COVID Clashes with Traditional Iraqi Burial

Religious customs in Middle Eastern countries are changing erratically due to coronavirus outbreak.

According to Adham Rashad Ismail, the agency’s head of mission in Iraq, “the World Health Organization says in guidelines similar to those issued during the Ebola epidemic that handling of the dead should be minimal and that trained medical teams should perform burials.” Burials are a sacred sacrament in many religions most often relating to the “afterlife” of the individual as well as a traditional custom passed down from centuries before. Now, most cases of religious burial rites are modified or canceled in the Middle East. Due to the number of deaths caused by COVID-19, the government has postponed many burials of family members 2 or more weeks. From this amount of time after death, has generated frustration and impatience amongst Iraqi and other Middle Eastern countries. However, some families have disregarded government protocol and have gone to extreme measures to even take corpses from medical personnel ahead of burials and taken to a private location. The location of burials has also effected the norm of Iraqi burial tradition. In “Baghdad and other provinces initially identified remote burial plots on the peripheries of cities. But families argued that burying their loved ones in such sites was undignified; most Iraqis inter their dead in cemeteries near holy shrines where they can return to pay homage”.

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