The cemetery began as a small civil burial ground in Basra and expanded dramatically during the First World War. Britain's Mesopotamian campaign, the grinding fight to wrest what is now Iraq from the Ottoman Empire, produced tens of thousands of casualties between 1914 and 1918. The dead came from across the British Empire: soldiers from Britain, India, Australia, and dozens of other territories. By the war's end, 2,890 graves filled the cemetery, the vast majority belonging to Commonwealth servicemen killed in the campaign. Among the WWI dead are Victoria Cross recipient George Godfrey Massy Wheeler, who was killed in action in April 1915, and Henry Howard, the 19th Earl of Suffolk, killed at the Battle of Istabulat in April 1917. Across the road, the Indian Forces Cemetery held hundreds more. Together, the two sites contained the remains of nearly 5,000 people. A small separate plot held the graves of Ottoman prisoners of war and eight Russian refugees who died in 1920 and 1921.

The headstones began deteriorating by the 1930s. In 1935, the original gravestones were cleared and replaced with a Memorial Screen Wall bearing the names of the men buried there. None of those inscriptions survive today. When they were removed, and by whom, nobody seems to know. The Second World War added another 364 graves and a dedicated Royal Air Force section. Basra sat along the Trans-Iranian transport route used to deliver Lend-Lease supplies to the Soviet Union, and the traffic of war brought new casualties. Among the dead from this period are Soviet pilots killed in a plane crash on May 5, 1942, including Senior Lieutenant Alexey Nikolaevich Ivanov and navigator Yuri Pavlovich Zaitsev, buried side by side in Section 7.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission maintained the cemetery until 2007, when deteriorating security conditions in Basra made continued upkeep impossible. What followed was a slow unraveling. In November 2013, The Daily Telegraph reported that headstones had been knocked down and broken by looters and vandals. Rather than attempt repairs, the CWGC made a stark decision: it cleared the site of all remaining grave markers, removed the Cross of Sacrifice and its plinth, and withdrew entirely. Local residents filled the vacuum. The open ground became a neighborhood football pitch and games field. The bureaucratic language of the CWGC's position is straightforward: as of 2024, the commission has no plans to return to Iraq to renovate or maintain any of its cemeteries and monuments there.

The story could end there, with nearly five thousand graves unmarked in a foreign city, tended by no one. But in July 2024, a relative of a soldier buried in the cemetery in 1941 traveled to Basra and laid a new gravestone on the grave. It was the first marker placed at the site in over eighty years. The gesture was small against the scale of the neglect, one stone among thousands of missing ones. Yet it answered a question the cemetery's condition poses: does anyone still remember? Someone does. The graves remain undisturbed, their sub-bases intact. The dead are still there, still identifiable, still waiting for the day when someone decides they deserve to be named again. Whether that day comes depends on forces far beyond the cemetery walls, on the politics of Iraq, the priorities of the Commonwealth, and the persistence of families who refuse to let their ancestors disappear.