Morgue a witness to Daesh atrocities
mosul — The young man ended up on the morgue’s examining table in two parts.
He had been seized for selling cigarettes, a crime usually punished by flogging by the Daesh group extremists who had occupied Mosul. But while he was being whipped, he shouted a curse insulting religion. On the spot, they cut off his head for blasphemy.
Sameh Al Azzawi, the 35-yearold medical assistant examining him, was sick of seeing Mosul’s youth butchered by the militants. The man was a newlywed. His family was waiting outside; it was one of the occasional times when the fanatics allowed the return of someone killed by the group. So Al Azzawi violated the rules: He picked out some thick thread and quickly sewed the man’s head back on, then zipped him up in the body bag. He could sew a head back on a body in four minutes. The family quietly thanked him. The morgue in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul was where atrocity met bureaucracy, the processing point for the machine of butchery that the Daesh group created across its territory in Iraq and Syria. Every day, the doctors and staff witnessed the worst of what the militants were capable of inflicting on a human being, constantly fearing they could be next.
Yet the morgue men of Mosul found ways large and small to defy their captors by honouring the dead as best they could.
The staff sometimes faced up to 60 or even 100 corpses a day. As pickup trucks laden with bodies did three-point turns to back through the morgue’s gates, hands, legs or heads fell off onto the ground.
Some were the mangled bodies of civilians and Daesh fighters killed in bombardment by the US-led coalition or fighting with Iraqi troops. Others bore the marks of Daesh’s brutal enforcement of its rules.
A broken skull on a man with internal bleeding could mean he was thrown from a rooftop, the punishment for those suspected of being gay. A woman with a split skull from a blunt force was likely stoned to death, the sentence for accused adulterers. Then there were punishments for spying or blasphemy: a gunshot wound through the head or decapitation. The Daesh group was keen on keeping records like a government. As they put together death certificates, the examiners quietly documented Daesh atrocities. They surreptitiously put an Arabic letter alif to mark a member of the group, and an M, the first letter in the Arabic word for “executed,” for the group’s victims.
One Excel sheet shows more than 1,200 people shot in the head, a likely sign of Daesh “executions”, between June 2014 when Daesh took over Mosul and January 2017 — an average of 11 a week. The list has 12 women marked as “stoned to death”. It also lists 95 people who were beheaded and 50 men and boys who died from a “fall from a height”, likely hurled from rooftops.
The staff operated under close scrutiny by Daesh officials and threat of punishment if they broke the rules or tried to leave.
Among those rules: The bodies of those “executed” could not be returned to their families, except in cases where a Daesh commander allowed it. Instead, they were dumped in mass graves.
Thousands more went directly into mass graves without ever coming to the morgue and Daesh brought at least 1,000 bodies to the morgue that they did not allow the staff to examine, so they have no idea who they were and did not record them.
Al Azzawi managed to sew the heads back on about 10 bodies, he estimates. It had to be quick. He did it after midnight in the washing area, which Daesh fighters tended to stay out of because it was the worst smelling part of the morgue.
A pickup truck dumped nearly a dozen bodies onto the pavement of the morgue courtyard, the latest delivery. “Get up!” a Daesh fighter screamed at the staff, summoning them to begin their daily task of sorting through the dead.
As the medical assistants went to
Our profession as doctors is all about humanity. They were doing the exact opposite Modhar Al Omari, senior examiner,
It’s a lot of pressure. Pressure, pressure, pressure. I always expected them to come at any moment and kill or behead us Raid Jassim, chief medical assistant
I tried to escape mosul with a smuggler’s help. along with dozens of others I hid under boxes of potato chips in a truck but we were caught near the Syrian border. I spent 10 days in detention, released only after I signed a pledge never to flee again on pain of death. after that, anything they ask for I do without complaint Sameh Al Azzawi, medical assistant
work, one of them stopped short in surprise: Among the bodies, a young man was breathing.
“He’s still alive!” the assistant shouted instinctively.
He hardly had time to realise his mistake. The Daesh fighter opened fire with his automatic rifle, spraying the bodies. Bullets thumped into the already dead and finished off the young man.
“It’s a lot of pressure. Pressure, pressure, pressure,” said Raid Jassim, the chief medical assistant. “I always expected them to come at any moment and kill or behead us.”
A few months after Daesh took over, a militant brought in the body of a Yazidi woman. She had hanged herself after being repeatedly gang-raped.
Jassim, 48, watched in disgust as the militant spoke to the body. “Why did you kill yourself? I told you I am not selling you to the commander. I told you I was going to marry you,” the fighter pleaded. — AP