During the past few months, Iraq’s memory of the “morgue refrigerators” has returned — after having somewhat diminished over the past two years but never having completely disappeared.

Iraqis have many sad stories to tell about those cold rotting corpses covered with camphor. Hatem Hassan, a resident of Mahmudiyah — 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) south of Baghdad — told Al-Monitor how he searched for the body of his elder brother who went missing two months ago. Hatem visited various hospitals and labs until he found his brother’s corpse, still in the clothes he died in, preserved in the morgue refrigerator of Al-Naaman Hospital in the Adhamiyah neighborhood of Baghdad. Once he found his brother, he started worrying about something more important: those who had killed him.

Iraqis aren’t too afraid of morgues and of what goes on inside. They have gotten used to them since the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988), which resulted in millions of deaths. The morgue refrigerator has become a symbol for the unknown and for searching for its puzzles among the corpses.

In his stories “Baghdad Wonders,” Iraqi writer Badr al-Salem writes about the unidentified corpses. A foreign correspondent named Miriam is searching for a missing person in the morgue. He writes, “We came back from the morgue. Everything was ugly. Dead bodies with no identities. And murders being carried out based on one’s [sectarian] identity.” In another chapter of the story, the author writes, “I was returning from the morgue with a trembling heart.” You can now find those stories in the so-called “hot areas” [areas plagued by terrorism] of Iraq.