Purifying dead, Iraqis awash in grief
By Patrick Healy, Globe Staff, 5/21/2003
AJAF, Iraq -- The young man with wet hands is the first to see the minivan as it careens among the tombstones of the Valley of Peace, halting and speeding, as if uncertain where this journey ends and the next begins. With the hem of his white robes, the man rubs his fingers dry, and waits.
He is a body washer, a sacred role in the rawest of rituals in postwar Iraq -- the bathing of the dead before burial. In a country where few people can find steady work, the round-the-clock demands on these men and women are only mounting.
The minivan pulls up to the Old Haider Washing Place in the middle of the valley's vast cemetery. It is a small family this time -- a father, his older brother, his last two sons, a few cousins.
Lashed to the car's roof is the homemade wooden coffin of his third son, Esa Hassan. Two days earlier, a US cluster bomb had sent the 11-year-old flying across a playing field near his home in Baghdad. Four hours ago, Esa died.
The other sons, Juad and Alaa, scramble onto the hood and strain for balance. They slide the coffin onto the heads of men below, who carry it inside to the white-robed man now standing by a small pool of water and cedar leaves.
''My son,'' says Esa's father, Muhammad. ''Yes,'' the body washer says.
Muhammad delicately unwraps the towels around his son's body and lifts him onto an 8-foot-long stone altar. As the body washer dips a ladle into the pool, Muhammad kneels by the altar and caresses his son's smooth, shaved head. Esa is thin from hunger. His eyelashes are dark and long, elegant. His long fingers are cupped as though ready to throw a ball.
The body washer, known in Arabic as a yighsilchi, covers Esa's torso with a cloth, then splashes water on the boy's head, chest, arms, and legs. With both hands, he scrubs a soapy batch of wool across the skin. The foam glistens in the sunlight that bathes the room.
The father, crouched on the floor, begins to weep.
''My son,'' he says again.
The washing of the body has long been a central burial rite in Iraq, but it has assumed new significance recently. Relatives stand nearby and grieve not only for their loved one, but also for their country's betrayals and agonies.
Many Shi'ite Muslims bring their dead from around the country to the Valley of Peace for burial near the Shrine of Ali, a holy site honoring a cousin of the Prophet Mohammed. And with so many lives lost in this country -- war victims, men and women stricken by disease, bodies being discovered in the hundreds in mass graves -- grief and hopelessness flood this washing place on most days.
One of the body washers, Alaa al-Zubaidi, began working here when he was 11, collecting the cedar leaves used to purify the water. (The cedar is mentioned in the Koran and is considered a holy tree.) Today he is the chief washer, rising at dawn and often not stopping before midnight as he cleanses the 35 to 40 bodies that now arrive daily.
''The person must be pure so he can be prayed over and prepared to face God,'' said Zubaidi, 27. ''It is both for body and soul. It is a sacred rite.''
Most days, half of the bodies come from Baghdad -- people killed by land mines, looters, and previously unexploded ordnance from the war. Some families travel all the way from coastal Basra; one group of 35 recently endured a carjacking as they brought a relative from there, finding a ride with another convoy.
All but combat casualties are washed; those who died in battle are sprinkled with dust. ''They are considered to be purified by shedding his own blood, by being a witness to martyrdom,'' says another body washer, Kareem al-Zubaidi, Alaa's brother.
A spirit of reconciliation has yet to take hold in this country, with so many still angry at Saddam Hussein's regime and the former ruling Ba'ath Party, but there are signs of forgiveness here. Several body washers say they are against war and against Hussein, but they absolve those who supported him.
''All the souls lost are not cheap,'' said Kareem al-Zubaidi. ''They are your fellow countrymen. We are suffering. We weep and cry, even for the Iraqi soldier, because he is my brother or your brother or my neighbor.''
Some mourners do not forgive so easily. On a recent day, five bodies arrived at the washing place from a recently discovered mass grave in Mahaweel, about an hour north. More than 3,000 bodies have been found there this month, believed to be the victims of a 1991 purge by the regime after a Sh'ite uprising against Hussein.
The family of Akram Hamza al-Mummar carries a shawl of his bones into the washing place, laying it on the floor for the body washer to rearrange into an outline of Mummar's skeleton. The skull is found. Some fingers. Tibia. The remains are sprinkled with dust -- a martyr of '91, the body washer declares.
''Saddam is an evil man, but Saddam by himself cannot do such things,'' says Samir Saadi, the dead man's son. ''George Bush Sr. and the Saudis did not support us during the uprising. They share blame here.''
Muslim tradition calls for a quick burial, but for many Muslims, being buried in Najaf is so significant that families are willing to let the corpses decay in the hope that the roads will become safer and allow travel from elsewhere in Iraq to this holy city.
One family waited a month before the patriarch could be brought for burial; his organs had turned to mush and the stench overpowered everyone in the washing place but the washer.
After bodies are washed (women are cleansed in a separate room), they are returned to the coffins and taken to the Shrine of Ali for a blessing. Families routinely become stuck in traffic in busy Najaf -- a funeral procession brings no special treatment -- before returning to the Valley of Peace to hire a grave digger and walk to the tomb or crypt.
The funeral is usually quick and quiet, except for women overcome by grief who beat their breasts and slap their faces in torment.
It is at the washing place where despair is most often given voice, as men stand outside and speak of their loss.
''Look at him -- look at this boy killed,'' says Esa Hassan's uncle, Aliaabe. ''This is not the victim of Saddam Hussein. He is the victim of the United States. Is this what America wanted? It is a genocide.''
He dabs at his wrinkled eyes with a dirty, torn handkerchief, then crumples against the Toyota in tears.
From inside come the shrieks of the father. Esa is placed on one side to have his back scrubbed, then the other; only the body washer can move him. Muhammad goes to the boy, but the family pulls him back. The boy lies on the altar with his knees crooked, as if lying in a child's bed that he has outgrown. The body washer turns Esa's head to the right so his closed eyes face his father.. And Muhammad Hassan goes to his son again, this time touching him.
Patrick Healy can be reached at phealy@globe.com.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 5/21/2003.
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