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Kandahar, Afghanistan — Flies buzz around smears of blood on the metal shelves in Kandahar's morgue. The smell is overwhelming, a fetid reek that seeps into the lungs and thickens, leaving a visitor gagging for air.
This is a choke point in the system that collects the human remains left behind by the rising violence in southern Afghanistan. Foreign soldiers in flag-draped coffins amount to perhaps 4 per cent of the 4,000 or more people who have died in the war this year. The bulk of the dead are insurgents and civilians, whose disposal is far less ceremonial.
Friends and relatives sometimes recover the bodies where they fall and give them a traditional burial. However, hundreds of others lie unclaimed and these corpses end up in the callused hands of Mohammed Shah.
The soft-spoken man guesses that he is 35 years old, but he looks decades older. He worked as a farm labourer until the end of last year, when the man formerly responsible for the morgue died of old age. Mr. Shah tells his relatives that he works as a clerk at Mirwais Hospital; it would be shameful to admit that he spends his days in the small white trailer where the bodies are kept, hidden in the foliage behind the hospital.
Racks inside the trailer can hold 20 corpses at a time and they often fill up during the worst of the fighting and bombings. The air conditioning cannot keep up with the summer heat, so Mr. Shah works amid the smell of rot. He complains of headaches.
"Sometimes they deliver the bodies at night, and I don't get any sleep," he says. "When I sleep, people say I talk in my dreams, I say very bad words. But I don't remember my dreams, thank God."
Mr. Shah says he has handled more than 500 corpses since he started, but hospital officials admit that it's impossible to know the real figures because of shoddy record-keeping. A battered notebook, with the words "book of corpses" scrawled on the cover, contains a few details for some of them: name, place of origin, date admitted and a short description of how the person died.
But hospital staff do not document the majority of cases and they blame the local police for failing to provide information about the bodies they drop at the morgue.
"We need a written record," says Sharifa Seddiqi, the hospital director. "Who is this dead person? A suicide bomber? A political prisoner? This is the problem. We don't know."
Police are not the only ones who dump bodies on Mr. Shah's doorstep.
People bring the dead in pickup trucks, family sedans and donkey carts. The hospital's bare wards, lacking equipment and drugs, also send their share of corpses.
The most common cause of death appears to be gunshot wounds, Mr. Shah says. Blast injuries are also common, usually a result of Taliban bombings and sometimes air strikes by foreign troops.
One of the corpses appears to be a Pashtun tribesman with a bushy black beard, his chest cut open and his eyes missing. Mr. Shah says the police told him that the man had died while in detention at Guantanamo, Cuba, but the claim could not be verified and it's unclear how he received the injuries.
Suicide bombers also end up at the morgue, and Mr. Shah has become an expert in the ways a bomb belt can rip a person apart. He crouches in front of a blackened heap of rags and flesh, and points to a bomber's gaping chest cavity. It was a small bomb, he says; no foreign troops were injured as the man blew himself up outside a Canadian troop carrier on the outskirts of the city.
A Taliban statement later identified the man as Jamaluddin, of Kandahar province, but in the morgue his remains lay unclaimed. Insurgents are usually reluctant to pick up their comrades' bodies, but they do sometimes skulk inside the morgue.
The Taliban do not bother Mr. Shah; he was born in the insurgent heartland of Panjwai district and he occasionally recognizes the dead fighters or the dangerous men who arrive to collect them.
Those who are not collected get buried in a nearby graveyard. Kabul authorities have reportedly decreed that suicide bombers will not receive an Islamic burial, saying they have violated a religious tenet by killing themselves.
Feelings about the Taliban are not so harsh in Kandahar, however, and Mr. Shah says he tries to treat every corpse with dignity. The only ritual denied the bombers is the customary washing of the body. "We don't wash the suicide bombers," he said. "The body is broken. You cannot wash it."
The others get heaved onto a tiled table and rubbed clean. Mr. Shah changes into a black outfit beforehand to avoid staining his clothes. The process takes an hour if he works alone, or half the time with an assistant. A woman washes the female bodies.
Mr. Shah wraps the clean bodies in white cloth and ties the bundles in three places, then lowers them into narrow plywood coffins. Tufts of raw cotton are packed inside to keep the loads from shifting, the boxes are shut and gravediggers take them away. They are dropped in shallow graves near the city's northern slums, under piles of gravel and dirt.
Afterward, Mr. Shah takes a hot shower, changes into his regular clothes and goes home. The work is not pleasant, he says, but he can now afford to supplement his family's diet with occasional meals of meat.
He also seems to feel a quiet pride in his role as the gatekeeper for the dead. "It's hard work," he says. "But it's necessary."
Graeme Smith is The Globe and Mail's correspondent in Moscow.
