Iraq's Self-Inflicted Wounds

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And yet it is a sign of Iraqis' utter mistrust of the leaders who have replaced Saddam that anger over Haditha has been directed as much toward the Iraqi government as toward U.S. troops. Like many Iraqis across the country, the survivors accuse their elected leaders of cocooning themselves in a highly fortified Baghdad enclave, with little thought for the plight of their countrymen. "The concrete walls of the Green Zone are too high, so they can't see what's happening to us," says Khaled Raseef, the spokesman for the Haditha victims' kin. Whatever they think of the Marines, Raseef says he was impressed with the thoroughness with which the U.S. military has investigated the killings. As of last week, he says, nobody from the Iraqi government had contacted him for an account of what happened.

Sheik Jamal's views on the Americans are not hard to divine--in his spare time he's a volunteer in al-Sadr's office in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood. But his take on the Haditha killings is purely practical: the local morgue dealt with those bodies, and they were all claimed by family members, so they aren't his problem. He has more pressing concerns. The escalation of killings in Baghdad puts him under tremendous financial strain: he makes his living as a professional mortician but receives no payment for burying unclaimed bodies, which he sees as a religious duty. He estimates that each body he buries costs him $20, including the price of the body bag, the coarse white cotton shroud, gravediggers' fees, transportation costs and the grave itself. Recently, he's taken to burying two bodies in each grave.

Money is only one of his problems. The Friday trips to Najaf are fraught with danger. The road from Baghdad runs through some of the most lawless parts of Iraq, where criminals routinely kill commuters to take their cars and terrorists have been known to attack funeral corteges. Sheik Jamal says his weekly convoy--one truck and several carloads of volunteers--has never been attacked, a fact he attributes to divine intervention. "It's God's work, and he finds a way for us to do it," he says.

It's late in the morning at the Wadi al-Salaam cemetery by the time Sheik Jamal and his volunteers have completed their grim mission. The 72 bodies have been sprayed with disinfectant, wrapped in shrouds and buried. Sheik Jamal thanks the gravediggers, shaking their hands. "I will be in touch," he says. "I'll call and let you know how many [graves] we need next week." Stretching out into the desert, the graveyard is unlikely to run out of space. And since the killings of Iraqis show no sign of slowing, Sheik Jamal will not run out of bodies either.