Iraqis continue to be tormented by disappearances even twenty years after Saddam’s downfall.
The discovery of dozens of mass graves is evidence of the crimes committed under Saddam Hussein’s rule of the Baath Party.
Iraqi engineer Hazem Mohammed believed he would finally be able to locate his brother, who had been shot dead and buried in a mass grave following a failed revolt against Saddam Hussein’s authority in 1991, when he first heard that U.S. troops had overthrown the dictator.
Mohammed’s ambitions weren’t the only ones that grew after the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. Tens of thousands of individuals were killed or vanished under the tyrant, and the families of those victims hoped they would soon learn what had become of their loved ones.
Mohammed, who was shot twice but lived through the massacre in which his brother died, and countless other Iraqis are still seeking answers twenty years later.
Many mass graves were discovered, bearing witness to the crimes carried out by Saddam’s Baath Party. Yet, due to the chaos and conflict that have engulfed Iraq for the past 20 years, efforts to identify the victims of historical atrocities have been delayed and incomplete.
Mohammed claimed, “I resolved to keep the location of the cemetery hidden until a stronger state would be in place after I witnessed how mass graves were being uncovered, randomly.
Further crimes were perpetrated while exhumations continued on, along with sectarian strife, the growth and fall of armed organisations like Al Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists, as well as Shi’ite Muslim militias.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which states that estimates of the overall number run up to hundreds of thousands of people, Iraq currently has one of the greatest numbers of missing persons in the world.
It took Mohammed another ten years to lead a group of experts to the location where he, his brother, and others were captured when Saddam’s forces put down a largely Shi’ite revolt at the conclusion of the Gulf War in 1991. At that time, they were shot while being forced to their knees near to hastily dug trenches on the outskirts of the southern city of Najaf. Under Saddam’s rule, his forces killed tens of thousands of Iraqis.
Mohammed’s brother was never discovered despite the fact that the site, which is now surrounded by farmland, had 46 people’s remains unearthed. He thinks there are still further bodies missing.
He asserted that a nation unable to address its past will also be unable to address its present or future. “But, I occasionally pardon the government. They need to deal with a great number of victims.
gruelling progress
Around 260 mass graves have reportedly been discovered thus far, with dozens of them still being sealed, according to the Martyrs Foundation, a government organisation tasked with locating victims and providing compensation to their families. But for such a huge undertaking, resources are scarce. One mass burial site at a time is processed by a team of roughly 100 people working in the Baghdadi ministry of health.
Out of over 4,500 unearthed bodies, the department chief Yasmine Siddiq stated that they had identified and matched DNA samples of nearly 2,000 people.
Skulls, cutlery, a watch, and other objects that might have been used to identify victims could be found on the shelves of her storage room. These victims had perished during the Iran-Iraq war in 1980–1988.
In addition to the forensic investigations, archivists are searching through piles of paperwork from Saddam’s Baath Party, which was abolished following his overthrow, for the names of unidentified missing people.
According to Mehdi Ibrahim, a representative of the Martyrs Fund, his team names 200 new victims every week. Social media sites publicise the names. Only a portion of Iraq’s dispersed archive, or around half of the foundation’s 1 million documents, have been handled thus far. The government still has the majority of records from the Baath Party era, although others were burned following the invasion.
Some atrocities are investigated more rapidly than others.
Siddiq claims that the Islamic State militants’ atrocities have been prioritised. The Islamic State militants took control of a large portion of northern Iraq in 2014 and controlled it for three bloody years.
The incident known as the Camp Speicher massacre by Islamic State—a mass killing of army recruits—had the greatest victim identification rate. Most bodies had been found and most families had reported their missing loved ones, according to Siddiq.
According to the Martyrs Foundation, 1,200 people were killed and 757 are still missing, making up nearly 2,000 martyrs as a result of the killings.
Over 600 victims have been reburied, with 150 of them being identified, in Sinjar, where Islamic State carried out what U.N. investigators classified as genocide against the Yazidi minority in Iraq.
Unexplored disappearances still exist. Families in Saqlawiya, a rural region close to the Sunni town of Falluja, are giving up hope of learning what happened to more than 600 men who were taken prisoner when the region was liberated from Islamic State by security forces.
Sunnis from the town of Saqlawiya were gathered up by Shi’ite militants seeking retribution against the Islamic State, according to witnesses spoke with by Reuters in 2016, U.N. personnel, Iraqi officials, and Human Rights Watch.
Ikhlas Talal cried as she flipped through photos of her husband and 13 other male relatives who vanished in early June 2016 from her Saqlawiya living room, which was just furnished with a carpet and a flimsy mattress.
We don’t have any priority,
For fear of retaliation, Talal did not want to characterise the guys in uniform who had taken them. But, she and other women in the area have been looking for their husbands, fathers, and sons for years, visiting prisons and hospitals as well as other locations across Iraq.
“The Iraqi government must take all steps to locate the disappeared and to bring the criminals accountable,” said Ahmed Benchemsi of Human Rights Watch.
Requests for comment on the Saqlawiya case from the Martyrs Fund and the Iraqi Interior Ministry were not met with a response.
A local PMF commander, Abdul Kareem Al-Yasiri, whose unit is currently stationed close to Saqlawiya, denied any involvement on the part of the PMF in the disappearances of locals during the conflict with IS.
He asserted that “these charges are untrue and politicised to tarnish our troops and we reject them,” adding that he thought IS was responsible for the disappearances.
Talal is attempting to have her spouse recognised as a martyr so she can apply for a $850 monthly pension.
“We are not a priority,” she remarked, standing in front of the half a dozen kids she barely manages to feed thanks to small-scale farming and support from neighborhood Organizations.
Even with better reporting, there are still unanswered questions.
Before the Camp Speicher atrocity in June 2014, Majid Mohammed last spoke to his son, a military medic. Mohammed is still missing since his identity was not among the hundreds of fatalities Siddiq’s team was able to identify. His wife, Nadia Jasim, claimed that numerous governments had ignored the issue of forced disappearances.
She claimed that all of the moms in Iraq were devastated by the disappearance of their kids. “Considering how much time has elapsed since 2003, we ought to have discovered a solution. Why do people still go missing?
