263533 Pte. Alfred Richard Jones British Army 4th Battalion South Wales Borderers from:Six Bells, Abertillery, Monmouthshire (d.16th February 1917) My great grandfather, Alfred Jones, died from his wounds received in action on 16th of February 1917 during the campaign in Mesopotamia. He had been a coal miner in the south Wales valleys as stated on the 1911 census. Therefore, we must assume he volunteered to fight. He is buried in the Amara War Cemetery in modern day Iraq. Amara is a town on the left bank of the Tigris some 520 kilometres from the sea. The War Cemetery is a little east of the town between the left bank of the river and the Chahaila Canal.
Amara was occupied by the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force on 3rs of June 1915 and it immediately became a hospital centre. Amara War Cemetery contains 4,621 burials of the First World War, more than 3,000 of which were brought into the cemetery after the Armistice. 925 of the graves are unidentified.
In 1933, all of the headstones were removed from this cemetery when it was discovered that salts in the soil were causing them to deteriorate. Instead a screen wall was erected with the names of those buried in the cemetery engraved upon it. The cemetery is currently in a very bad state but the CWGC is unable to access it at this time.
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