Iraqis get tattoos for ID purposes

Iraqis get tattoos for ID purposes
Beheadings, burnings can result in unknown corpses
By Christian Berthelsen
Los Angeles Times

Baghdad, Iraq - The ghastly procession of decapitated corpses and
mutilated bodies that has defined death in Iraq drove Firas Adil Saadi
to do something that once was the province of convicts and degenerates
in Iraq: He got a tattoo.

The 28-year-old Shiite Muslim has a marking on his right shoulder so
his family may avoid the despair of not being able to identify his
remains. In ornate Arabic calligraphy, it says "My brother Husam,"
after a cousin who suffered such a fate. Saadi also carries paper
identification, but he believes it would be burned beyond recognition
in a bombing.

"The idea came to me after seeing these daily incidents during which
some corpses are mutilated and distorted, some were even headless, and
the fact that the identity cards are either lost or destroyed," said
Saadi, a trader who works in Baghdad's Shorja market, which has
suffered numerous bombings. "Even the water of the firefighting
equipment is destroying them, so I thought about an irremovable
identity card, which is the tattoo."

In Iraq, it has come to this: Faced with the omnipresent specter of
death, an increasing number of people, mainly Shiite men, are willing
to contravene social taboo to accommodate it.

Although tattoos are not exactly "haram," or forbidden, under Shiite
Islamic law, they are very much frowned upon in modern Iraq.

There was a time when men and women got tribal tattoos such as wrist
markings or small dots on the chin as a sign of beauty or for
spiritual reasons, such as warding off evil.

In the recent past, however, tattoos were usually worn by men of the
lowest classes and became a way to identify prisoners' bodies in case
they were tortured to death by guards. Repressed by Saddam Hussein,
Shiites make up the bulk of the lower classes, which might explain why
they're more willing than Sunnis to get tattooed.

"I think the resort to using the tattoos by people now from all social
classes is something like a return to barbarism, and this is exactly
what the Americans want, getting Iraq to the pre-civilization times,"
said Hashim Hassan, a Shiite professor at Baghdad University's College
of Information.

"Both the lower and middle classes are taking tattoo drawings on their
bodies. It is more among the men than the women because of the feeling
that the men are targeted so they do not want to lose the links with
their families (even if they are killed)," he said. "I think a time
will come when each family will choose a tattoo for itself and get
recognized by it." /copy and paste from http://www.denverpost.com/ci_5723184

Injectable rfid <http://www.google.com/search?q=injectable+rfid> might
be the better way to go, however if someone's at the epicenter of an
ied I doubt even injectable rfid would offer much by way of ability to
identify what was a human body before it became vapor.

Plus, if someone's willing to decapitate another wouldn't they also be
likely to strip off a tattoo?

--
Curt