Baghdad Garden Becomes Graveyard, Full of Grieving

An Iraqi woman at the grave of a relative behind Baghdad's Abu Hanifa mosque, the most hallowed place of worship for Sunnis in Iraq.

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BAGHDAD — In the gardens of the living and the dead, the war goes on; not so much with enthusiasm as with resignation.

It is just after dawn Friday, which is the first day of Id al-Adha, literally “the Great Feast,” celebrated by Muslims worldwide to coincide with the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. The dun-colored alleyways of the Adhamiya neighborhood here are deserted at this hour, everywhere except in the memorial garden behind the Abu Hanifa mosque, which is the most hallowed place of worship for Iraqi Sunnis.

Thousands of mourners throng the headstones in what only three years ago was a community garden on the banks of the Tigris River. This is a relatively new tradition in Iraq, paying respects to the dead between morning prayers and the feast held later in the day. On this one day, the garden of the dead overflows with the living.

A white blimp hovers high overhead, a reminder that Adhamiya was once a bastion of the Sunni insurgency. It is an American reconnaissance craft, loaded with video cameras. The Abu Hanifa mosque was long a rallying point, and a few blocks away was Saddam Hussein’s last hiding place as he escaped Baghdad.

Now this garden, known as the Martyrs of Adhamiya since it became a cemetery in 2007, is so densely packed with graves that it is often difficult to walk between the rectangular capstones that cover each one (out of reverence, no one dares tread on top). Six months ago, the authorities counted 9,000 graves, but many more have been added since. Nearly all are victims of Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence of one sort or another — terroristic bombings, sectarian killings, political assassinations.

The air is scented with a profusion of burning joss sticks, stuck in the earth around the graves. Many are adorned, in the Iraqi way, with plastic flowers; often photographs of the deceased are propped up against the headstones.

Here no one seems to believe the war is over. “Even in a hundred years it won’t get better,” says Sabriya Fadhil Abbas, kneeling at the grave of her brother Ali, 39, killed by a car bomb in 2008, leaving a wife and seven children, the eldest 13. “They’re still fighting in the government; no one trusts one another. How can it end?”

News about the war in Iraq is taking a back seat to the escalating war in Afghanistan, but still the violence continues. What was our objective for invading Iraq? Did we liberate the Iraqi people and make their lives better by invading the country and killing Saddam Hussein? Are the Iraqi people interviewed for this story correct when they say the war will last forever? Can they trust their government? Can they trust the United States?