“I’ve seen death in this city, but nothing as sad as this”
Last spring, a ferry disaster claimed the lives of dozens of innocent men, women and children in the Iraqi city of Mosul. But as well as being a human tragedy, the incident also laid bare the failure of an entire country, says Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
On 21 March 2019, in Mosul’s al-Baker neighbourhood, a school principal named Ustad Ahmad put on his new summer blazer, jeans and wraparound sunglasses as he prepared to go out. It was the start of the new year holiday of Nowruz, and he was planning to take his wife and children to an amusement park – a reward for the full marks achieved by his two sons in their recent exams. Tall and burly, Ahmad was a proud man – proud of his smart boys, his beautiful baby daughter and, above all, his clever, outgoing wife. At around 1pm, the family took a taxi to the amusement park, where he gave the boys money to go on every ride.
Things hadn’t always been as comfortable for Ahmad as they were now. When Islamic State took over Mosul in 2014, he had been expelled from his teaching job, and for three years he was unemployed. But now, two years after the liberation of Mosul, he was proud to be a respectable principal once more, even if the city he lived in was still in ruins.
Mosul today is a broken city. The early euphoria of liberation is dissolving as reconstruction efforts have failed. Pledges to rebuild the city remain unfulfilled, while thousands live in camps. The security situation is deteriorating and across Iraq, anger is rising. In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have taken to the streets to demand a complete overhaul of the political system. During two months of demonstrations, 400 people have been killed and thousands injured. At the same time, what endures is the tenacity and resilience of the people of Mosul, their love of life and entrepreneurial spirit. At the end of the war, as the city was retaken block-by-block by the Iraqi army, liberated neighbourhoods quickly sprang back to life. Families returned to their homes and volunteers cleared rubble from their streets. Even as the fighting raged just a few blocks away, people began rebuilding their homes and businesses, occasionally even allowing themselves the small reward of a meal out with their families.
It was close to 2pm when Ahmad’s family decided to go on to Umm Rabaen, a pleasure island on the Tigris River, in search of a shady spot for lunch. It would be cooler by the water and there was another amusement park there to visit. Like many businesses in Mosul since the liberation, the island was part-owned by a member of a powerful militia – one of the armed groups which have secured public contracts for businesses in return for big kickbacks. The businesses they own are unaccountable and, through a combination of fear and corruption, there is almost no oversight. The result, for the people enjoying their holiday in Mosul that day, was disaster.
The same morning, in another part of Mosul, a woman named Shahla was making coffee, when Umm Yussuf, a friend of her 71-year-old mother, called to invite them both for tea at the pleasure island that afternoon. Shahla thought the island would be too crowded. But her mother wanted to go – so she prepared a picnic and they set off for the river. When they arrived, and saw the crowd gathered on the river bank, Shahla thought that the whole of Mosul must be there. She didn’t like crowds, and was trying to ask her mother if they could leave, when Umm Yussuf found them. The two old women hugged and the three of them headed towards the ferry to the island.
Umm Rabaen is connected to the east bank of the Tigris, less than 100 metres away, by two cable-pulled flatbed ferries, maintained as part of the amusement park and island. The ferry allegedly had no safety provisions, and the service was rarely, if ever, inspected. As the crowd waiting for the ferry swelled, a man named Omar watched with growing unease from a nearby motorboat. He noticed that the water was rising quickly: the decks of some riverside cafés were already submerged. The day before, police had told the ferry management it would need to suspend operations because of the unusual quantity of water in the river, after earlier heavy rainfall. Everyone along the river had been warned. But the ferry was running. At 3pm, it docked on the eastern bank, and the families in coloured headscarves squeezed together as they waited to board. Everyone was in their holiday clothes, young men and boys wore suits and bow ties, girls wore dresses with frills.
“By the time it started moving, nearly 300 people were crammed aboard the ferry
– far more than it was designed to hold”
As Shahla went down the steps to the ferry, she noticed that the water level was very high. Her mother and Umm Yussuf walked behind her, holding hands. At about the same time, Ahmad and his family also climbed down slowly with the pram. The back of the ferry was full, but more people pushed to enter. By the time it started moving, nearly 300 people were crammed onboard – far more than it was designed to hold. Constructed from sections of an old pontoon bridge welded together and decorated with arches on either side, the ferry was pulled by cables connected at the front and back to motors mounted on opposite sides of the river. A third, guiding cable maintained the ferry jerkily on its course, as the current tried to push it downstream. The operator, noticing the ferry was tilting, started telling people to move away from the
listing right side. The back of the ferry was being dragged by the current, pulling the ferry off its line. A few kids climbed over the side railing, to see what was going on.
A small wave gushed over the deck, covering Shahla’s feet. Now scared, her mother said the three of them should go back to the shore, as if they could still walk away. Shahla could see others were frightened too. Elsewhere on the ferry, Ahmad stuck by the railing, assuring his wife and children that the ferry would right itself. He clutched the pram tightly. A second, bigger wave surged in. The ferry listed to the right. The boys hanging on the railings threw themselves into the frothing water. Just over a minute into the crossing, the ferry had tilted so far that a third of the deck was underwater, and most of the people were clambering to the other side. Ahmad, standing in water up to his neck, held on to the pram, trying to keep the baby above water. Then he heard a loud grinding noise and saw that the ferry was turning over and that people were sliding down towards him. He gripped the pram tightly but it sank, pulling him underwater, his baby daughter disappearing into the darkness of the river.
