A festival of mourning turns bloody: "The 10th day of Ashura, March 2, was a bad one in Iraq: bombs in Karbala, bombs in Khadamiya. After an afternoon spent in hospitals, I went to the central morgue in Baghdad. It was semi-refrigerated and clammy and smelled like sweetish cloying meat. Some bodies lay on the floor, twisted among blankets and bits of bloodied rag and clothing; some bodies, naked, were stretched out on autopsy tables, with parts of limbs and personal effects in trays to the side. The scene looked much, much worse than dead people do in movies. These were not simply cold bodies but shreds of people: the remnants of a child, a blown-off head, legs without any torso. The morgue official, an overly jolly man, picked up a half a jaw and wriggled it at us. 'Look, you wanted to see. Look!' And in this nasty, cold, dismembered place of horror is where family members must come to identify their loved ones." i wanted to add perhaps a somewhat similar experience of when i was in kashmir. somehow the words just dont come.