For several weeks, you could see little piles of dirt all over Baghdad, and along the highways leading outside of the city, marked with bricks, or stones, or signs and, always, with palm leaves. The drying, wilting palm leaves were buried, standing up, to mark the graves. Some of the graves had little cardboard placards stuck carefully under a pile of stones to help family members: Adult male, adult female, 2 children in black Mercedes. Adult male, small boy in a white pick-up.

Sometimes the graves were marked by the license plate of the car the victims were in. But most of them were marked with the palm leaves.

�Baghdad Burning September 08, 2003