THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The sectarian violence and just plain lawlessness in Baghdad has reached a point that even trying to find missing family and friends at the city's morgue is a potentially fatal undertaking.

In recent months, Shiite militias have been staking out Baghdad’s central morgue in particular, and the authorities have received dozens of reports of kidnappings and killings of Sunni Arabs there.

Many Sunnis now refuse to go there to look for missing family members and are forced to take extraordinary measures to recover a relative’s body, including sending Shiite friends in their stead.

And if they can not be identified, the bodies end up in an anonymous grave,uncared for and unmourned by their families, if anyone is left.

While the morgue tries to keep bodies for at least a month, officials often have to unload them much sooner because the building only has the refrigerator capacity to store about 100 bodies at a time, Mr. Khuzaie said. On occasion, the morgue has received several hundred bodies in a day.

Health officials say scores of bodies go unidentified every week, though there is no way to determine the victims’ sectarian affiliations.

At least twice a week, a member of Mr. Sadr’s organization, Sheik Jamal al-Sudani, gathers a crew of men to pile the bodies onto a large truck and drive them to the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala for an anonymous Shiite burial. Mr. Sudani said the lightest loads number about 70 bodies while the heaviest have topped 250.

Early on Friday morning, Mr. Sudani’s workers, wearing white boots and white plastic gloves, received bloodied and disfigured bodies through the morgue’s side door, zipped them into black body bags and hauled them into the back of the truck, chanting, “There is no other god but Allah.”

“We take care of them,” said Mr. Sudani, who stood to one side watching the ritual. “Sunni, Shiite, Christian — it doesn’t matter. They’re all victims.”

They are certainly all the same to Our Dear Embattled Leader.