‘An Indescribable Feeling of Grief’ After Stampede

The hospital walls here are papered with photos. It could be New York City after Sept. 11 or Sri Lanka after last year’s tsunami. But these are not family snapshots of the missing. These are gruesome images of the found.

Iraqis searching Thursday for relatives missing after a deadly stampede of pilgrims scanned the collage of postmortem pictures -- the swollen, bloodied bodies with teeth broken and eyes frozen open -- praying that they would find a familiar face and yet praying that they would not.

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

Even for a society hardened by daily bloodshed and decades of oppression, Iraqis were overwhelmed, both emotionally and logistically, by the deaths Wednesday of at least 965 people. The victims, mostly Shiite Muslims, were crushed, trampled or drowned when tens of thousands of pilgrims crossing a bridge over the Tigris River panicked as rumors spread of an impending suicide attack. Security barriers set up at both ends compounded the situation.

On Thursday, mosques ran short of wooden coffins. Gravediggers in the holy city of Najaf, a preferred burial site for Iraq’s Shiites, worked without breaks. Suppliers of traditional mourning tents were inundated with requests in Sadr City, the Shiite neighborhood in the capital where many of the victims lived. Every major street in the slum was dotted with tunnel-shaped tents, where mourners gathered to pray, listen to recordings of Koranic verses and sip 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 hours-long 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 Sayyid 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.

“Not even the war prepared us for something like this,” said Dr. Adnan Assal, head of a Medical City outpatient clinic that received many of the victims.

Mohammed Alwan, one of 50 gravediggers in Najaf scrambling to bury hundreds of bodies arriving from the capital, said he had no time to rest.

“I cannot stop to talk,” he said. “The dead bodies are going to explode due to heat.”

Police divers dragged the Tigris for bodies but found only one drowned boy. “I fear the rest were swept away by the current,” said one diver.

Underscoring lingering sectarian tensions in Baghdad, a gunfight briefly erupted Thursday evening between Shiites on one side of the bridge and Sunni Arabs on the other. The fight appeared to have begun after grieving Shiites fired guns into the air as they crossed the bridge, drawing fire from Iraqi security forces on the other side, an Interior Ministry official said. Later, residents on both sides of the bridge began firing. Three people were wounded, the official said.

The U.S. military announced one combat death, saying a soldier was fatally shot Wednesday near Iskandariya. At the Medical City complex, scores of people continued to search 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 let people climb inside and look for missing relatives. 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.

By Thursday evening, dozens of bodies remained unclaimed citywide, hospital officials said.

Ammar Nouri, 27, spent most of the last two days searching for his 15-year-old nephew, Humam Najim. Mutual friends said that they had seen the boy and that he was OK. But the family worried when the teenager did not return home or call.

After visiting half a dozen hospitals around the city, Nouri returned to Medical City on Thursday afternoon and was both horrified and relieved to see his nephew’s picture taped to the wall.

“At least we found him,” Nouri said. “But I’m still stunned.”

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Times special correspondent Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf contributed to this report.