Each day for the past nine months, the bodies have been coming. Some are carried in simple wooden coffins strapped to car roofs. Others arrive with more ceremony, escorted by black-clad mourners or men in military fatigues to a hypnotic soundtrack of Islamic hymns. The convoys turn into the lanes of the Valley of Peace cemetery, squeezing past tombstones weathered by millennia and stopping next to freshly dug holes in the desert soil. The newest inhabitants of the world’s biggest cemetery were killed not here in Iraq but in Syria , where they fought under the green flag of the Middle East’s most potent new Shia Islamic political force, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (League of the Righteous). The militia has been busy readying for the afterlife, buying up more than 2,500 square metres of burial plots and erecting shrines for its fallen. In Baghdad, nearly 100 miles north, the group has […]