THE shops facing each other on Martyrs’ Square in central Baghdad say much about the state of Iraq: on one side, a coffin-makers’ workshop does a roaring trade. Across the road, a gun shop displays pistols and leather holsters.

Death is one of the few businesses flourishing in this war-torn country. While foreign security firms make millions out of the unrest, and terrorist groups pay criminal gangs to fuel it, the funeral business has never had it so good.

The elderly Mahmoud brothers, who have been making plain wooden coffins for a decade, are struggling to keep up with demand. “With every victim who falls to an explosion and suicide attack, the demand for coffins increases and my work flourishes,” said the elder brother Ali, 67.

The coffin business is booming: yesterday alone two-dozen people were killed in Baghdad before the capital had even had breakfast.

A bomb exploded outside an army recruitment centre, killing at least 13. Gunmen ambushed a police convoy, killing ten policemen. A bomb hit the deputy Interior Minister’s convoy, killing a bodyguard.

That was a relatively good day. At least 60 Iraqis were killed the previous day, and more than 200 have died in the week since the country’s new Government was formed.

Before the war, Ali and his brother Abbas would make a coffin a day.

Now, with suicide car bombers blowing crowds apart on a daily basis, they have to turn out two or three each, often slowed by electrical blackouts that put their buzz-saw out of action. In the loft of their tiny workshop, near the notorious guerrilla stronghold of Haifa Street, ten coffins are stacked and awaiting collection by a wealthy businessman.

With so many deaths these days, the charitable rich buy large orders of coffins and donate them to mosques. Unlike his elder brother, Abbas takes little satisfaction in the boom. “I suffer when I see people coming to ask for a coffin,” he said. “I see the sadness in their eyes. Sometimes I feel they hate me, but there’s nothing I can do, this is my job.”

The price of a simple coffin has gone up from £3 before the war to about £25, a fortune for many Iraqis. The dead are not actually buried in the caskets; rather, they are taken to the cemetery in them, then buried in a shroud. The coffin owner usually donates it to a mosque.

With Haifa Street so close, and armed guerrillas openly prowling the alleys, much of their business occurs almost on their doorstep. Next door to their workshop, an elderly calligrapher earns a tidy wage painting banners announcing the deaths.

The boom covers the death industry. The Wadi al-Salaam — Valley of Peace — cemetery in Najaf is said to be the largest burial ground in the world, a mini-city of raised tombs and sunken crypts where hundreds of thousands of Shia are buried within sight of the Imam Ali shrine, where the cousin of the Prophet lies buried. In this labyrinth, gravediggers labour all day to cope with the influx of the dead, brought from across the country in coffins strapped to the roofs of cars and minibuses. Mohanned Abu Saiba said that before the US invasion he and his fellow gravediggers would bury about 60 people a day. Now they receive as many as 200, all of them Shia, and many mutilated.

“We see signs of torture on the bodies we bury all the time,” said Dakhel Shakr, a gravedigger who recently buried three headless women pulled from a river near Madain, a town where dozens have died in sectarian strife.

The demand for space in the overcrowded graveyard has sent the prices of plots of land skyrocketing. In the past, families would pay about £400 for 50 square metres (538 sq ft) of land. Now they have to pay more than ten times that amount. Sometimes they bury the dead without even knowing who they are, as in the case of 16 unidentified bodies brought from Madain. They merely write a description of the body on the tombstone.

Mr Abu Saiba and his colleagues have not increased their fees, but their wages have soared thanks to all the extra business. “Lately work has flourished and really expanded,” he said, with little satisfaction.

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