Global News Journal

“Killed in a cowardly armed attack, Abbas Shawi Houshi al-Kaabi has died. The funeral will be held in his house in Wehda Quarter for three days.”

So reads a black banner draped on a wall on a Baghdad street, its message written in elegant Arabic calligraphy. Such funeral banners have long been customary in Iraq to announce the death of a loved one and publicly inviting others to join the aggrieved family mourn their loss.

They have also been a steady business for the calligraphers who painstakingly make them out by hand. But the number of black banners dotting Baghdad and other cities has swollen in recent years, as the indiscriminate and sectarian bloodshed following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003
has taken its toll on the Iraqi people.

Tens of thousands have died in over five years of violence following the U.S.-led invasion, as Iraqis became tragically accustomed to the relentless drumbeat of car bombs, kidnappings, suicide vests and assassinations.

The violence has brought as well a new feature to the funeral banners, which for much of Iraq’s recent history had heralded death mostly by old age or natural causes. The new banners, which too often read ‘killed in an explosion’ or ‘killed in an attack,’ hark back to Iraq’s bloody war with neighbouring Iran, which claimed a million lives on both sides over eight years.

In that era, hundreds of thousands of young Iraqi men killed in action were proclaimed martyrs on their funeral banners.

Abu Nizar, a calligrapher, is surrounded in his central Baghdad shop by different types of pens, brushes and pigments he uses to paint not only funeral banners but advertisements and
sundry other notices.

Until 2003, the veteran calligrapher was unaccustomed to making out funeral notices using such a bloody vocabulary. But now, even as violence drops sharply across Iraq, he does at least 10 such banners a month. He often refuses the $10 or so in payment from poor families who may have just lost their sole breadwinner. As he paints, he is often left wondering who will write his own banner.

Abu Osama al-Maliki, another calligrapher and artist, feels ashamed to be making a living on the back of the demise of others. “I feel for those who have died, but what can I do? We are all destined for death,” he said.

It is an awkward exchange between merchants and grieving families who come to request funeral banners, said Fadhel, a calligrapher who asked to go by his first name only.

“I don’t know what to do other than offer sympathetic words. It seems foolish bargain to make a deal with the dead and get money in return.”