Burials in Iraq are down

[JaJae]

NAJAF, Iraq — At what's believed to be the world's largest cemetery, where Shiite Muslims aspire to be buried and millions already have been, business isn't good.

A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that's cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.

Few people have a better sense of the death rate in Iraq .

"I always think of the increasing and decreasing of the dead," said Sameer Shaaban, 23, one of more than 100 workers who specialize in ceremonially washing the corpses. "People want more and more money, and I am one of them, but most of the workers in this field don't talk frankly, because they wish for more coffins, to earn more and more."

Dhurgham Majed al Malik, 48, whose family has arranged burial services for generations, said that this spring, private cars and taxis with caskets lashed to their roofs arrived at a rate of 6,500 a month. Now it's 4,000 or less, he said.

Malik said that the daily tide of cars bearing coffins has been a barometer of Iraq's violence for years. The number of burials rose and fell several times during Saddam Hussein's persecution of Shiites, and it soared again during the eight years of the Iran - Iraq war in the 1980s.

I've read a few articles on this story. This was the most even-handed story I could find. I've even seen blogs reporting this as bad news in Iraq because it was hurting their economy.

I think this is a good measure of violence in Iraq and definitely helps prove what the media and government have been saying regarding the levels of violence.

While I think this should be taken as good news, rather than spun to be bad news I also realize the political situation has shown no progress as of late. There's only so long we should hold out waiting for the Iraqis to step up.

[SoFlaJDM]

do you wanna leave a source?

edit: i found it, and you posted about 1/4 of the article without even providing a link

here's the rest of the article... i find it amusing where the op decided to cut off his snippet

Then in the 1990s, the daily average fell to 150 or less, Malik said. With the current war, the burials again reached 300 daily.
In the early days of the war, some bodies brought for burial had been victims of Saddam, found by their families in unmarked mass graves. Later, there were surges; September 2005 marked a high point after a stampede during a Shiite Muslim festival killed hundreds on a Baghdad bridge. More than 1,300 were buried in a single day, Malik said.
The cemetery workers aren’t immune to violence. In 2004, militia fighters loyal to the anti-American militant cleric Muqtada al Sadr and coalition forces fought in the cemetery, and burial operations had to stop.
Afterward, many cemetery workers were killed or injured by bombs left behind. Their work remained hazardous until U.S. and Iraqi military teams cleared the explosives, Malik said.
Najaf, a city of about 600,000 people, is built around the gold-covered Imam Ali Mosque, a shrine to one of the most revered figures in Shiite Islam who grew up in the home of the prophet Muhammad and later became his son-in-law.
The city, with the shrine and graveyard, is considered the third-most important holy site for Shiite Muslims, after Mecca and Medina. It attracts millions of pilgrims each year — and tens of thousands of funeral parties.
The Wadi al Salam cemetery — its name translates as “Valley of Peace” — dates to the 7th century. Its mud-brown jumble of crypts and rectangular and domed brick and marble tombs stretches to the horizon. It’s six miles long, two miles wide and grows by acres every day.
Imam Ali himself is said to have pronounced it the entrance to paradise. And so the Shiites come with their dead.
The burials aren’t expensive, usually $200 or less, but many people draw their income from them.
When a family arrives — after going through the indignity of having the coffin searched repeatedly for explosives — the body is taken to be washed at one of five family-owned businesses. Female bodies are washed by teams of women. Men wash the male bodies.
The bodies are then carefully wrapped in white cotton shrouds, made in factories in Najaf that also export them. Then the bodies can be taken to the tomb of Imam Ali for a ceremony that includes circling the imam’s tomb.
After prayers, the coffin is borne to the gravesite. There, professional preachers are paid to recite verses from the Quran. The family and the gravedigger remove the body from the coffin and ease it into the grave, placing the head in a niche dug at the end of the grave that faces Mecca.
After the burial, there is another prayer, then workers build a tomb over the grave.
The sights and smells of working with the bodies, particularly those torn by war, are hardly pleasant, but it becomes a mundane job like any other, said Jawad Abuseba, 40.
His family has dug graves for more than 300 years, he said. His hands are thick with calluses after 22 years of digging with a shovel, basket and pickaxe. With their nails torn and their skin gray, his hands look as though they're dead, too.
"There is nothing beautiful in this career, but I cannot do any another job," Abuseba said.
Shiites feel so strongly about being buried here that when it’s too dangerous to travel, families have buried their loved ones elsewhere temporarily, then disinterred them for reburial here.
Even with less violence, many of those buried here are victims of the war, and the tragedy of each loss offers a counterpoint to workers’ worries about money.
On a recent day, after the ritual washing, four male relatives carried a coffin containing the scorched and torn body of Mohammed Hazim, 33. Three women trailed, weeping.
Hazim, a member of the radical Mahdi Army militia, had been killed in a U.S. attack in Diyala province, his brother, Ali, said.
“Death to infidel America and the agent Iraqi government,” the family chanted again and again.
At the shrine, security guards stopped the procession to check the coffin for explosives before allowing the men to take it inside. Later, at the grave, the men cried and the three women fell to their knees shrieking and flinging fistfuls of sand into their hair, a gesture of extreme grief.
“We Iraqis are full with sadness and tragedies now,” Ali Hazim said. “I swear by the name of Allah that each house bears some weight of sadness and of tragedy, and this is the reality of Iraqis now."
For the laborers in the Valley of Peace, it was just another workday, one they faced with a matter-of-fact attitude unnerving to those who deal with death less frequently.
“Certainly, when the number of dead increases I feel happy, like all workers in the graveyard,” said Basim Hameed, 30, a body washer. “This happiness comes from the increase in the amount of money we have."
Death is something everyone must face, he noted. “My job demands death, and this is our fate, all of us.”