At this point, the cable pulling the ferry snapped, and the vessel started to flip over. People fell on top of each other. Shahla was pushed into the water, and lost her mother’s hand. When she got back to the surface, a woman climbed on top of her, pushing her down again. She took a breath and sank underwater, allowing herself to be dragged downstream. The hull now stood vertical – a green floating whale drifting downstream, among dozens of bobbing heads. In the water, Shahla was bumped and rammed by objects and bodies. She looked for her mother, but the current was pushing her fast. After half an hour, her clothes were getting heavy, but she knew that if she didn’t keep swimming, she would die. Finally, she managed to catch on to a boat, and haul herself over the side. From the boat, she could see the extent of the disaster. Bodies floated around them, many of them children. There was a tiny boy, three or four, dressed in a onesie and floating on his back.
Deep underwater, Ahmad lost the pram. He too saw a boat and swam to it, grabbing on to the rear engine. But as he clung on desperately, the propellor roared into life: the blades cut into his sides, causing Ahmad to scream and let go. He knew he’d lost his family. Better to die, he thought, as he sank into the water. But his body wouldn’t let him drown, and involuntarily he kicked his way to the surface, where he was rescued and taken to the island.
When an officer from the Mosul police arrived on the island, he arrested everyone still working there – including vendors selling coffee and burgers – but the owners and directors of the island were nowhere to be seen. Most of the staff had run away, fearing they would be arrested and anticipating the anger of the victims’ families. Meanwhile, the bewilderment of the police laid bare the ineptitude of the Iraqi state. In oil-rich Iraq, the Mosul river police had just one boat, which had sat broken for months; they had no ropes or lifejackets to throw to the people drowning in front of them. While the chief of the river police had jumped in one of the civilian boats and gone to help, most of his men had never trained for such a crisis. They didn’t know what to do.
Back on land, Shahla searched in vain for her mother and Umm Yussuf in the hospital. “There was chaos, and no one was in control,” she recalled. “Bodies were dumped like sacks of garbage.” Later, she spoke to her brother on the phone. He was weeping. Before he said anything, she knew her mother was dead.
Over at the morgue, hundreds of families gathered as the bodies started to arrive. Flanked by policemen, the director climbed on top of a police truck to plead with people to give him time. Even the morgue’s staff, accustomed to the sight of death, were weeping. Of the 128 finally confirmed dead, 57 were women, and 44 children. Another 69 are still missing.
Even in a nation accustomed to fanatical militias and mad dictators, the disaster was shocking. When the public discovered a warning had been issued about the dangers of operating the ferry, grief turned to anger. Within days, the media reported a connection between the island’s owner, Ubaid al-Hadidi, and a militia commander. Before the disaster, people in Mosul had felt too scared to speak openly about the militias’ economic activities. Now there were protests and sit-ins. The fact that the island’s owners were backed by a leader of one of Iraq’s fiercest militias, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, would have made it less likely that rules were enforced against them. The day after the disaster, Hadidi claimed that he and his son had not been in Mosul at the time as, he said, an Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq representative had threatened them and demanded a large payment. “We would always shut the island if the water level climbed, but we haven’t been in Mosul because of the threats we received,” he said. Three days later, Hadidi and his son were arrested. In a TV interview, a representative of Asai’ib Ahl al-Haq said: “Even if we accept someone connected to the movement is a partner in the island, that does not mean Asa’ib are responsible for what happened.”
When they brought the body of Ahmad’s wife to his house on the night of the accident, he refused to see her. He did not attend her funeral. The body of his elder boy was found the day after the ferry sank, trapped under the capsized hull. His other son and baby girl will never be found. After the disaster, Ahmad asked his mother to give away his boys’ toys and school bags. “I want to forget their memories,” he said, voice breaking. Ahmad does not blame incompetence or corruption for the disaster. “Yes, there was negligence,” he said, “but what can I do about the owner? Is he much worse than the people who stood watching while others floated in front of them? No one came to save us. When they took me to the island, I saw people eating picnics. This unfeeling attitude: is it because of all the death the city had seen?”
In the autumn, I visited Aya, a young woman who lost her mother and other relatives. “What caused the ferry to sink was corruption and negligence,” she told me, her grief mixed with bitterness. “No one cares this happened here.” In October, Aya started receiving phone calls from tribal elders, pressuring her to accept an offer of blood money from the owner of the island. Hadidi was offering bereaved families 10m Iraqi dinars [roughly £6,500] and a plot of land if they would drop charges. The elders told her that all the other families had accepted and that she was one of the last holding out. “I was refusing to sign, but all the families had signed. They tell me they won’t get anything from the state and they need the money. I don’t know what to do.”
I called the Iraqi MP Shirwan Dobadani to ask him about the compensation offer. He told me that it was true – two prominent tribal sheikhs had acted as intermediaries. “If the families wait for the judicial system, they won’t get anything,” he said. “There are thousands of cases of murder and assassination that haven’t been solved. The worst disaster in Iraq is forgotten after 72 hours.”
A longer version of this article appeared in The Guardian. © Guardian News & Media 2019.
“After half an hour in the water, Shahla’s clothes were getting heavy, but she knew that if she didn’t keep swimming, she would die”