FOR 23 years Sheikh Jamal al-Sudani has taken it upon himself to bury the bodies of murdered Iraqis — men, women and children — whose families were too afraid to retrieve them from the mortuary slabs of Baghdad.

Until recently they were the victims of Saddam Hussein’s pitiless and paranoid regime, which hunted down critics with ruthless efficiency and often dispatched their sons as well to eliminate the risk of revenge.

When Saddam was overthrown three years ago, Sudani thought his workload would ease. But now he is busier than ever and can barely imagine the suffering of those whose grisly remains are being tipped into new mass graves reminiscent of the old tyranny.

In July, which saw the worst sectarian slaughter so far in Baghdad, Sudani collected up to 500 bodies in a single week. There was one particularly dreadful day when he wondered how he would find the strength to carry on.

Arriving at al-Tub al-Adli morgue in the capital, he was asked to remove a coarse cloth sack of heads that had been left on a filthy floor. Among the heads was that of a boy no more than 12 years old. Sudani could see that it had been cut off.

“I felt something snap inside me,” he said last week. “My guts were knotted and I started to cry. It was like looking at my young son. He had such an innocent face.”

Yet Sudani, a father of three boys — Khaled, 18, Hassanein, 16, and Jaafar, 7 — recovered his composure, reflected on his duty to the dead and returned to his macabre routine.

The sheikh ensures that each of Baghdad’s unclaimed bodies is wrapped in six metres of blue plastic and loaded onto a flat-bed lorry for the journey south.

The route is perilous for the drivers of his truck and three escort vehicles. They are Shi’ites but must pass through the so-called “Triangle of Death”, the heartland of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and associated Sunni extremists.

“Every time we do the trip we feel that an invisible hand is guiding us,” Sudani said. “It is the divine presence of Allah’s angels that sees us safely through.”

The convoy’s destination is usually the holy city of Najaf and the Wadi al-Salam (valley of peace) cemetery. One of the largest graveyards on earth, it is said to have been designated a gateway to paradise by Imam Ali, one of Shi’ite Islam’s most revered figures.

Here, within sight of the gilded Imam Ali mosque, the sheikh and a team of helpers wearing white gloves and masks unload the bodies, remove the plastic wrapping and cut the bonds of any whose hands were tied before they were killed.

They wash and disinfect the bodies, then assign a number to each one. Every tormented face is photographed and any distinguishing features are meticulously recorded on a computer in case a loved one should summon the courage to come looking for them.

The bodies are then shrouded in 10 metres of white cotton, carried to the graveside and lain in line to await burial.

The diggers toil relentlessly to prepare for at least two deliveries a week from the sheikh, who brings scores of bodies each time. First a shallow, sloping trench is carved out of the desert soil, then individual holes are dug.

In theory, each hole should be as deep as the digger is tall. But if pressure of numbers makes this impossible, care is taken to ensure that the graves are at least deep enough to keep out wild dogs.

The bodies are heaped in and covered with the mushroom-coloured sand of the desert. In the absence of names, their numbers are marked on a concrete block at the side of the pit and prayers are recited to complete the ceremony.

Mass graves in Iraq have long been associated with Saddam’s cruellest campaigns of persecution, from Operation Anfal against the northern Kurds in 1988 — for which the former dictator is now on trial, accused of genocide — to the suppression of an uprising by southern Shi’ites in 1991.

When coalition forces invading three years ago found no weapons of mass destruction, Tony Blair said he hoped that the discovery of such graves would persuade those who doubted the wisdom of removing Saddam “just how brutal, tyrannical and appalling that regime was and what a blessing it is for the Iraqi people and for humankind that he has gone from power”.

The mass graves of the post-war period in Najaf and the neighbouring holy city of Karbala are filled by Sudani and others with a care that Saddam’s henchmen never showed. Yet they signify atrocities as horrifying as almost anything seen in the pre-war Iraq.

“It is as if Saddam had never left,” Sudani said. “In his day people were callously murdered and those I have to pick up from the morgue today are no different. I believe the people carrying out these murders learnt from Saddam. He was the master. But the killers have developed new methods more brutal than before.”

The victims of Sunni beheading gangs and the Shi’ite death squads’ so-called “driller killers” are piling up at an increasingly alarming rate amid claims that Iraq is entering a civil war.

“How could humans reach this level of violence? What drove them to such a level of inhumanity?” said the sheikh, reflecting the despair of millions clinging precariously to life in cities blighted by terror. “How have we reached the stage where we have hundreds of unclaimed bodies every week?”

Part of the answer lies in the records he has amassed over the years. The strange personal archive maintained by Sudani and his son Khaled at their modest home in the poor Baghdad suburb of Sadr City chronicles each change in the pattern of violence and its devastating impact.

The files created for each month show how the Sunni beheaders held sway when their stronghold of Falluja was stormed by US forces in 2004; how Shi’ite squads armed with electric drills stepped up their activities after an attack on the al-Askari mosque in Samarra last February; and how little difference the killing in June of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, has made to the level of violence.

According to health ministry figures, 3,438 civilians were killed in Iraq in July alone, nearly double the figure for January. A much-heralded security plan for Baghdad, under which US and Iraqi forces aim to secure the city, one area at a time, is cutting the number of murders in some parts of the city but August figures showed the overall toll down by only 17%.

Looking at Sudani’s computer records is like peering into a chamber of horrors. A photograph of each corpse he has catalogued glares out from the screen. The sheikh may know nothing about how they led their lives but he possesses intimate knowledge of how they died.

Some of those who were burnt were killed in car bombs, he explains, while others were dowsed with petrol and set alight. Of those who died from asphyxiation, some were strangled and others were suffocated with polythene bags.

“Sometimes people can’t believe what they see in these pictures,” he said. “Many can’t stomach them but I have to live with them, be with them and try to make sense out of them.

“I am very tired but this has become my destiny, my mission. I do not do this out of choice but out of religious obligation.”

It was while I was working on an investigation to expose Iraq’s new mass graves two months ago that I was warned of a plan to kill me. This newspaper’s emergency evacuation procedure swung into action and I had no choice but to abandon my inquiries for the time being. But Sudani’s haunting images made me determined that the story should be told.

The sensitive and hazardous nature of Sudani’s work has attracted unwelcome attention to him, too. A roadside bomb was recently detonated as his convoy drove through the town of Latifiya in the Triangle of Death. Seven of his men were injured in the attack, which he says was aimed at him.

“The only reason no one was killed was that the vehicles were driving in the middle of the road rather than at the side,” he said.

Several death threats have followed in text messages warning him to stop what he is doing or face the consequences. “Leave your job, curtail your movement, we shall kill you very soon,” said one text.

He believes his association with the Mahdi army of Moqtadr al-Sadr, the radical Shi’ite cleric, has helped to make him the target of Sunni extremists.

One factor in his decision to ignore the warnings is the satisfaction he senses when a family traces a missing relative through his archive and discovers that he has provided dignified burial.

Often the families are Sunnis who did not collect a body for fear of being kidnapped or killed by Shi’ite militiamen said to watch the morgue. Those who prefer a Sunni burial ground are allowed to exhume the dead.

Sudani makes no religious distinction between those he helps: “The unclaimed victims have no mothers or fathers to cry for them so my men and I become their loved ones and we mourn them as our own.”