Travel

Never-Ending Death

Iraq’s Wadi Al-Salam Mega-Cemetery Knows No Bounds

By Karlos Zurutuza

Believed to be the most expansive necropolis in the world, Wadi Al-Salam is constantly expanding and therefore difficult to survey. The grounds cover at least 1,920 acres. Photo by Hassan Al-Jarrah.

Finding the way to where I’m going couldn’t be easier: Just follow the cars with coffins strapped to their roof racks. This grim procession happens daily as hundreds of Arab men in turbans and women wearing black veils drive through the unforgiving Iraqi desert toward Najaf, the third most sacred city for Shia Muslims after Mecca and Medina. Death is both their constant travel companion and their final destination—it literally hovers above their heads throughout the journey to Wadi al-Salam, which contains an estimated 5 million gravesites and is reputedly the largest Muslim cemetery in the world.

I arrive at the same time as Hassan, a man who came from Basra along with his brothers, wife, and three children to bury his father. Theirs was not a funeral procession that allowed much time for grieving.

“We only stopped once on the way here, a five-minute toilet break at the service station halfway,” Hassan says. “It’s five hours to Basra, and in this heat the corpse decomposes rapidly.”