Wall Street Journal-<\/p>\n
BAGHDAD\u2014Bone by bone, workers at the Baghdad morgue are piecing together the victims of Islamic State, a gruesome jigsaw puzzle that has overwhelmed Iraqi authorities and delayed a sense of closure for families of the missing.<\/p>\n
After decades of conflict, culminating in Islamic State\u2019s brutal three-year reign over the country\u2019s north, Iraq has one of the highest number of missing people\u2014and unidentified bodies\u2014anywhere. Yet only 25 people in the country have been trained in scientific exhumation techniques, and the morgue attached to the single Baghdad laboratory equipped to conduct DNA tests is running out of space to store remains. Those limited resources have been further strained by the economic crisis curbing Iraq\u2019s budget.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes we can\u2019t receive any more cases because we have nowhere to put them,\u201d said morgue worker Ali Husham, 31.<\/p>\n
The militants often chose natural features such as sinkholes for execution or body-dumping sites, making many bodies hard to recover. Other known gravesites lie in parts of the country where Islamic State still poses a threat. Many other areas have yet to be cleared of improvised explosives, including booby-trapped corpses.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, members of the excavation team members say they have developed skin problems working with so many decaying bodies. One of them, Dhia Abdulamir, says while he and his colleagues have become accustomed to death, some of them are haunted by what they have seen, such as a male victim clutching a photograph of a child.<\/p>\n
Even in the face of such challenges, exhuming Iraq\u2019s mass graves is integral to the nation\u2019s efforts to heal from the trauma of Islamic State\u2019s occupation, experts say, as well as a critical test for Iraqi institutions trying to put an end to generations of conflict.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou cannot have stability if you have very large numbers of people who are unaccounted for,\u201d said Kevin Sullivan, a spokesman for the International Commission on Missing Persons, or ICMP, a Netherlands-based intergovernmental organization that is assisting Iraqi authorities. Elsewhere, Mr. Sullivan said, failures to address the issue of missing people \u201chas compounded the difficulty of establishing a postwar settlement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Iraq lacks precise figures for missing people, but even before Islamic State\u2019s killing spree, the International Commission on Missing Persons estimated it was anywhere between 250,000 and a million\u2014the grim legacy of multiple wars and violent repression under dictator Saddam Hussein.<\/p>\n
Even as Islamic State conquered around a third of the country in the summer of 2014 and enforced its rule with extreme violence, Iraqi authorities were still unearthing mass graves dating back to the 1980s war against Iran. Iraq recently uncovered the remains of 85 Iranians and 10 Iraqis killed in that earlier conflict in mass graves in the country\u2019s south.<\/p>\n
Islamic State\u2019s rule ended late last year when Iraqi forces backed by a U.S.-led coalition drove the militants from the last pocket of territory they controlled in the country.<\/p>\n
A recent effort to locate and recover the remains of 39 Indian laborers murdered by Islamic State threw a brief spotlight on the challenges Iraqi authorities face.<\/p>\n
Mr. Abdulamir was involved in digging up the site west of Mosul that a local shepherd had identified as their mass grave. The Indian workers lay side by side as they fell when Islamic State killed them not long after seizing the city in 2014.<\/p>\n
The remains of 38 of the men were flown back to India on Monday and handed back to their families. The body of the 39th man is still in Iraq because DNA testing to identify the body isn\u2019t complete.<\/p>\n
Speaking to local media on Monday in the city of Amritsar in Punjab, where most of the men were from, India\u2019s junior foreign minister Vijay Kumar Singh said forensic tests showed some of the men had been shot dead, while the cause of death for others hadn\u2019t been established.<\/p>\n
Responding to criticism the government had taken too long to locate the men, Mr. Singh said the search could only begin after Mosul\u2019s liberation last summer. \u201cThe Indian government left no stone unturned,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
For relatives, the return of the bodies marked the end of an agonizing wait. \u201cThe government gave us a false hope,\u201d said Anita Rani, the 31-year-old wife of Gurdeep Singh, who went to Iraq in 2013 from a Punjab village to work as a mechanic in a construction company. \u201cI was living with this hope that he would return alive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Iraq has now identified roughly 300 mass graves in Iraq, including those predating Islamic State\u2019s incursion. So far, around two-thirds of them have been opened up and determined to contain the remains of nearly 5,000 people, according to Najiha al-Shimmari, the head of the Martyrs Foundation, the government agency responsible for dealing with mass graves and compensating victims\u2019 families.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe expect to find more,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
While it is relatively manageable to reconstitute a skeleton and make an identification from remains kept separate from others, bones of multiple victims mixed up in a mass grave pose a far tougher task. It can take months to sort them out and return identified bodies to relatives. For that reason, some experts warn it will take many more years to complete the process.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re talking about huge numbers,\u201d said Zaid al-Yousif, the head of the Baghdad morgue. \u201cOur resources are too limited to deal with all these cases at once.\u201d<\/p>\n
Among the mass graves yet to be excavated is a natural sinkhole south of Mosul believed to be the largest one of all, where the militants disposed of hundreds, if not thousands, of their victims.<\/p>\n
But before work begins on the remaining sites, Iraqi authorities must establish a database to identify the remains they exhume. That involves collecting DNA samples from tens of thousands of people with missing relatives, many of them scattered by the war.<\/p>\n
\u201cTime is not in our favor,\u201d said Dhia Karim, who oversees the excavation of mass graves. \u201cThe more time goes by, the harder it is.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wall Street Journal- BAGHDAD\u2014Bone by bone, workers at the Baghdad morgue are piecing together the victims of Islamic State, a gruesome jigsaw puzzle that has overwhelmed Iraqi authorities and delayed a sense of closure for families of the missing. After decades of conflict, culminating in Islamic State\u2019s brutal three-year reign over the country\u2019s north, Iraq has one of the highest… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1608"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1609,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions\/1609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}