammar Nouri, 27, spent most of the past two days searching for his 15-year-old nephew, Humam Najim. Friends insisted they saw the boy and that Najim was OK. But the family worried when he did not return home or call.

After visiting a half-dozen hospitals around the city, he returned to Medical City yesterday afternoon and was both relieved and horrified to see his nephew's picture taped the wall.

''At least we found him," Nouri said. ''But I'm still stunned."