Sea of death: World's biggest cemetery filling up as Iraq's battle against Isis takes its toll
The Wadi al-Salam cemetery in Najaf covers about 10 square kilometres and contains five million bodies.
A vast cemetery in southern Iraq is running short of space as fighters killed in the battle against Islamic State (Isis) double the average rate of burials. The Wadi al-Salam cemetery – Arabic for Valley of Peace – in Iraq's Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, covers an area of around 10 square kilometres and is the final resting place of five million people.
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The number of daily burials his risen to 150-200 since the ultra-hardline Sunni militants overran a third of the country in 2014, Jihad Abu Saybi, a historian of the cemetery, told Reuters. The rate was 80-120 a day previously, he said.
The scale of the enormous cemetery – a seemingly never-ending sea of tombs – can be seen in this stunning drone footage.
As land becomes scarce, the cost of a standard 25 square metre family burial plot has risen to about five million Iraqi dinars (£3,200 or $4,100). This is almost double the amount paid for the same sized plot before violence escalated as IS exerted control over large swathes of north and western Iraq in 2014.
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The cemetery has a special place in the hearts of Shia Muslims as it is near the mausoleum of their first imam, Ali Bin Abi Talib, a cousin and son-in-law of Prophet Muhammad. Shia fighters often visit the shrine before heading to the frontline to battle Daesh, and request to be laid to rest in Wadi al-Salam should they be killed, as a reward for their sacrifice.
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