[David Octavius]

Originally Posted by JaJae

I've read a few articles on this story. This was the most even-handed story I could find. I've even seen blogs reporting this as bad news in Iraq because it was hurting their economy.

I think this is a good measure of violence in Iraq and definitely helps prove what the media and government have been saying regarding the levels of violence.

While I think this should be taken as good news, rather than spun to be bad news I also realize the political situation has shown no progress as of late. There's only so long we should hold out waiting for the Iraqis to step up.

This means what exactly? That things are now just horrible over there instead of gruesome.

Lets see:

1) There are 4 million Iraqi refugees out of a total population of 27 million - that almost 15% of the entire population displaced

2) Infrastructure is still a joke

3) The people that had the means (read - skilled and educated people) left Iraq long ago

4) Sectarian violence is still a huge problem


So while a 6 month time frame looks encouraging, the big picture suggests this will change.

[JaJae]

Originally Posted by SoFlaJDM

do you wanna leave a source?

edit: i found it, and you posted about 1/4 of the article without even providing a link

Yahoo News, AP. The part I quoted was essentially the crux of the story.

[JaJae]

Originally Posted by David Octavius

This means what exactly? That things are now just horrible over there instead of gruesome.

It means burials are down 1/3rd in Iraq.

[Scrum]

They only have one cemetery in the whole country?

That's crazy.

[SoFlaJDM]

actually, it was mcclatchy

[Donkey®]

It only means the fighting factions have carved themselves out a little piece of territory already so there's no need to kill for the territory anymore.

[JaJae]

Originally Posted by SoFlaJDM

actually, it was mcclatchy

Yes it was, I apologize. It was a Yahoo News popular item, I assumed it was AP. This is the link...
As violence falls in Iraq, cemetery workers feel the pinch - Yahoo! News

I've never heard of McClatchy actually...

[JaJae]

Originally Posted by Scrum

They only have one cemetery in the whole country?

That's crazy.

No, but the article states it is the most popular place to bury people and people come from all over to have their relatives buried there.

Dhurgham Majed al Malik, 48, whose family has arranged burial services for generations, said that this spring, private cars and taxis with caskets lashed to their roofs arrived at a rate of 6,500 a month. Now it's 4,000 or less, he said.

Malik said that the daily tide of cars bearing coffins has been a barometer of Iraq's violence for years. The number of burials rose and fell several times during Saddam Hussein's persecution of Shiites, and it soared again during the eight years of the Iran - Iraq war in the 1980s.

It's just an observation and seems to coincide with the lower death tolls being reported in Iraq.

[RMNIXON]

Originally Posted by JaJae

Yahoo News, AP. The part I quoted was essentially the crux of the story.

You forgot to put all the negative spin on top. Obviously what happened in 2004, 2005 compared to the 90's is the story here. Like nobody has told us thing were bad before they got better?

[RMNIXON]

A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that's cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.

Well, lets try and get them better jobs.

[David Octavius]

Originally Posted by JaJae

It means burials are down 1/3rd in Iraq.

Uh-huh and I already posted that your point is BS

As long as there is a secetarian war - which was not there before we went in - there will always be death and violence. That 150 people die a day instead of 300 is not something to cheer about, people are still dying with no end in sight.

Good news is a resolution of the war, or an imminent one period, anything else is bullshit because people will still die - sometimes in greater numbers, sometimes not as high, but people still die.

[JaJae]

Originally Posted by David Octavius

Uh-huh and I already posted that your point is BS

As long as there is a secetarian war - which was not there before we went in - there will always be death and violence. That 150 people die a day instead of 300 is not something to cheer about, people are still dying with no end in sight.

Good news is a resolution of the war, or an imminent one period, anything else is bullshit because people will still die - sometimes in greater numbers, sometimes not as high, but people still die.

Who's cheering? But this certainly isn't bad news and isn't something to write off as pointless. Yes, Iraq is still in sectarian violence and yes it's bad. But the deaths seem to be going down. Iraqis are burying far less people. That's a good thing and I really don't see why it can't be stated as such. It's not BS simply because other things are bad in Iraq. There are a lot of things in Iraq, some things are good news and some things are bad news. It's possible to separate the two.

[hereticzero]

Are they almost out of people?

[Publius]

It's hard to bury someone if they're nothing but ashes and charred chunks of biomass spread across an intersection.