Saleha drags herself one haunted step after another. Her black abaya brushes the ground, raising dust. She looks to the sky and cries, “Why did you leave me alone? Why did you go away, Fatima?” She touches the simple wooden coffin as it passes and says, “Why?”

The grieving woman screams with the desolation of a person who has just lost her younger sister. Fatima, 56, who leaves behind two sisters and five brothers, lived with her husband Tahseen in a brick house in Ba’quba, the capital of the Diyala province, 50 kilometers (31 miles) northeast of Baghdad. A late-stage cancer took her life in just three months.

After being ritually washed with water three times, her body was wrapped in a white shroud — the "kafan." Now, it lies on the ground in solitude — a void between the earth and the afterlife. Around her, women gather, also standing alone, but united by grief in the Najaf cemetery, south of the Iraqi capital, where the rituals of death and burial have barely changed in 1,400 years. Grandchildren, sisters and friends hold a silent vigil nearby amid tombs both new and ancient, mounds of red sand and piles of concrete.

Wind-blown sand turns the early afternoon pale, shrouding the women as their bodies convulsively rock in sorrow. “Allah, why did you let her leave so soon?” Sajida, Fatima's sister, asks mournfully. Her hands clap hard on her head, palms turned upward, and eyes are fixed on the body of Fatima as six men prepare to carry her to a grave.