Feature: Cemeteries attract more visitors as Syria crisis drags on

Visiting the deceased relatives is one of the traditional practices Muslims are keen to follow on the first day of the Eid al-Fitr feast in Syria.

Ahead of the crisis, graveyards would be busy with visitors, but not like after five years of war, when the number of those visiting has largely gone up.

Before the war, most of those visiting the graves were young people visiting late parents. Now, most visitors are parents visiting their slain sons, who had been killed in the battles and violence that has engulfed the country over the past five years.

Throughout the country's five-year-old conflict, estimates of deaths varied between 155,587 and 402,819. On April 23, 2016, the United Nations and Arab League Envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, put out an estimate of 400,000 that had died in the war.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitor group, said Wednesday that 1,138 people, including 400 women and children, were killed during last month only.

Now, instead of visiting one or two graves, it's become increasingly common to see a man or a woman visiting several graves for relatives.

Following the crisis, people have become inclined to distinguish between two types of death, the first is "God-caused death," which is death by natural causes, and the "martyrdom," a type of death exceeding that of natural causes.

Each party of the conflict deems its casualties as martyrs as there is a perceived belief that martyrs die to defend their families and thus will be granted heaven.

In government-loyal areas in the coastal cities of Tartus and Latakia, photos of the martyrs fill public squares and villages, most of those slain are young men.

On the occasion of Eid al-Fitr, local social networking sites, such as the "Syrian Martyrs, Beacons of Light," posted on Wednesday tens of photos of slain soldiers from different Syrian cities.

One post from a woman called Emma read "If it wasn't for your sacrifices, we would have been under the knives," in reference to the Islamic State (IS) gruesome beheadings.

"True that the spirit of Eid is beautiful and should be embraced and lived happily, but there are people wearing black from inside out... there is a martyr everyday," Emma posted.

Somar, a journalist in the coastal city of Tartus, told Xinhua that visitors jam packed the Martyrs Cemetery there with posters of slain soldiers and Syrian flags as well as flowers covering the head stones.

In Latakia city, another bastion of support to the administration of President Bashar al-Assad, graveyards' visitors also flocked cemeteries, holding green plants to place them over the tombs, as part of a belief that the green leaves bring peace to the spirits of those gone.

In the predominantly Kurdish region in northeastern Syria, Kurdish media said thousands of people visited five graveyards in Kurdish towns to pay a tribute to their slain relatives and friends who got killed during battles against terror groups.

In the capital Damascus, people visited its 33 graveyards in large numbers Wednesday to place green plants and recite verses of the Holy Quran.

"As you can see many people are paying the visit to the deceased ones this year. This conflict has sent more people under ground than any other conflict in nearby countries," Wassim said, while visiting the graves of his father, who he said had died of a mortar attack in al-Mazraa neighborhood in central Damascus last year.

The large number of dead people has also contributed to the skyrocketing prices of graves, especially in city centers.

Earlier this year, the government-owned Tishreen newspaper said the prices of graves have bounced to imaginary prices during the crisis, as the price of one grave reached between 1,110,000 and 1,480,000 Syrian pounds (roughly 3,000 U.S. dollars).

The price in dollar could not be seen as expensive as a global price, but the slump of Syrian pound, which lost 1,200 percent of its pre-war value, is the reason.

The amount of Syrian cash now for buying a grave could be enough to buy a house in the suburbs of Damascus ahead of the crisis.

The paper also said the government has opened a new graveyard in Husainiyeeh suburb, 13 km from central Damascus, as the cemeteries of the capital can no longer contain more bodies due to the growing number of deaths.

In less fortunate areas like Aleppo city in northern Syria, people started burying their relatives in public parks due to the high death tolls. Endit