THE WEST DESERT OF NAJAF – There are no signs to point the way to the New Valley of Peace or, as the Iraqis call it, the “Crown Cemetery”. But it is not difficult to find: just follow the cars. It is the only place they are heading on the rough desert road.
Work on this cemetery in southern Iraq began four months ago, and there are already more than 3,200 graves. Backhoe loaders work every night to make new furrows in the sandy soil.
“We are waiting for our mother,” said Ali Radhi, 49, of Nasiriyah as he stood by his car outside the cemetery gate in the blazing summer sun earlier this month, when mid-afternoon temperatures reached 115 degrees. “She died two days ago, but now with a crown, we cannot bring her. We have to wait for the ambulance to take her.
“There are some rituals we should be doing, but with the crown we can’t even touch her body and we don’t have a funeral,” he added softly, looking down the road as if he wanted the ambulance carrying his mother’s body to appear on the horizon . .
In Islam, burial should be done quickly, if possible within 24 hours of death. The body must be ritually cleansed by professional washing machines, but the family may be present: men washing a male relative, women by a woman.
In pre-Covid times, Shia Muslims, regardless of where they were from in Iraq, carried the coffin on their shoulders around the Imam Ali shrine in the pilgrim city of Najaf and prayed for the body outside the shrine gates. They would then take the coffin to the Wadi-Al-Salam cemetery, one of the largest and oldest in the world, to bury it.
Sunnis would hold their funerals close to home and then take the body to a nearby cemetery, where, as in Shiism, gravediggers would lift the deceased’s white coffin and place it on the ground, head to Mecca. .
For Mr. Radhi and the other people whose loved ones have been buried in the new Wadi-Al-Salam cemetery, all of these essential rituals must be forgiven, and it feels like betrayal. They failed to do the last good thing for someone they loved: send them in good shape to the next world.
“They are burying their relative not in the usual way, and this makes them very sad,” said Tawfik Mahdi, a cleric from Najaf, who is available to try to comfort families. “Our role is to reduce their pain and say, ‘Don’t worry, this pandemic happened and you can’t be around them like before, but we will pray for you.'”
The story of how the cemetery was born begins when the first coronavirus patients began dying in March in Baghdad.
The religious and health authorities were not prepared for the stigma that came with transmitting the disease, as well as the fear that touching the body would run the risk of contagion. Cemeteries refused to take those who had died from Covid-19 because people whose family members had not died from the virus felt it was a stigma to be buried alongside someone who had.
While scientists have not established how long the virus survives in a person who died from it, they believe it could take up to a few hours and could be in the materials used to wrap and transport bodies.
“I began to see these scenes on television, I still remember them, they threw seven or eight bodies out of a hospital morgue and left them there,” recalled Sheik Tahir Al-Khaqani, head of the Imam Ali combat division. One of the first militias created to fight against the Islamic State. Unlike some of the militias close to Iran, the Imam Ali brigade is linked to the moderate and inclusive Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Mr. Al-Khaqani came up with the idea that the solution was a new cemetery only for those who died of the coronavirus. He met with the Governor of Najaf, Mr. Sistani and the leader of the Shia Foundation, which is in charge of all Shiite financial and real estate affairs.
Within days, they had 1,500-acre land 20 miles from the city of Najaf, assigned for burials.
Imam Ali Combat Division volunteered to run the cemetery. Its medical teams were responsible for receiving the dead, disinfecting the body bags in which they arrived, and then washing the deceased.
Other contingents assumed responsibility for the excavation and burials. Some took on the role of guides to help family members when they find their relative’s grave among the thousands that stretch across the desert. Family visits are allowed 10 days after burial.
Under the orders of the Grand Ayatollah, although the cemetery is run by Shiites, it welcomes everyone, regardless of their faith or sect, and the burial is free.
Mohammed Qasim, a dating and vegetable farmer near Baghdad, said those who dug the graves, attended the washing, and performed the last rites are “human angels.”
“Yes, these are the noblest people I have ever met,” he said. “How can they not be the noblest when they are with death at the same table for breakfast, lunch and dinner and yet they do not complain?”
For Ari Sahak Dirthal, 33, an Armenian Christian, his father’s funeral on July 1 remains a source of pain. “I immediately went to the Armenian Orthodox Church in Baghdad because I knew that my father wanted to be buried there, so I was surprised when they said we couldn’t bury him here,” he said.
They directed him to the coronavirus cemetery. Along the way, he frantically made calls to find out what sentences to say. It still cuts quickly, he said, that no one from the Armenian Orthodox Church accompanied him.
Dirthal said he was received by the sheikhs in charge of the cemetery, who told him that his father could be buried anywhere.
“I just said, ‘I want my father’s grave to be far from the others’ and he was, in fact, buried a kilometer from the graves of the Muslims,” Dirthal said.
The Shiite gravediggers did their best for his father, he said, sending him a video of the burial, with one of the Shiite medical staff members wearing protective gear and awkwardly making the sign of the cross on his father’s body.
For Sunnis, the rituals are more familiar, making parting easier and less solitary. Hundreds of Sunnis are buried here. But a burial away from home is still difficult.
The main Sunni cemetery in Baghdad would not accept the body of Al-Murtada’s father Ahmed Jasmin, despite the fact that this is where all the members of his family had been buried.
“On the way to the new Wadi Al-Salam cemetery, I spoke to my father and said, ‘Please forgive me, I couldn’t do your will and bury you with our family,'” Jasmin, 22, said.
But after arriving at the cemetery, “all the fatigue and anger disappeared because I found a typical cemetery where I could visit my father at any time,” he said. “I was greatly relieved and told myself that God loves my father when he chose this place for his burial.”
The entrance to the cemetery is nothing more than a metal skeleton shaped like the door of a great mosque. Beyond stretches the desert, shining in the sun, row upon row after row of graves, each with the words of the Qur’an: “This is the will of Allah.”
As the sun went down at night earlier this month, more families arrived along with the ambulances. Burials take place from 6 in the afternoon until the first prayers in the morning.
Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters stood on the edge of the cemetery. A rope kept them from entering to make sure they were kept away from bodies and any living infections. Some raised their arms to heaven and wept over their loss.
Although crying and wailing are rituals, she perhaps expressed even more than usual a sense of injustice: how could they stay away from their loved ones in these last crucial moments? They had traveled so far, to a cemetery in the middle of nowhere, but could not follow the body to the end. It was the final and most painful form of social distancing.
A middle-aged brother and sister were together on the hot night. The wind blew the woman’s abaya around her in whirlpools and the man raised his arms to the sky.
“I hand you over to the care of Imam Ali,” he said to his dead father, referring to a founding figure of Shiite Islam.
Her sister wept in the wind.
Falih Hassan contributed reports from Baghdad.
