ONE YEAR ON FROM

EVEN the weight of a small child’s body was heavier than Suroor al-Hussaini expected when she heaved it from the rubble and held it in her arms.

At first, the smell was overwhelming. But she quickly got used to it and the weight.

She had to, she decided – because this was a grim task that desperately needed doing and no one else was doing it.

After last year’s celebration of the liberation of Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city, the devastation of its residents as well as its buildings was painfully clear to see.

When we meet 12 months on within the streets lined with shattered ruins, the stench of rotting bodies is unmistakable.

Boys, some as young as five, are so hardened by war they tell me they play a macabre game of setting light to the corpses of IS fighters.

An estimated 40,000 people – fighters on both sides and civilians – died in eight months of street battles, artillery duels and airstrikes.

Thousands of corpses, including IS fanatics with explosives still strapped to them, lay where they had fallen under vast piles of debris.

When the authorities did nothing to remove them Suroor, a 23-yearold nurse, decided she must.

Partly out of fear of disease. But mostly in a determined attempt to restore some dignity to the dead.

Suroor was spurred into action after her sister Nibras, 14, was killed and her dad died of a heart attack in the city’s old town.

She could not bear the idea of unburied bodies being left to fester