IRAQ: At long last, a victim is laid to rest

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Salam Suwaidan died more than a year ago, but he finally got a proper burial Thursday after his family tracked his body to a cemetery for unidentified corpses and brought it back to his hometown west of Baghdad. Hundreds of people turned out for the funeral, the result of painstaking efforts by relatives whose experience illustrates the tragedy facing so many Iraqis.

Not only do they lose loved ones to violence on a daily basis, often they never find out what happened to them. This was nearly the case with Suwaidan, who headed the scholarship department at the Ministry of Higher Education in Baghdad.

In November 2006, Suwaidan and dozens of other ministry workers were dragged from their offices, bundled into vans, and driven away.

His brother said the family, which is from Ramadi, kept looking for him, even as months passed with no information.

‘We went to the central morgue of Baghdad many times, but we were not able to locate the body.’

About a week ago, a family friend was scanning the central morgue’s computer database of photographs of unclaimed bodies. The friend was looking for a relative. He recognized Suwaidan’s face in the database and told the family that Suwaidan had been buried in Karbala. The cause of death was listed as strangulation. He had been killed shortly after the mass abduction, according to the death certificate.

Friends in Karbala went to the cemetery, fetched Suwaidan’s body, and brought it to Ramadi, where it was buried in the family plot.

‘Now . . . we feel that he is still alive among us,’ his brother said.

— Tina Susman in Baghdad