Iraq’s Najaf Cemetery Swells as Fight Against IS Escalates
Wailing and pounding their chests in grief, a dozen women clad in mourning black gathered around a tomb in the massive cemetery in Iraq's holy Shiite city of Najaf. A short distance away, a grief-stricken man cried silently inside his car, parked next to a friend's tomb. The two granite tombs belong to Shiite militiamen […]Sinan Salaheddin writes for AP:
Wailing and pounding their chests in grief, a dozen women clad in mourning black gathered around a tomb in the massive cemetery in Iraq's holy Shiite city of Najaf. A short distance away, a grief-stricken man cried silently inside his car, parked next to a friend's tomb.
The two granite tombs belong to Shiite militiamen who fell in the ongoing campaign to dislodge the extremist Islamic State group from the northern city of Mosul. They are the latest addition to the cemetery known as Wadi al-Salam, or Valley of Peace, already home to millions of graves of Shiites from Iraq and elsewhere. It's the final resting place of choice for pious Shiites because of its proximity to the shrine of Imam Ali, the much revered 7th century founder of their sect.
With the government not publicizing the casualty figures of the Shiite-dominated security forces fighting in Mosul and elsewhere in northern Iraq, the cemetery offers one reliable, if not entirely accurate, indicator of battlefield losses from the government side. Sunni soldiers who die fighting are buried elsewhere.
