Battle, bomb blast, massacre and murder — all are good business for the men loitering in the shadows among the tombs in Najaf.
“When news breaks of heavy fighting or a suicide attack somewhere in Iraq, most people think, ‘How terrible’,” said Ali Abud al-Zahra, 34, a gravedigger at Wadi al-Salaam cemetery, the largest graveyard in the world. “But we pick up our shovels and wonder who will get the contract to bury the dead.”
Wednesday was a good day for Mr al-Zahra. An Islamic State suicide bomb attack in the distant town of Muqdadiyah two days earlier had killed 37 men.
The small burial company that employs Mr al-Zahra, one of more than 400 similar offices in Najaf, had secured the contract for most of the dead from the incident. Their bodies had arrived for burial throughout the morning.
With an average grave fee at the Iraqi dinar equivalent to £250, half of which is profit, the Iraqi civil war has boosted business among gravediggers in this holiest of Shia cemeteries. It covers more than 1,500 acres and contains the bodies of an estimated five million people.
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“I’ll be honest about it,” said Amer Khadum, 41, standing beside Mr al-Zahra in the shadows of the tombs. “It makes us happy to do this job. We make a lot of money.
“Five years ago maybe we got an old man or woman to bury every three days, and you’d see the offices squabbling over their body for custom. Now you see us relaxed and rich, just waiting for the bodies to come.”
Iraq’s recent history has been the bloodiest in the Middle East. The Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein’s era of repression during the 1980s and 1990s, the American occupation and now the war with Islamic State — no other country in the region has suffered so much.
“Saddam helped us a lot,” said Jabar Muhammad Abdul Amir, 55, head of a 200-year-old family burial business in Najaf. “If he wasn’t at war he was always hanging people.
“Sundays and Wednesdays he’d hang men, Tuesdays he hanged women. So if other business was slow, at least we knew which days of the week to wait for the bodies of the hanged.”
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The men all agreed that most recent era of bloodshed, the continuing two-year-old struggle with Islamic State, has generated their best business since the peak of sectarian fighting in Iraq in 2006.
In the first two months of 2016, United Nations figures show that at least 1,510 Iraqi civilians and security forces died in the violence. Those figures are a minimum estimate, based merely on registered deaths, and do not include many of the fatalities in areas held by Islamic State.
“Last year a car bomb in the district of Khalis killed 120 people in one go,” said Mr Amir. “I was responsible for them all, and charged each family the same rate — $300 a grave.”
Overall, since January 2014, violence in Iraq is likely to have killed between 53,361 and 72,056 people, according to the respective figures released by the UN and Iraqi Body Count, the independent British-American project compiling casualty statistics in Iraq.
At least 610 members of the security forces have been killed fighting Islamic State in past eight weeks according to the UN, and competition amongst the Najaf undertakers for military contracts is fierce.
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Though dead Shia soldiers belonging to the regular Iraqi army are commonly buried in family plots, members of the Shia militia Hashd al-Shaabi often employ specific burial companies to bury their dead in designated areas.
After the fiercer battles, between 60 and 100 dead fighters have required burial on a single day, and Mr Amir was furious to have lost a contract last year with one militia, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, to a rival office.
Asaib Ahl al-Haq has suffered heavy casualties fighting Islamic State and has four separate war cemeteries in Najaf, with between 300 and 550 dead in each. “I charged them $400 per grave, which included headstones of Italian marble,” Mr Amir said. “Then a group of young entrepreneurs offered them a rate of just $125 per grave and they took it.”
The gravediggers said they were unfazed by the mutilation of some of the war dead they had to bury.
“Many are incomplete,” said Adnan Tarosh, 42. “It depends what the family find. Sometimes we get just a leg or hand to bury. A couple of days ago I buried just two feet from one guy. It doesn’t bother me too much. I am a friend of the angel of death. I am with him here every day.”
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He looked around him at the ranks of tombs, adorned with pictures and fluttering flags, formed by the dead of one Shia militia, the Badr Organisation. Among them was a 14-year-old boy, numerous men in their twenties, grizzled veterans in middle age, and one of the group’s deputy ministers.
“They come to me dead,” Mr Taroshsaid, “and I put them in a grave at the same price for a commander or a soldier. Under this ground there is real democracy.”