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Grieving Syrians forced to dig graves at night in besieged Ghouta

As regime airstrikes pummel Eastern Ghouta, petrified residents rush to bury their loved ones in the dark for fear of joining their lost relatives.
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In a cemetery in Harasta, a city in the besieged Syrian district of Eastern Ghouta, aerial attacks have raised the dead. Despite the acute danger and gruesome scenes, treks to graveyards are unavoidable. With people dying almost daily, a driver is tasked with dropping off corpses at the cemetery, where an undertaker and relatives wait to bury the bodies.

“Many burials take place after sundown since it’s harder for regime planes and their allies to spot small gatherings,” Hosam al-Beiruty, the head of the local council of Harasta, told Al-Monitor. “It wasn't always this way. Harasta used to have big funerals before the war. Many people would attend and a sheikh would say a prayer. Now a body is buried in 10 or 15 minutes by three or four relatives.”

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