Three long weeks… then a miracle. Family buried in rubble of their Mosul house rescued
CARRYING eight black body bags, Walid Ibrahim Khalil led rescue workers to the spot where his house once stood. Twenty-one days earlier it had been levelled by three coalition air strikes, burying his entire family under the rubble.
Mr Khalil, 46, had been standing in the doorway when the bombs fell on his home in Mosul’s Old City on June 30. He was thrown clear by the blast, but his wife, two brother-inlaws, three children and two grandchildren had been hiding in the basement and were not so lucky.
Looking at his flattened house behind him, he assumed they were all dead. Every day he begged civil defence workers to help him recover them, but with Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) snipers still in the area they were unable to reach their street.
Mr Khalil went out each morning with the bags hoping that day would be the one he was finally able to give them a proper burial. Then, after three long weeks, they discovered all eight alive. A miracle for Mr Khalil and a rare piece of good news for the rescuers who have spent months pulling up mostly bodies. The top floors of their two-storey house had collapsed, leaving the Khalils trapped in the four-squaremetre basement beneath.
“We didn’t scream for help,” says Mr Khalil’s wife Anwara, speaking to The Daily Telegraph from her brother’s house in east Mosul where she is now recovering. “We were worried Daesh was still outside. We assumed everyone else was dead as that whole time we never heard the sound of children or women and the smell of dead bodies grew stronger by the day,” says Mrs Khalil, whose legs were badly injured by shrapnel.
The family survived by eating rice they had stored in the basement. “We boiled it using a gas stove,” Mrs Khalil, 48, says. “Each of us got three spoonfuls twice a day. I can’t describe the hunger we felt.”
They had several jerry cans of water from the well, so dirty they had to mix it with chlorine to make it drinkable. The food ran out after 10 days and by the end they had just three days’ worth of water left.
There was a small window which allowed in some light and they kept track of how long they were down there by marking off the days.
“There wasn’t enough room to lie down so no one could really sleep,” Mrs Khalil said. “We made some space for the youngest, Mohammed, who managed to sleep a bit. The men had to take it in turns to stand for a few hours at a time so the others could stretch out.”
Temperatures can reach up to 122F (50C) in the Iraqi city in July and the family suffered in the heat.
On July 21 the rescuers managed to reach the house. Mr Khalil, who had worked as a mechanic before Isil, sobs as he recounts the moment. “I saw Mohammed first, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I grabbed him and just held him to my chest and didn’t let him go. My wife was
‘We can only blame Daesh. There is no other way to destroy an enemy who doesn’t play by any rules’
in a bad way, but alhamdulillah (thanks God), she was alive.”
The rescuers had only their hands to dig through the rubble, and then threw down a rope. The men emerged sporting long beards, emaciated and extremely confused.
Mrs Khalil had to be carried out on a rescuer’s back. The family in turn were relieved to see Mr Khalil, whom they feared had been killed. Mr Khalil is now partially deaf from the explosion and Mohammed is so traumatised he barely speaks.
They believe their house was hit because a Chechen Isil militant had been using the roof as a sniper position. They begged him to move to an empty building as they were afraid they would become a target.
The Us-led coalition has come under heavy criticism for what some say was a disproportionate use of air power. On numerous occasions they are reported to have dropped 500-pound bombs to take out just one jihadist.
One such incident in March left more than 100 people, who had been crowded into the basement of one house to serve as human shields, dead. Rights groups accuse them of failing to adapt their tactics even when it was clear that Isil had forced civilians into areas most likely to come under attack.
Yet the Khalil family say they do not harbour any resentment towards the coalition. “We can only blame Daesh. There is no other way to destroy an enemy who doesn’t play by any rules,” says Mr Khalil.
There are likely still hundreds, possibly even thousands, of bodies left to find under the rubble.
“We don’t have any estimates,” said Major Rabia Ibrahim Hassan of the civil defence, whose rescuers have been working for the last three years without pay since Isil took control of Mosul and the government stopped their salaries.
“We can’t know, because Isil moved people from house to house to use them as shields. People still come to us today to tell us they think they have loved ones buried in this or that place.” Every day as many as 40 bodies arrive at the nearby hospital. In the last month, 850 bodies have passed through, of which 180 have not been identified.