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05 April 2003: "Al-Zubayr morgue"

The BBC Reports British troops have found what is being termed a "makeshift morgue" at an Iraqi military base near al-Zubayr, which is some 15 km south-west of Basra, and perhaps 25 km north of Safwan. Approximately 200 sets of human remains were found in a warehouse; catalogues of photographs of the dead were found in a neighbouring building, and in the courtyard outside was what looks suspiciously like a purpose-built execution spot: a brick wall, pockmarked with bullets, with a foot-high platform in front of it and a gutter in between.

The preliminary indications are that this place has been around since 1985, but that it was in use until fairly recently; the remains are not recent, and most appear to have been killed by being shot in the head. Who were these people whose remains are kept here? Iranian troops, perhaps officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, captured during the Iran-Iraq War? Kuwaiti soldiers captured during the occupation of the Emirate? Some of those 600 Kuwaitis whom Iraq agreed to return under the terms of Resolution 687, but never did? Possibly a mix of the above.

The term "death camp" doesn't seem wholly applicable, not in the sense with which we've come to associate it. From what I can make out, this place doesn't seem to have been geared towards detaining large numbers of prisoners for any protracted length of time, or—given the single "shooting gallery"—executing them on a large scale; rather, this seems to be a place to which persons, who were being detained elsewhere, were brought to be executed (perhaps preceded by some torture/interrogation). We're not looking at a "factory of death" here; if anything, it seems more a "studio of death."

The storage of the remains carries some questions with it. It is generally agreed upon in the muslim world that the deceased should be buried ("Have We not caused the earth to hold within itself the living and the dead?" Qur'an 77.25-26), and it may be that the the people responsible for this... charnel-house wanted to deny their victims access to the afterlife. The fact that coffins were left open seems to point towards this conclusion. However, the proper burial of a deceased is the collective duty of all muslims (fard kifayah); if, for instance, the deceased's family fail to bury him, it is the duty of any and all other muslims to carry out that duty.
I'm no expert on Islam, but it seems to me that by not according these dead a proper burial, the people responsible for this facility have failed to carry out their obligations to Allah. Then again, the powers that be (shortly "will have been," insh'allah) in Iraq have been noted for being less than consistent in their devotion. Hopefully, this discovery will drive that point home to any muslim who thinks of the Coalition forces as "Crusaders."

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