In Ancient Iraqi Cemetery, Families Search for the Missing
NAJAF, Iraq – The graves stretch some 10 miles into the desert, in what may be the largest cemetery in the world.
Near the center lie the older ones, packed closely together in a jumble of tall clay mounds and blue-domed mausoleums. Here is the final resting ground for those killed during Saddam Hussein's brutal regime or in the war against Iran and other cases and causes that date back centuries.
In the outskirts of the cemetery, the city fades into the background and the graves grow farther apart. This area is for the newly dead, the ones killed in the violence that erupted after the U.S. occupied Iraq in 2003.
It is also for the missing.
For scattered among the marble tombstones are simple stone markers with numbers but no names, to show where the unidentified rest — about 22,000 of them, say cemetery officials. These are the ones who lie unclaimed, who died without a proper burial and ended up at the cemetery without their loved ones ever knowing.
It was here in the Wadi al-Salam, or the Valley of Peace cemetery, that 42-year-old refrigerator repairman Mahdi Jadoua Ahmed came looking for his two missing brothers.
Nobody knows just how many Iraqis went missing during the sectarian warfare that tore the country apart. But at least 17,477 unidentified bodies have been found since May 2005, according to an Associated Press tally based on reports from morgue and police officials.
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Near the center lie the older ones, packed closely together in a jumble of tall clay mounds and blue-domed mausoleums. Here is the final resting ground for those killed during Saddam Hussein's brutal regime or in the war against Iran and other cases and causes that date back centuries.
In the outskirts of the cemetery, the city fades into the background and the graves grow farther apart. This area is for the newly dead, the ones killed in the violence that erupted after the U.S. occupied Iraq in 2003.
It is also for the missing.
For scattered among the marble tombstones are simple stone markers with numbers but no names, to show where the unidentified rest — about 22,000 of them, say cemetery officials. These are the ones who lie unclaimed, who died without a proper burial and ended up at the cemetery without their loved ones ever knowing.
It was here in the Wadi al-Salam, or the Valley of Peace cemetery, that 42-year-old refrigerator repairman Mahdi Jadoua Ahmed came looking for his two missing brothers.
Nobody knows just how many Iraqis went missing during the sectarian warfare that tore the country apart. But at least 17,477 unidentified bodies have been found since May 2005, according to an Associated Press tally based on reports from morgue and police officials.