'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
Pictures of the two brothers stare out, side by side, separated by the gulf of a quarter-century. Rahim Jabr died in 1981, a foot soldier in the bloody eight-year war with Iran, and Naeem was a casualty of the savage sectarian fighting that gripped Baghdad in 2006.
The gravedigger, Mr. Abu Seiba, said it is impossible to guess how many bodies are buried here, perhaps tens of millions, as each grave is built on top of an older one.
"We used to receive 200 to 250 bodies a day; now it's fewer than 100," said Najah Abu Seiba, the patriarch of a gravedigging family here for three centuries. "We used to work 24 hours a day."
