On wide, high-definition screens, images flash up for two seconds at a time: flayed skulls, charred limbs, disemboweled torsos, heads bloated and bulging around taped-up eyes. Men and women sitting in plastic seats flinch as they squint at the real-life horror show, trying to identify husbands, cousins and friends. This is the Baghdad morgue, where the grim body count of the last seven years has been a daily reality, where bodies were piled up and lay unclaimed by terrified families before being driven to vast graveyards with numbered plots. As American-led troops battled resistance and then civil war, this building and its 50 employees dealt with the consequences. In 2006 and 2007, the morgue received 150 corpses a day. Today, although the stream of dead has slowed to a trickle, the morgue remains a nightmarish reminder of the fighting’s lingering effects as people come to hunt through the photographs of
