Media: Iraq Violence Down - Women, Children, and Cemetery Workers Hardest Hit

You can't make this stuff up. Declining violence in Iraq should be a good thing celebrated in the media, and yet, they have to go out of their way to find bad news in even that.

They found perhaps the one group outside the terrorists and insurgents themselves that aren't happy about the way the surge has cut down the violence in Iraq.

That would be cemetery workers who were doing brisk business at the height of the insurgency when terrorists and insurgents would run the streets red with blood.

At what's believed to be the world's largest cemetery, where Shiite Muslims aspire to be buried and millions already have been, business isn't good.

A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that's cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.

Few people have a better sense of the death rate in Iraq .

"I always think of the increasing and decreasing of the dead," said Sameer Shaaban, 23, one of more than 100 workers who specialize in ceremonially washing the corpses. "People want more and more money, and I am one of them, but most of the workers in this field don't talk frankly, because they wish for more coffins, to earn more and more."

Dhurgham Majed al Malik, 48, whose family has arranged burial services for generations, said that this spring, private cars and taxis with caskets lashed to their roofs arrived at a rate of 6,500 a month. Now it's 4,000 or less, he said.