After years of neglect, Basra’s British cemetery is football field
A woman wearing a black coat and carrying a black bag roams this cemetery without any graves. There are also some young boys playing football in this dusty yard, surrounded by a fence with a small gate. This is Basra's British cemetery. The cemetery, located in the Hakimiyah district of Basra, is home to the […]Mustafa Sadoun reports for Niqash:
A woman wearing a black coat and carrying a black bag roams this cemetery without any graves. There are also some young boys playing football in this dusty yard, surrounded by a fence with a small gate. This is Basra's British cemetery.
The cemetery, located in the Hakimiyah district of Basra, is home to the bodies of British servicemen who died in Iraq during the British occupation of the country during World War I. According to British records there are 2,551 burials from World War I and a further 365 from World War II, as well as graves of other nationalities. Previous to Iraq's attack on Kuwait in 1991, special teams from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission would come from there regularly to keep up the cemetery’s maintenance. However since then, the cemetery has been badly neglected.
