It took Abu Haider and his relatives several hours to dig up his nephew’s grave and exhume the body at a cemetery in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf built especially for COVID-19 victims. When they had finished, they shrouded the body in white sheets, loaded it on to the back of a pickup truck and set off to re-inter it in Najaf’s old “Valley of Peace” graveyard, the traditional resting place for Iraq’s Shi’ites. In doing so, Abu Haider is not only reliving the pain of losing a loved one to the coronavirus pandemic that has infected nearly 300,000 Iraqis and killed more than 8,000.
